Kitschhouse

A song I made 5 years ago. Since I learned one or two things in the meantime I thought I give it another try. Kept the samples, kept the instruments, didn’t really change anything, only removed all effects and tried to come up with a better sounding mix.

It’s way better, still has plenty of issues. And I still can’t decide for my life whether things are too loud or too quite. Right now it feels like the epiano and main synth are too loud. If I lower the volume just a little it feels too quiet. It’s a mystery.

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Cool track :sunglasses:

Yes, I would agree that the epiano and some synths parts ( the main one but also some more atmo and ambient layers ) are a bit louder, but you may get around this with compression to tame the epiano attack ( or get back at the source and play with ADSR ) and EQ rather than reducing volumes maybe.

Now I think it’s also a question of contrast here, everything sounds very equal and quite “mono-ish” at the minute, washing out synths parts with reverb and spreading them with delays might be something interesting to try here IMHO.

Hey thanks. Indeed very mono and centered and plain. I think I talked myself a bit into a wrong direction with these and other decisions like not changing instruments or upgrading the drums and the bass to something less monotone.

I guess best is to let the song sit for a while and then do a remix instead of trying to fix this mix. After all, this is already not shite and could become something pretty decent.

Might have been done at the time that you were diving deeper into mixing in mono to get more clarity in your tracks and more cohesive mixes, which is good here. So it’s a good track to experiment with “space & time” ( so mostly reverb & delays ) as well as panning to give another dimension to the mix.

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Yea, this mono addiction is turning into a one-trick pony. Made another song the last days where I tried to “find my way back” into stereo and while there is clearly a big improvement to similar songs from two, three years ago, much more control and clarity, it still sounds very amateurish and incoherent. No idea how to describe it. There are no obvious mistakes (well a few due to being too lazy to do it right), it just just sounds like a stack of isolated tracks rather than an ensemble working together to create a song.

Since I got myself a subscription again to revisit some tutorials, anything you would suggest to watch?

Not sure what you’ve already seen or not, but here are different interesting ones IMO :

Understanding Mixing Fundamentals with Phil Johnston

Creating Wide Mixes with Protoculture

Effects with Protoculture

Understanding Delay

Understanding Reverb

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Thank you.

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