Trance Track Feedback

Hallo!

I am looking for feedback for my new trance track. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thank you.

hi, your link isnt working.

This is my page. The track is on top and its name is “Winter Scene”…

https://soundcloud.com/euphoric_feel

Clap is very long and takes getting used to. To integrate it into the song it needs more reverb. At the drop it lacks on sub frequencies. Your bassline is good just put it on some degrees or look at the EQ.
But overall I really liked the number. Pretty classic and for me to short (the end comes very apruptly), but cool to listen to.

I continued working on the track and embedded your hints. Bass louder, Clap shorter and some work in mixing&mastering.

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Well, I really liked that long clap! Don’t get me wrong.It was I think special and as I said took me a bit. But after…It would really fit when you just keep the length and put a bit reverb on. But thats just my opinion on that :wink:

Thank you. Any other suggestions?

Personally I think it’s a nice track, quite pleasant to listen to and the arrangement works fine as well but I really find the all mixing/mastering totally overcooked and the result is a very squashed & over-compressed Mix, the Kick is also very “clicky” and quite harsh to my listening. Don’t hesitate to keep more headroom and to retain dynamics when mixing/mastering electronic music, even if it’s Trance, Techno and you’ll want to end up with a level wise competitive track, pushing too hard limiters & compressors don’t always help in the end. Going back to the mix stage & gain-staging to re-balance all channels before reaching the master bus should help.

Thanks for your comment. I reworked the mixing&mastering. I think it sounds well improved now.

This forum is about the track “Winter Scene (Radio)”. It can be found on my soundcloud artist page.

https://soundcloud.com/euphoric_feel

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Hola. Happy new year. The latest version still doesn’t work for me. It’s a pity, because you have a really good song here. I am not an expert, but I would say that the main problem is that whatever you are doing is too much.

You need to rescue the song. It’s too good to be left like this. Look into his sad, multibandcompressed eyes: “Papa, please stop compressing me. I will never be a block. I want to be dynamic, like maman used to be before that monser, that Skrillex, … I’m not a block. Papa! Papa!”

Just some random thoughts:

  • Do your mix without anything on the mixbus except a soft glue compressor and analysis tools. The song must work by itself.

  • Also deactivate reverbs and other stereo tools and first make everything work without them.

  • Stuff your chain with metering plugins. Ears are stupid. A lot of things make sense to them if you play it long or loud enough. Throw on sth. like Brainworx bx_meter (or one that measures this newer lufs thingie) to have some visual feedback for loudness, peaks and dynamic range. Same for the spectrum. Use peaks and averages for getting a better picture.

  • Take your reference tracks and measure. Does your song look like this? Isolate some frequency ranges and listen to it, stereo and mono. I cannot imagine that your 400hz to 2khz area is supposed to look like this, and the part between kick/bass and that static arpeggio synth.

  • Listen to your drop in mono. There is a kick, where is the drop? Find a base where it doesn’t sound wrong in mono and then do your magic and always switch back in mono to listen for changes. Unimportant information is allowed to disappear, but not your main synths. Mono sounds funny, listen to an old Beatles song once in a while, so you don’t mistake that mono sound for a problem in your mix.

  • Use mono to roughly select your panning positions and reverb levels (unless it’s some sparkle in the stratosphere that is meant to disappear in mono). No idea why, but you hear much better when it’s in the right area.

  • There is some kind of detuning on the intro synth that starts around 00:30. Maybe it’s done for space but it’s too much and sounds dissonant to me.

  • The space is also too much for me in this song. Too visible, too erratic. Tone it down. Pan your instruments, pan mono delays and reverbs, and put your stereo effects towards the end to get that stereo butterfoam without becoming pre-diabetic. Do not visibly eq or compress the input to these effects, do it on the input signal. Sidechain the output. Otherwise you lose the atmospheric glitter.

  • What I find pretty helpful is to route all send fx tracks with room effects back into a single audio track. Because then I can solo it and work only on that space creation engine.

  • If you only want to catch spikes, use a limiter or softclipper. If it is too loud, turn the volume down. If it’s too quiet, turn the volume up. No compressor needed.

  • Always go back to the isolated instrument, stereo and mono. If you apply too much compression, you’ll hear it. It takes on a flatter, kind of muffled sound, or with a too strong limiter you’ll hear distortion artefacts. For your song probably nothing you want to send into your busses, because it will only get worse with the limiters and compressors on the bus. You know that experience, when you compress and cut and compress even more and you think it should get loud, but it does the opposite and gets weak and like [insert penis joke].

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Agree with @kuchenchef , the Mix improved a bit but still overcooked.

Lot’s of good points & advise from him in his post ( brilliant feedback BTW @kuchenchef wish many more members would involved that much in the track feedback section on the forums ).

I’m always amazed to see people making a Mix revision after a few hours/days time, I’ll be honest, except for some seasoned producers or very well trained audio engineers that work for clients under time pressure, I don’t know many people that decide that the Mix is done very easily in time, especially when it’s you own music. Take your time, as mentioned in the previous post : “The song must work by itself” before thinking about pushing it further.

Edit : forgot to mention that Phil’s tutorial about the fundamentals of Mixing is really worthwhile watching :wink: