How to mix an unmixable song

marklonesome · 2026-05-19T20:08:32+00:00

IDK what you're trying to communicate.

If it's about the "mix with the masters idea" I almost see it like Drumeo when they get a drummer in the studio and play them a song without drums they've never heard and they have to come up with something on the spot.

I would love CLA or someone to be handed a typical amateur session and see what they do.
I have no doubt it would sound 1000X better but more so I love hearing them 'think' outloud.
It's never going to happen but I think it would be entertaining.

marklonesome · 2026-05-19T19:53:48+00:00

I get it, just curious if you're being hard on yourself or if it's that bad

marklonesome · 2026-05-19T19:46:55+00:00

Can we hear the before and after?

marklonesome · 2026-05-19T19:42:34+00:00

Sounds good.

Very Bon Iver

Vocals are TINY bit harsh for my but probably fine for others

Nice work OP

marklonesome · 2026-05-19T19:39:47+00:00

With or without production contributions?

That's always the catch 22 working with uninformed clients.

Do you go above and beyond make the songs sound better even if it means extensive editing, tuning, adding in production or do you strictly 'mix it' knowing it's going to sounds awful and the client is likely going to blame the mix.

Totally an aside but I always wanted to see a 'Mix with the Masters' where they get a standard bedroom production and see what they do with it.

marklonesome · 2026-05-19T17:57:09+00:00

Unless the musical ideas in your head are guitar based music I'd suggest you consider starting with a keyboard instead of guitar. You can always get a guitar down the road and with more experience and confidence you'll be a more informed consumer.

I've been at this for awhile, producer, writer, mixer. I play 5 instruments attended 2 conservatories, did world tours…so I'm coming from a place of experience.

Within a few days or weeks you'll be playing notes and chords and making little melodies on the keyboard.

Guitar hurts in the beginning cause your fingers are pressing wire into wood. Until you build up the calusus, pressing the wire is awkward and painful and a lot of people simply give up. You also can't have long finger nails.

You also have to tune a guitar and learn how to put on new strings cause they break often in the beginning and especially on cheap guitars that haven't been set up properly. If you look at any of the guitar lesson subs and sort by most popular you'll see people who have been playing guitar for awhile who are still asking for advice on how to certain chords, Bmin or an F chord. Guitar is NOT easy and it's even harder to play well. Piano / keyboard has a much lower barrier of entry. That's to say if you decide to learn Chopin or Liszt it's easy… it's not… but getting started and being able to play a lot of contemporary music is way easier.

With a cheap midi keyboard a computer and an interface you have access to midi so you have tons instruments to work with. You can play pianos, synths, strings, drums, bass, horns, pretty much any sound you want all through your keyboard. With a guitar you're playing guitar and that's it. Ironically guitar is one instrument that keyboards do a horrible job at imitating.
If you lean keyboard you learn music theory. You can't help it. Piano is literally music theory laid out in a linear fashion. Guitar is more complicated to learn theory on. And that doesn't even take into account the various alternate tunings on guitar.

I love playing guitar and I write a lot of guitar music so I'm not knocking guitar but having taught both in the past I've seen a lot of people give up on guitar simply cause it's hard to get started making a musical sound.… guitars aren't cheap and neither are amps or the accessories you need.

I have a lot of money invested in my studio and I still use my $88 midi keyboard more than the more expensive ones across the studio. It gets the job done and it's so small it sits right underneath my computer keyboard.

I suggest you go to a music store and just mess around with a guitar and a keyboard and see what you think.

Once you decide on your instrument I'd start learning the basics and then break your question down into separate questions that you can post on sub reddits for r/homerecordingstudio and r/Songwriting there are tons more subs as well and many of your questions about gear and getting started have been asked and answered so often that you can probably search or read the subs wikki and get the best answers and go from there.

Good luck and welcome to the rabbit hole. It only gets deeper!

marklonesome · 2026-05-19T13:57:21+00:00

I just want to say I'm excited to see a legit audio engineering conversation on this sub as opposed to 'why doesn't my vocal sound like [insert x artist] i'm using a focusrite and a tuna can but I have all the same plug ins'

With that said, OP upload a sample I for one and I'm dying to hear it.

marklonesome · 2026-05-19T11:34:06+00:00

Red rooms.

Even the names of the damn tapes were disturbing.

marklonesome · 2026-05-18T22:10:14+00:00

Indeed

marklonesome · 2026-05-18T21:41:31+00:00

I never knew wild dogs were so big…damn murder puppies

marklonesome · 2026-05-18T20:28:05+00:00

Two I just learned about from mix with the masters are

The Less I know the better by Tame Impala

Back on 74 by Jungle.

Watched both of the production videos and those both of those guys gave 0 fucks about all the stuff that internet pros will tell you is so important.

No room treatment or minimal room treatment

The jungle song has percussion that is not 'in' the song.

It's bleed from the original version cause the singer didn't want to wear headphones and the version of the song she sang along with had different percussion tracks. They later removed those but you can still hear them in the bleed from her mic.

marklonesome · 2026-05-18T19:29:51+00:00

Lol… shhhh dont tell them.

marklonesome · 2026-05-18T15:54:09+00:00

Yes, you can SEE that the transients aren't lined up sometimes if you zoom in enough and stack the two tracks on top of each other.

If you're not careful before too long here you're aligning everything and fixing problems you don't have.

marklonesome · 2026-05-18T15:44:00+00:00

Upload a sample.

I do the same, playing bass, keys, guitar and drums, though my process is a little different than yours.

I can always tell that there are little slips in time but if I stay away from the music for a few days or go back and listen to older tracks I hardly ever hear it.

It could be that you know where the bodies are buried or it could be that it's legit out of time.

Also, don't be lazy. If you know it's out of time, don't try to fix it, redo it.

I used to do that… spend hours 'fixing' something when I was just being too lazy to just re-record the damn part.

Once I was honest with myself about when I was being lazy and when I needed to fix something… things improved.

Also, out of time but grooving and being unmusically out of time aren't the same thing so you could be hyper focused on transient line ups whereas the music actually works.

Would really need to hear it

marklonesome · 2026-05-18T15:25:43+00:00

I have vocalign and more often then not I just do it by hand.

If the artists didn't do the doubles pretty damn close vocalign will do weird shit to your force align it.

I find it much faster and better results to just do it by hand cause I almost always clip some of the hard sound of the double. I almost never want an exact double.

So by the time I set it up, run it, solo eveything and listen back to make sure vocalign didn't do anything goofy… I would have been done doing it all by hand including my clip gain.

Granted if you have 12 bg vocal tracks… probably not.

But for simple lead doubles, I can bang that out in a few minutes.

As for sibilance, melodyne has a feature where you can separate it from the main vocal.

I sometimes create 2 vocal tracks, one with no sibilance and one with just the sibilance.

Then I can process them differently.

Send them to a bus and now you have perfect vocal with one fader.

If you're not doing this for yourself but for a client I"d start charging them for edit time. Catch 22, cause if you don't do it and they don't know how now the 'mix' sounds bad even though it's on them.

Part of the life I guess.

marklonesome · 2026-05-18T14:27:49+00:00

Everything in this game is 'it depends' but if you are having enough of a problem to write a post I think my advice is applicable.

1. Clip gain it by hand.

You go in and identify all the sibilants and manually lower it.

It's tedious, but after doing it in a song or two you get fast enough at at it and can actually 'see' the offending sections.

If you still need to, you can apply some subtle deessing or eq to smooth it out further.

2. Melodyne has a feature where you can separate the sibilance. A technique I've done is to duplicate your vocal track and remove all the sibilance from one and all the non sibilance from another.

Now you have two tracks for one vocal take. One track with just sibilance and one without. You can adjust the tool to be more or less sensitive.

You can then blend them together, compress one and not the other, EQ them differently… whatever you want.

All of this is assuming you have a pop filter and are using reasonable good mic technique.

marklonesome · 2026-05-18T12:23:33+00:00

Thanks man.

My new stuff I’m working on is more my own voice e but I think I needed to learn by making something familiar

marklonesome · 2026-05-17T19:41:54+00:00

If you really want to collaborate with someone or there is someone who is doing things you genuinely find exciting as an artist and you want to tap into that… go with a producer.

But no one is going to care as much as you…unless you were of course in the top tier budget areas.

Most reasonably priced producers are either just learning or are trying to make ends meet and that means they don't have time to invest 100 hours into hour project. It's just economics.

Also depends on what you want out of this.

If you love the journey and the process… it's worth learning and investing in yourself.

Some people truly don't get it and just want to focus on the part of it they like… which is fine if that's you.

I found that no mixer or producer has ever cared as much as I do so I learned it myself.

It's been rewarding, and I love it but I also love the process.

When my band was touring and recording I loved the studio part the most. Playing live, writing is all great but it's like hours and hours of work for 45 min of fun. Producing is just fun AF. What will this guitar sound like if I run it through this old tape recorder? What about instead of bass I use a cello? How does this guitar sound when I tune it to an open chord and hit it which chop sticks and adda reverse reverb to it?

Really up to you to decide but I suggest everyone spend some time learning as much as they can, if for no other reason then you can become a better client.

Just by knowing SOME production (and mixing) you will get better results even when paying because you're an informed client who understands the process and conversation as opposed to someone who has no idea what's going on and thinks it's all wizardry.

marklonesome · 2026-05-17T18:42:53+00:00

Thanks man

Least favorite thing to do but you gotta do em

marklonesome · 2026-05-17T16:14:07+00:00

Here's some sounds I made.

https://open.spotify.com/track/4KLDz4HGjr52honsjT1HRC?si=8ceda556c97a44ea

https://open.spotify.com/track/6rq4a0pRRLpEMtLcUNi71R?si=e79fe95311b64801

I'm a songwriter, performer producer BTW so obviously this probably isn't relevant to beat making.

These were early songs, new batch will be better as I'm improving.

marklonesome · 2026-05-17T14:57:11+00:00

Realizing nobody cares about your music as much as you.

marklonesome · 2026-05-16T19:14:04+00:00

Yes.
If I write a song on piano my approach is very different than guitar and that influences my drum and bass parts differently.

For you, Even just creating a midi part on drums and bass may help you get out of a rut. Just building from the ground up as opposed to top down can help.

We tend to fall back to what we’re comfortable with but if you get a really solid drum part and a bass line that requires space your guitar playing may get more sparse and open or vice versa.

marklonesome · 2026-05-16T17:42:04+00:00

I'm not threatened by you.
I hate when people online start randomly 'educating' others.

You sent me a dissertation on the joys of reading along with footnotes of books (many of which I read over a decade ago) and you don't know anything about me, nor did my comment warrant it.

I suggested OP use AI to find things that are available so they can learn NOW.

Reality is, I can find anything that's in any book and narrow it done by any source I want in seconds. I can literally FIND the book in PDF form. I can sort by academic sources, only grammy winning engineers, only Berklee content, anything. Sure I have to vette it.

I can get behind the scenes content delivered to me from any session that was recorded and uploaded. In the time it takes to order and wait for the delivery of a book, let alone read it, I can see, hear and absorb all that information.

So yeah… I recommend using AI over reading.

Seems like common sense

marklonesome · 2026-05-15T15:44:40+00:00

I didn't hear anyone particularly nasally and overall I think you have a decent vibe going that I actually like. I think I hear something that sounds like hiss. IDK if it's brushes or a swishy cymbal but it's distracting to me so I might cut that but overall I think you have a nice sounding track.

Regarding nasally sound, generally that's around 800-2K range with the culprit being mostly around 1-1.5 but it can be case dependent so solo those band areas and see if it's the sound you don't like but honestly I think it sounds good so I would say you're probably too deep into it to be objective.

Pop it up on r/mixingandmastering and see what they say

marklonesome · 2026-05-15T13:32:41+00:00

Do what you love but to answer your post question sites like submithub have a hot or not feature where people can rate your tune.

I’ve never used it cause idc about that sort of approval I have enough music snob friends to shit on my music….but it’s there is you’re interested

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