Participant: AlekseiN

Thank you for participating in the HOFA XMAS MIX CONTEST! We'd like to give you a short feedback to your contribution.

Leveling 

The cornerstone of a good mix is created during leveling. This is definitely going in the right direction in your mix. However, you could still optimize your mix a little here. For example, the electric guitar, snare drum and cymbals are a little louder and therefore stand out too much from the mix. You can lower their level slightly to ensure that these tracks blend in better with the rest of the mix and don't seem too detached. 

Accompanying elements are further in the background but still audible and leading elements such as the lead vocals have sufficient volume to assert themselves without standing out too much from the mix.  

We also like the panorama distribution. The positioning of the guitars, for example, ensures a certain stereo width and also creates space for the vocals or snare drum in the middle. So you've done a good job here! 😊  

Nevertheless, the instruments are not yet able to separate and differentiate from each other in the best possible way. But this is more of a spectral problem - so let's take a look at the EQing. 

EQing 

The first thing we noticed about your mix was the rather high-mid and presence-emphasized sound. This makes the mix sound a little sharper and thinner overall. Although this enhances the aggressiveness and transparency of the song to a certain extent, it also sounds somewhat unbalanced and there is a lack of fullness of sound. This sound impression is primarily created by the electric guitars, cymbals and vocals. You can therefore focus a little more on the fundamental tones instead of the high mids in order to optimize the sound accordingly. In addition to the overall impression of the sound, your EQing also creates a so-called "midrange clash" - many tracks mask each other in this spectrum, making it difficult to differentiate between the individual instruments and creating a rather opaque impression. 

Compression 

You are on the right track as far as dynamic processing is concerned. The individual elements are largely controlled, which creates a certain density. Furthermore, no "side effects" of suboptimal control can be heard.  

In your mix, however, the sibilants of the lead vocal are a little too clearly "de-essed" and start to lisp. You have correctly recognized that the S and sibilants are somewhat problematic, but when de-essing, pay even more attention that the reduction does not lead to the singer appearing to lisp. 

Depth & Effects 

Basically, we think that you have used reverbs & co tastefully. The result is a subtle spatiality and no element is too indirect.  

By the way, we think the vocal delay, which can be heard in a few places, is a cool idea. It's particularly good that you've automated the delay and that it doesn't occur too often. However, depending on your taste, we could still imagine embedding the delay into the mix a little more subtly at a lower level.


Conclusion 

Overall, you have done a solid job and are on the right track. We still see room for improvement in some areas, although you can quickly improve most of the points of criticism with our approaches mentioned here. We hope that we have been able to help you with this analysis and wish you every success with your upcoming projects! :)


In the following screenshot you can see the comparison of the frequencies of your mix (white curves) with our mix (orange curves) in the analyzer. The lower curves represent the average energy over time, while the upper curves illustrate the peaks. The volumes of the two mixtures are equalized. To equalize the two mixes, you should lower the level of our mix by 0.7 dB. You should make this adjustment both for the listening comparison (i.e. via the level of the track) and for the visual comparison in the analyzer - it is an important prerequisite for an objective A/B comparison. 

On the analyzer you can clearly see that your mix has more pronounced high-mid frequencies and high-end.

HOFA-College offers a wide range of online courses on recording, mixing, mastering and producing music.
Mix analyses form an essential part of the education at HOFA-College, along with video tutorials, personal support, online campus & studio workshops. Experienced audio engineers listen to the mixes of the students and create individual and detailed, multi-page feedbacks about the strengths and weaknesses of each mix, with many helpful tips & tricks.
Learn more: hofa-college.com

Best regards from the HOFA team - enjoy your music!