Tips For Mixing Songs
I have got some basic and seemingly trivial advices regarding to mixing a song I want to share with you that are mostly missed by beginners.
Reverb & Delay
Personally, I think it's important to keep your song a little 'wet'. By wet I mean to apply some reverb and delay to your tracks -- yes, even to the drum tracks! Note, it can be a real challenge to find a happy medium between wet and dry. Of course you shouldn't get too dry -- the listener has to notice that there is some reverb or delay, but more like on a subconscious level. I want to point out here that I'm talking about general wetness and not piercing delays you would want to use for a solo, like for instance in "No No No" by Deep Purple, or a highlighting reverb dosage at the end of a vocal's verse like it's to be found in "School" by Supertramp, or even an excessive, but beautiful use of reverb like in the solo of "Fools" by Deep Purple as well.
Since the individual instruments and their elements respond differently to one and the same reverb and moreover not every instrument requires the same 'wetness', you mostly should choose one particular reverb for each instrument. Naturally, it's not desirable to have your tracks 'swimming' in reverb except you mean to do so.
Normally, drums (especially the snare since it's so punchy) require only little and short reverb. I'd recommend to equalize it a little 'bluntly' so you get a soft sound impression. Piercing elements consisting of mainly high frequencies and a fast decay like the snare make your reverb stand out more than for instance a bass drum or a crash. The bass drum doesn't have these penetrating frequencies and a crash has a very slow decay which both makes the reverb hardly noticeable.
Especially guitars and vocals require more brilliant reverbs since otherwise they tend to gain what I would call 'vague outlines'. It's up to you to choose the right reverb time and to determine its appropriate percentage, but especially with rock guitars I would prefer a delay because the overdrive sound tends to lose some 'punch' in combination with too much reverb.
In my experience, synthesizers, organs, and keyboards tolerate more reverberation without beginning to reverberate penetratingly.
Critical Frequency Bands
A big mistake I've often made in the past was to stress the low middle frequencies. You probably know that middle frequencies and especially the low mids are responsible for a warm sound impression. The issue I often had was to set up my sounds individually until they sounded great in themselves, but only without the rest of the tracks. And if you set up all your sounds separately, you'll probably find that every instrument sounds full and balanced, but in the complete mix everything suddenly starts to sound awfully fuzzy and blurry.
There is a trick to doing that properly. You sort of have to consider your whole
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