Happy New Year. I hope yours is off to a great start. A quick one to start 2024.
I was preparing some Doxkyn tracks for mastering recently. I was pretty happy with them but I did my due diligence and pulled up MCompare by Melda Production to check the mixes against some references I’ve been using while mixing the album.
Track 1, good. Track 2, erm, nope that doesn’t sound right.
Immediately I could hear that the issue wasn’t the mix, it was the arrangement. Basically there wasn’t enough movement in the rhythm section and it was in need of some “helping percussion”.
I often use helping percussion (with permission) when I’m mixing and mastering clients’ songs. Often I find a little dab of some shaker, tambourine or a percussion loop of some kind in a section helps delineate it and give the appropriate lift.
The Takeaway:
1. Always reference your mix against a suitable comparative mix to see how the arrangement stacks up.2. Arrangement decisions are always more powerful than mix decisions. Get better at arranging and your mixes will improve as well.
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