Cool song.... nice renditions by all. I love some good blues. Floyd did a good job on the guitar. Personal nits could be mentioned but they are neither here nor there since they are not production or performance issues but simply my personal taste issues and preferences.

I was noticing the sound of the total mix sounded a bit close to distortion in a few places so....out of curiosity, I DL'd the file and opened it in my editor.

wow...it was looking pretty much exactly how I expected it to look. you're running the compression too high somewhere in that project. I could hear it in the sound quality in the first 5 seconds. The picture below is the song in the wave editor. It pretty much stays slammed at 0db or very likely "over" which results in the squashed sound. This also sounds like there's a "rough edge" to the highs on J's vox part. The meters in my editor stayed pegged to 0db or mighty close for the time I listened in the editor to compare the mix to the soundcloud player.




You should always have a visual check of a song file before you cut it loose to see where the peaks are at. You can get the song plenty loud without extreme compression and really, a song like this doesn't need to be compressed. Let it breathe.

This is the picture I try to aim for regarding compression.


The song is "In A World Without You" and there's nothing hitting the tops.


Hey, I'm not slamming you for doing this, simply pointing it out..... I too have had it happen to me. That's why I always look at the wave 100% of the time in my finalizing process. Often I find that the compression is NOT in the final steps but somewhere back in the mix where I turned something up and didn't really check it. I don't want to have a "sonic brick" to represent my music & skills.

When you get the compression ratio's right, the song is plenty loud and has an open feel to the sound quality....I call that "air" and it's what you need to aim for. To much compression and you lose that openness and the sound becomes noticeably squashed.



Last edited by Guitarhacker; 08/20/14 10:42 AM.
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