Hi all!
Looong time lurker, first time poster. Glad I took the plunge and became a part of the community!

I'm currently working on my first project which has a lofi/shoegaze/trip-hop vibe. The lyrics are on Croatian so don't bother understanding them. The idea was to create something groovy but bleak.

I'm mixing using JBL 305's in an untreated room. Everything was recorded in not-so-great conditions. Well, you get the picture, the classic "I wan't to record my music and I don't know how but it doesn't matter, wait, why does this sound so crappy?".

I'm willing to learn as much as I can from you guys.

Thanks a bunch!

Welcome Frets! I'm probably the last person you want giving advise as I am learning about mixing myself but I'd start by high passing (cut the bottom freqs off) of most of the tracks that don't have critical low end content. Repost the results and hopefully others will chime in. Also, dial back the reverb on any instrumental tracks a notch. I don't know anything about this genre of music but hopefully this would be a small step in the right direction.

Hey Pdiddy, thanks for the reply!

I've already HP-ed al the guitars, synths and vocals (cutting lows from about 150 Hz down). My drum room mics are compressed and heavily present in the mix but I didn't HP them because I didn't want to lose the sweet low end of the kick in those mics.

I by myself can hear a lot of build up in the low mids and not so much information in the highs. Maybe my arrangement just sucks which leads to a build up in that area?

I wouldn't dial back too much of the reverb because it's kind off a signature FX of this kind of genre but I'll experiment with your advice!

Anyone?

Plenty of goodness in this track Awesome first try!
I can only critique the fuzz wash over everything in the low mids undefines the parts. Both the vocals and the guitar parts, especially guitar parts are lost in the effect especially when the accompaniment comes in denser.
That hold feature on the reverb might work just on it's own.

The Guitar parts could be introduced cleaner in the mix earlier on and drenched in the reverb effect slighly later with a gate to prevent the reverb trailing into the next phrase.
Vocal sounds like it is sitting back and made to fit in with everything else. Possibly bring it to the fore a bit more with some deessing and make the remaining instruments fit with it as it is the accompaniment.
Drums sound great but that distortion fuzz too much in some parts.
The song soothes!

Harsh vocals, but i like the tune and the tones.

@Bart Nettle:
Thank you Bart! So I was right something funky was happening in the low mids. There's no fuzz effect over the parts you mentioned, just a tad of saturation. I think I made the mistake in the recording phase where I recorded the vocals to hot and the guitars with way much overdrive so I lost the ability to tweak the amount of overdrive as the song evolves with plugins.
Is there I chance I could carve the low mids area of each instrument heavy in that freq information in hope of giving each instrument (esp. vocals and guitar) more space to be heard?
A thank you for the reverb advice, I will try it.

@joecandy:
Thanks for the reply! Yeah, now you mentioned they are quite harsh. I believe it's because I recorded them too hot with a cheap ART preamp. Is there a way I could level down that harshness a bit in this scenario?

F