How would you rate my mix, 1 to 10?
Mix feedback: Why a second ear can give you so much peace of mind.
I got a message recently with a request I know all too well myself, from a time when I was producing a lot more music. Louie – composer and producer, artist name Melouie – texted me one morning, short and unbothered, on WhatsApp:
Hey hey, so I've listened through the track. The mix is really good, nice and clean, nothing hurts to listen to. There are just two small things for my ear:
1. Bass: the bass notes vary quite a bit in loudness. I'm guessing that's a monitoring issue. You could try freezing the bass track down to audio, then adjust with clip gain. In stem mastering I'd handle this with dynamic EQ.
2. The kick feels a bit swallowed by the bass. I'd push the kick a bit more around 60 Hz and use a transient designer to bring out the transient more.
3. You could maybe pull the bass down slightly overall in the parts where the kick isn't playing – but that's more a matter of taste.
Hope that helps.
No commission, no deadline, nothing dramatic – just the question almost every producer asks themselves at some point: am I actually on the right track here, or is my own ear deceiving me because I'm simply too deep inside the track?
That's exactly the moment Mix Feedback really helps. Not the full mixdown, not stem mastering – just a short, honest outside perspective before the track even reaches mastering.
So I listened to the track start to finish in our mastering room, and I have to say – it sounded genuinely great. Just the bass issue together with the kick was the problem.
Here I show you how my first tip for Louie could be implemented:
This is what that first note looks like once it is actually applied. The bass gets frozen to audio, cut at the note boundaries, and the level of each clip is set by hand. The loud notes come down before they reach anything else in the chain, so no compressor has to make a musical decision it is not equipped to make.
It is slower than reaching for a plugin. But what good does a multiband dynamic eq do when I"m not hearing which note is actually the issue due to room modes. Also it would be great if the mastering would have thew wiggle room to do its own job instead of spending its headroom on damage control.
That's the real difference between a vague opinion and feedback you can actually act on. Louie didn't have to guess whether his ear was tricking him – he walked away with a clear next step.
Almost anyone who produces or mixes their own music knows this feeling: you spend too long inside your own track, and your ear adapts to problems that stand out immediately to me. A second, trained ear in a top-tier listening room – before mastering even begins – can dissolve that exact blind spot.
That's why Mix Feedback is deliberately kept low-key: an honest, eye-level assessment that gets the mix pointed in the right direction before the final step – so mastering can spend its time putting the finishing touch on top, instead of fixing rough problems.
Thanks to Louie / Melouie (melouie.com) for letting us share this exchange.
Get an honest, trained ear – before your track goes into mastering.
