Hi Jeanette! On 2022-01-17 15:41, Jeanette C. wrote: It's cool that you want to improve and I'm always impressed when somebody reacts to criticism like you do! It's first of all, IMHO, too much hi-end from the high mid and up and too little lo-end. I miss the kicking bass and pulse at the bottom. The first one is often when the ears (and often the head) are tired and the lack of bass is often because the acoustics in the mixing room and/or head phone generate too much bass and people overcompensate the other way because they think it's too much bass. That was the main thing that I heard at once, but if that is fixed (assuming I'm right), then new problems might arise! But in the end, mixing is always a subjective thing! :-) Som reference tracks of some well-known music in the same type of music will often keep one on track and of course: -Rests! One should never mix more than an hour without rests, the ears are big liars! I mainly make a living as a sound engineer and believe me, I have done worse and more bad things are still to come! Around five years ago, I mixed a song with the hi-hats so loud that the producer kicked me out and let another mixer mix that song! For this job, I was mixing 8 songs in a row at night time, everyone knows that this is a no-no, but I had a deadline to keep. As an example of bad mixing (IM-not-so-HO), here you can hear a lear bad mix with only one guitar and vocals. That's John Lennon's Working Class Hero on his YouTube channel. Here you can hear how they in a 2010 remastering of the song changed the voice (way too much middle - a more telephonic voice) and even managed to compress the life out of the voice even more. And as a curiosity, notice what's happening between 1:24 and 1:45, they have punched in another take (that also appears on the original). Not everyone has noticed this, but it proves that everyone no matter how good they are, can do funny stuff and even get away with it. :-) The professional world has many examples of bad takes and mixing mistakes. Jostein