A close friend of mine is in the band, Promise To Burn.  They are currently working with a producer (Malcolm Springer) with about as big of connections as you could imagine.  I was supposed to head down to Nashville to be there for the initial mixing, but some scheduling changes got in the way of that.  Anyway, my friend was back home and let me hear what they had so far.

It's important to note that Malcolm had never mixed in this room before and was learning the room.  These mixes were a trial.

Either way, I had done a mix the day before which I had compressed fairly hard for me.  When I played Malcolm's mix, everything was much more dense!  I mean way denser.  When I say "dense", I mean that it was thick.... not from low end necessarily, but from just being thick.  The best way I could describe it would be with clouds actually.  Malcolm's mix was like a black cloud that you couldn't see through.  My mix was sort of a transparent thin cloud.  Sorry, this stuff is tough to explain.

It was immediately obvious that I need to mega compress my recordings compared to what I have been in order for them to compete with modern recordings.

The downside to this is I HATE overcompression on my mixes because it never sounds as good on my monitors.  Then again, overcompression seams to do something positive in the car. 

As always, I'm stuck in a delima, but maybe writing this blog entry will get me closer to smashing my mixes harder.