?I'm in the middle of mixing the most important song of my recording “career”. I feel that the song I'm mixing right now has a better chance of becoming a hit than any song I've ever recorded. I'm producing the song and that means that I could be getting some backend $$ (which means I didn't get any money up front).

Anyway, I'm trying to put my best foot forward and make a mix that is absolutely pro. My tracks are solid and it's just up to me to get them all to fit together. Poor monitoring conditions don't make it any easier, that's for sure.

Anyway, I?wastn't happy with the vocal so I?solo'd?it last night. YUCK!! It sounded horrible! I had like 7 plugins on the inserts. I had two compressors, eq, multiband compression and who knows what else.?

Note:? When I'm getting close on a mix, I like to solo invididual channels just to make sure they didn't get too weird when I mix in context.? Sure, if a mix sounds great, it doesn't matter what the individual tracks sound like.? I'm totally aware of this.? However, sometimes there are problems in the mix that you can't quite put your finger on that can be found by soloing instruments.

Out of curiosity, I copied the track to a brand new channel and removed EVERYTHING! I did end up compressing it a healthy amount. I have to say that the vocal with nothing but compression on it sounded 1,000 times better than the track that I had processed the shit out of!!!!

It turns out I was just trying way too hard.

I remixed the song completely with minimal stuff on the vocals. Just compression and a reverb with plenty of pre-delay which I only crank up during the really loud / dense parts of the song.

Sometimes you just have to start over.

Brandon