Soundcloud’s spectrum VS Traktor’s spectrum [asap]
When I export my tracks to soundcloud the spectrum looks wide, stereo and big. When I export them to
traktor they look very thin and doesn’t got similar waves. I’m going to play on a school show in 7 days and I’m
starting to wondering if I did something terrible wrong with my mix?
You should trust the Traktor waveform. Soundcloud’s compression algorithm makes lots of tracks “look” good that aren’t mixed or mastered properly.
Hah that’s great. I remember an engineer once almost slapping a musician because he said: “Well the track looks good”. Go with what Josephy said. Much better to use your ears to judge things. Easy way to identify problems is by A/B-ing your tracks to a reference track. Make sure they are both pushing close to 0dB (mastered tracks are pretty much always pushing 0dB).
A lot of times why a track will sound or look thin versus other references has to do with subtle mix/mastering techniques. You pretty much want to make sure the loudest peaks in your track are hitting 0dB, but not clipping. Having a good mix where the audio spectrum is fully populated will help, along with some light compression during mastering. All these things sort of culminate together and produce a full sounding track that is compatible to other tracks in terms of dynamics and volume. Getting a track to this point is a whole process in itself, but don’t worry, slowly make adjustments in future mixes and I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it.