Headphone mix

[Toloache]

At the moment im without a soundcard, because modern pc dont have firewire and i can't use mine, so im mixing with my ath-m50 headphones. They are a little bit on the bass heavy side, so can you please listen to this snippet of a track im making and tell me how do you find levels? I added a limiter on to rise a bit the dbfs, because im mixing at -6 db, but i think it's pretty transparent.

Also on a side note, i find my main problem with mixing is the snare/clap. If i program a good volume for my ears on the clap, i have to turn down the kick because otherwise the song peaks and distort, and i have to be conservative on the limiter. Or on the other hand, i can turn down the clap and set the kick up, but in this manner the clap sound far away.

In those commercial songs i hear strong kick and claps, and a medium dbfs of -12, but if make my claps this loud, when i limit they go over 0 db. How do you treat your snares/claps to fit with the kick and maintain at the same time a good volume? Hpf don't work for me!

Aniway, this is the snippet http://soundcloud.com/toloachemnml/bubble-jungle

[Barfunkel]

Sounds weird that the whole songs distors when you turn up the clap. Maybe turn EVERYTHING down a few dB and work from there, you could be mixing too hot.

What are you using for snares and claps? If they don't fit, try changing them to different ones. If they don't sound good in a track context, no amount of tweaking will make them fit. Just delete and choose/make new ones!

[Toloache]

Usually i mix with kick and snare/clap combined at -8 and build all the other elements from there. If i turn up the clap/snare to the loudness i wanna hear or i hear in professional tracks, suddenly the master go to -3 and i eat all my headroom for limiting. This happens with every style of snare that sits with the kick. Initially i was thinking that maybe the two attacks would clash, but lenghtening the attack doesn't help much. So i thought that maybe there is some processing to do to make the snare/clap clear but at the same time not turn down the kick too much

[Barfunkel]

I don't think there's a type of processor that would turn a kick/snare combo that doesn't sound good into sounding good. Like I said before, choose a different snare/clap. Or a different kick. When you find the right combination, they should sound pretty good together without much processing.

[Rein]

try to turn the volume of the snare down (a lot) and add a high passed clap. also, check the tuning of the snare. if you're using a 808 kick for example that's about a G, would be nice to have a snare @ D if the music is in G minor for example.

[tone-def]

of course it's going to peak when you layer to sounds together. just leave more headroom
i'm guessing the clap (or kick) isn't as loud as you think it is in professional tracks.

[loictambay]

not sure if this is conventional or even correct, but I've been getting some pretty decent, loud results overdriving my snare/clap with my kick...I'll solo my kick and snares and bring them up so the kick hits almost 0db then add the snare and let it clip and record the result. The levels match and it seems to blend the two together, and give the snares a bit of warmth. If you look at the waveform, it gives that rounded look to the waveforms that I see in many professional tracks...

[Rein]

not sure if this is conventional or even correct, but I've been getting some pretty decent, loud results overdriving my snare/clap with my kick...I'll solo my kick and snares and bring them up so the kick hits almost 0db then add the snare and let it clip and record the result. The levels match and it seems to blend the two together, and give the snares a bit of warmth. If you look at the waveform, it gives that rounded look to the waveforms that I see in many professional tracks...

cool technique... i'd make sure that the bass peak from the kick are the same on every hit, sometimes the snare hit can lower the volume of it when they collide. some spectrum analysis can help you there..