Man, great tune and great job!
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I’m impressed you even did the singing. Honestly I think it’s pretty spot on with the song. I didn’t notice it was you until I read your comment. If anything maybe take the volume down in the mix a little but it’s good.
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Really awesome work Paul! Great job!
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So, happy to contribute some constructive advice here, partly learned in my own mixes, partly learned from others and put to good use myself. All of this is not criticism - you overall sounded good - just advice on improving the overall balance and saturation of the mix.
You have a classic situation in this song that everyone runs in to early in mixing multiple instruments and luckily a relatively simple case. Basically, All the instruments sound good in isolation but in the mix they become too saturated and a little thick and muddy because they are all living in each others spaces. The sound ranges the instruments each occupy overlap and the additive tone from them becomes overwhelming and oversaturated. So you get in to a situation where while the overall relative levels are ok, the sound is off for saturation, tonal balance, and loudness. It turns out the levels are of less importance in a mix than these things, beyond a certain point.
Sometimes this is fixable with some easy techniques, sometimes you need to go more advanced. All require some plugins or builtins in the DAW as they aren’t practical to fix in isolation, especially for the drums. I don’t know what you have there so I will just be general here, but simple and good versions of many of the tools I recommend can be had for free in the Kilohearts Essentials bundle at kilohearts.com. You will specifically want a filter, compressor, and EQ plugin if the DAW does not have good builtins for this. I would also strongly recommend a good parametric graphing EQ. I use a different one, but if you don’t have one a good start is MeldaProduction’s MEqualizer, in their free FX bundle (which also comes with a lot of other great stuff).
In your mix, the worst offender for mud/saturation is the bass. This is actually pretty common, our instrument is mighty 
In this case the bass is overlapping both the kick drum on the low end and the lower overtones of the synth and your vocals on the high end. You have really strong mids too and are already pretty saturated, so I am guessing you’re compressing and maybe running through something like a chorus there, plus the chords in the song itself add to this.
We’ll fix the low end first. This is also the part most horrifying to bass players but it is really important. When you throw in a bunch of separate instruments a lot of low end overtones and harmonics start to accumulate down in the 20-50Hz range, and the bass is the worst offender here by far, so by applying EQ or a filter down there on the bass track and trimming a lot of that away, you can dramatically clean up the mix. I would recommend adding a high pass filter to the bass track that rolls off at around 40-50Hz (at 12dB/oct if it lets you select). You can also do this with EQ if you have a parametric/graphing EQ. You’ll want to play with the specific cutoff and move it around to find the best tone.
The next step is EQing it and this is one that’s hard to give specific advice for without having the stems to play with. I think you are definitely going to want to lower the low mids and mids a bit but how much is hard to say. For Hooky basslines like this a slight boost in the high mids followed by a high shelf cutting some of the highs can help, but you’ll want to be careful and play with both of those because that’s where your voice and the synth are too.
Drums - I think EQ for the drums is a tough one here. They are boomy but that’s kind of awesome. I think the answer for the drums is probably more compression and playing with how they sound as you run them up in to a relatively hard compression ratio. You can then mix them lower in level but adjust their loudness via compression on the drum track; this is a very common technique. Just don’t go crazy with the compression (unless you want to and are shooting for a more '80s vibe )
Do you have the drums miked separately and running in to separate tracks in the DAW? That’s best but miking drums is f’ing hard. If so, you can then bring the snare up a bit relative to the kick and compress it more to increase its presence.
The synth - ahh synthesizers, my main instrument. I love them but they also can be a prime, prime offender for mud and saturation. In this case it’s probably not too bad - you have a nice simple patch going here and it sounds pretty clean. Still, I think if you want you can completely filter away anything below about 100Hz on the synth track and not even notice in the mix except maybe having it sound a little cleaner. The place to watch here will be in where it is overlapping with your vocals - you may want to EQ it up or down in places a bit.
That leaves vocals. These are really hard. You have already effected them in a lot of ways I would; I would recommend copying the track to a second track and panning them a bit to get a little stereo separation going, plus (if possible) remove the effects from one. Might be hard for you here but is why I always record completely dry and apply effects in the DAW. If that’s what you did, things will be immensely easier for both the vocals and bass; if you recorded them amped and effected it’s more difficult. Anyway, to start I would recommend mixing everything else around the drums and vocals and see how far you can get; the next step for the vocals would be compression.
It’s really hard to be specific without having the instrument track stems to play with. I’d be happy to take a look this weekend if you want to PM me and send me the stems. If you have dry tracks that would be ideal but I could give it a shot with the wet tracks too.
All of these are just a pointer to how to get started on each part and from there, a lot of tweaking of the EQ, compression and levels is needed - but you can end up with something much improved from a straight mix. You have a lot of great raw ingredients here to play with, all the individual instruments sound great and I kind of want samples from your drums myself
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That is incredibly helpful! I appreciate you taking the time to write that up. I have in the past listened to my mix vs the original and had no clue why my drums and bass sounded so so different. This was a great Mixing 101 for me to get a basic understanding of what’s going on.
Drums are a pain to record. I use four mics- bass, snare, and two overheads.
Thanks again Howard. I will study this and apply it to the next cover. I’ll play with this cover too and see what happens. I probably won’t repost it with a new mix because I like my videos to reflect my progress. But I’m excited to start this new chapter in my musical journey.
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@Johnnyb I had no idea there was a playlist of all the covers!!
This rocks, literally! Thanks for maintaining it!
So many exclamation points!!
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This advise is worth gold!
You didn’t mention chorus for bass. You don’t recommend it?
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Having a good bit of overlap with Mr. Howard as far as taste in music I would bet a great, great deal of money that he would recommend it. Chorus was (is) a major part of the sound of post punk and shoegaze / dreampop bass lines. I know for a fact that Hooky used an EHX chorus pedal on Love Will Tear Us Apart, for example.
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If Hooky does it, it must be great 
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He’s an icon for sure, but this all stemmed from Paul’s cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart, which is why I thought that bit was relevant.
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IMO chorus is the best bass effect
Not just because hooky. Run chorus into fuzz and play.
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How funky can three notes be? Let INXS show you!
INXS - Suicide Blond
Ibanez EHB1000S - Ampero One - GarageBand
Comments welcome!
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Oh, how cool. Love that song. There are only 3 notes? This needs to be on my ‘to learn’ list.
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Very well done sunDOG! Nice simple three note bass line.
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That was great! I think my next bass will be a G&L Kiloton. Sounded really good.
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very nice!
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Nice job brother. I had fun doing my cover of this a few months back.
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@Paul_9207 great cover!! Really enjoyed that
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I’ve always liked this song and enjoyed Guy Berryman’s bass lines.
Coldplay - The Hardest Part
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