Expectation // 5 Year Mix Comparison

A super exciting thing—the bestie Chiisana and I have finally released our duet of Girl's Day's iconic song Expectation!!! Although we recorded it in 2014, many plans fell through throughout these years and at long last, expectations have become reality....haha get it.......thanks I'm here all the time

We're very privileged to have aeror404's hot, leggy art and Nobelz' amazing animation 💗

Since there have been multiple "finished" versions of this mix that span across 5 years—evolving with my growth in mixing skill/judgment—I was interested in comparing them and seeing exactly how my style of mixing and mastering changed!
Sad that YouTube was not very kind to the mix though so please listen at the link below:

[left to right is low to high frequencies]

Green :: Expectation 2015 ver. [Link]

Purple :: Expectation 2017 ver. [Link]

Blue :: Expectation 2019 ver. [Link]

Since this is electropop, I like to emphasize the beat a lot—and to 2015 me, that meant "the more low frequencies the better. LOL NOPE, it sounds muddy as heck!!! The effects were pretty cool, vocals are surprisingly fairly even but get drowned out by the instrumental, and oh god the whole thing is overly compressed.

My biggest leap in mixing style happened between 2015 and 2017, which was when I started to somewhat grasp how crucial mastering is and which frequencies make a mix pop out. Also in this time, Fome and I discussed mixing a lot and being able to watch him do his magic inspired me a ton!

So in 2017, I backed off on the low 300-and-below frequencies, left the mid freqs the same (why??), and went stronger on the mid-high and high frequencies, from 3k to 12k Hz. That and the fact that I made the vocals louder gave them a lot more clarity. ^^ I also made much better use of more of the modules in the mastering plugin iZotope Ozone. In 2015, I only [poorly] used the loudness maximizer and multiband dynamics—but also utilizing the harmonic exciter, stereo imaging, and post EQ made a huge difference in producing a significantly more polished-sounding mix! (I should probably learn more about mastering outside of Ozone though asdfljds)

If anyone's curious what effects were used, there's a lot of WAVES' CLA Vocals and VComp Stereo and Adobe Audition's built-in Flanger, Phaser, and Convolution Reverb.
For the most part, I just adjusted settings on effects I already had in place, however in 2017 I did add C6 Stereo (plugin by WAVES) on the vocal bus—it's a multiband compressor that somehow just magically makes things sound a little yummier and cleaner. :'D

Upon revisiting my 2017 mix this year, my biggest issues with it were that mid frequencies were too strong and the bassy beat emphasis I was trying to go for was...messy. Each beat had a 'thump' but not a decisive 'click' that made it a satisfying hit, if that makes sense? So I reduced the overall low frequencies but tried to give it that little emphasis in the right place.

iZotope Ozone: Harmonic Exciter 2017 vs 2019 

One thing I did was increase the use of iZotope Ozone's Harmonic Exciter (these are the settings for spatial mid only)—and you can see that I shortened the band for low freqs so that it would end at 165 Hz instead of going all the way up to 308 Hz. Additionally gave the low freqs some more width to make them feel more dynamic; here are my 2019 stereo imaging settings:

iZotope Ozone: Stereo Imaging 2019

For the vocals, two areas in frequencies that I boosted this year were around 3k and 11k Hz, which adds some more crispy presence to the vocals—but comes with the consequence of annoying sssssibilance. Rather than use a de-esser, I actually prefer to manually go into Audition's frequency spectrogram editor and target the exact areas that are whistle-sounding little jerks lolol. However it's not quite reflected on the frequency graph up top because I started finding the master too piercing-headache-sounding and basically reduced everything above 4k Hz. Also I did a lot of reducing of the mid frequencies around 500 to 900 Hz, because for some reason I seem to hate them . . . shrugs

Changes to the post EQ! (Orange line is spatial mid aka center channel, blue line for spatial sides.)

iZotope Ozone: Post Equalizer 2017

iZotope Ozone: Post Equalizer 2019

TL;DR: The older I become, the more hearing loss I have, and the more whipped I become for high frequencies LOL.

Obviously there's still TONS AND TONS AND TONS for me to learn, so I hope I can continue to make leaps in the upcoming years!! Maybe one day I'll remaster Expectation again and get to add an updated comparison to this post?