MIX CHALLENGE - MC37 October 2017 - Winners announced

[VasDim]

Hi all,
this is my attempt to mix:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xems0mc6fb0p7 ... m.wav?dl=0
Good luck to all.
VasDim

[Mister Fox]

A friendly reminder:
24 hours left to submit your mix



WARNING:
I'm tightening the thumb screws. Each mix that is submitted after the deadline this month, will be automatically discarded for Round 2. No more last-minute sneak in's. So please use the Global Countdown page and the world clock on the Board Index to see if you still have enough time left.

[HerbFelho]

Hey everybody, glad to be back after 2 month of inactivity.

Thanks for the tracks formfish, it´s been a pleasure to mix them, although it turned out to be a bit trickier than one would suspect from first listen. The original mix is quite strong already in my opinion and helped to decide where the journey should go. Didn´t want to change the feel too much, just enhance things a bit in terms of clarity and separation but still feel more glued together on the other hand.

The lead vocals seemed the biggest point here, nice upfront on the original mix but feels disconnected to the mix, so I tried to address that and find the right balance here.

I decided to do only minor editing work, no vocal tuning, only a bit timing correction on the guitar solo and some melodyne work on the bass track. Some Bass notes have been picked real hard I felt, which led to higher pitched notes in many places and also to a bit clipping. Tuning helped to get a more defined and tight bass sound I hope.

Basically I put a lot of time in EQ separation of the tracks since many of them occupied the same frequency range. On the other hand, since there are no drums there certainly is some room to play with things like transient designers to make some of the tracks more “punchy” to compensate for that and bring things forward.

Would be too much to go into detail here but if anyone´s interested I´d be glad to help.

I use Presonus Studio One Pro, some of my fave plugins are:
- Slate´s Everything bundle
- lots of Waves Stuff
- Fab Filter´s ProQ2 and ProL
- SKNote´s DDD-Chorus or SoundBrigade
- Wavesfactory Trackspacer
- TDR Nova

Here´s the mixes, hope you like it:

WAV: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0phm ... TR5a2pLNjA
MP3: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0phm ... FRQeEtSZ2c

[Zsolt]

Hi!
Nice song, nice recording.
Here's my mix:
mp3: https://www.dropbox.com/s/g8kxoxlk7znw2 ... t.mp3?dl=0
wav: https://www.dropbox.com/s/70f8bb9qpqu0q ... t.wav?dl=0

Good luck to all!
Zsolt.

[OctopusOnFire]

Greetings everyone, here's my submission for this song.

Other than the usual eq and compression to clean and control dynamics, I used the Scheps 73 and clariphonic to add frequencies. The voice has the usual EQ, comp, de-esser, and it's sent to another track with microshift and some processing to widen it.
Ozone Imager is used on the acoustic guitar and piano to place them behind and widen them a bit.

On the 2 buss, I tried a free analog summer based on the TUBE-TECH SSA2B (https://bedroomproducersblog.com/2016/0 ... arly-free/) and other than that, there's a fairchild 670 emulation just kissing the needle and the Vertigo VSM-3 to apply some M/S distortion.


MP3: https://mega.nz/#!aYAhkaBI!giEn5N6QLks0 ... 9xG7WDLP6Q

WAV: https://mega.nz/#!rQY0jCyC!krQo6dLSCs9G ... FVNHVZCSc0


Good luck to all!

[kc23]

Hi!

So, here´s my mix. Last minute... again.

Haven´t done any editing or tuning. Just tried to blend things in.

Everything mixed ITB (in Sonar PLatinum) except for the bass, which was reamped mainly to get the "thump", and the lead voice, that was processed with a summit audio tla-50.

Almost all eq was done using Sonar´s channel eq, mostly for taking out resonances. Then used LimeEQ to sweeten a couple of things.

Some Lime compressor for the main acoustic guitar and the main buss.

One thing that was problematic for me was the peaks of the tambourine... had first to automate them and then soft-clip some of them.

Anyway, here are the links:

wav
https://www.dropbox.com/s/khnxuc46vqybs ... 3.wav?dl=1

mp3
https://www.dropbox.com/s/e8rhe603df5wk ... i.mp3?dl=1



Thanks!


(edited because of orthographic errors)
(edited url links for one-click download)

[Mister Fox]

It is the 22nd October 2017, 0:24am GMT+1/CEST - the first Mix Round has officially ended

If I didn't miscount, we have 25 participants this month! Seven participants more than last month (18).
There have been no submissions after the deadline. Though a couple of "warnings" due to rule violations.



Please check all if your links again, make them downloadable. Those that uploaded MP3s only, please take note: providing a FLAC (on low bandwidth)/WAV (on DSL and higher) file is mandatory now.

Please also update your posts with minimal documentation for others to learn from (see Rules & Guidelines).


Please watch this spot for the client feedback and Mix Round 2 participant announcement.
Good luck to all participants.



Also:
The Songwriting Competition 02 (SWC02) is still in full swing. The deadline is 24th October 2017, 11:59pm GMT+1/CEST

[fese]

Hello everybody!
First let me thank you for taking part and all the kind words regarding my song! Despite all the technical flaws (I so need people to do all the demanding stuff like recording and singing in pitch and time ) I am very fond of this one and it is nice to see it being appreciated!
Also credit goes to my collaborators, especially MikeJM for the lyrics (he was 18 when he wrote them!) which were there first and were so easy to put into a song, within a few minutes the song was 80% percent composed (the remaining 20% took a bit longer, though, as always); and Xavier and Christine for bass and vocals.

Now, after all the nice words, on to the judging! Lots of entries, lots of listening work, I hope I'll do all of you justice

One thing regarding your uploaded files: I've encountered a few problems which were (mildly) annoying and extra work

1. check whether your download link works! I've got a "not found" from B4lasers submission, so no file, no taking part, and that's actually a shame regarding the work you put in.
2. please provide links that i can download immediately, e.g. with dropbox links you can change the final bit of the URL from "dl=0" to "dl=1". One click, immediate download. No soundcloud links where I have to login to dl (pure luck that I haven't deleted my soundcloud account yet!)
3. put your exact forum user name in the file name! Not any other name or even worse, nothing. Makes it really hard to match the files to the user.

Listening and judging 24 mixes will take a lot of time and I want to concentrate on that and not on file management, so I decided to be a hard-ass and add file delivery as a (lower weighted) point to my evaluation matrix!

I have 24 valid submissions.

[fese]

One more thing for the people who delivered 48k SR files: be aware that I batch import all the files into a Cubase session and let it deal with any conversion necessary. I don't know the quality of the resampler in Cubase (it was supposed to be rather bad from what I remember) and whether I'd hear any difference to another converter, but if for whatever reason you feel the need to work in 48k (from a technical standpoint, I really cannot imagine that the slightly extended frequency range provides any benefit, especially regarding two SR conversions), you probably should deliver a file in the original SR converted with a tool you trust to be of good quality.

[kevin gobin]

Sorry Fese for providing soundcloud links. I think I am the only one here with Studio Saturn.

I remember soundcloud players were embedded (not anymore indeed) in the mix challenge forum, so I found them easy to listen to, and also no one ever complained since I joined this community, so we really could not know... (should we? )

I also found they were a good way to share the mix challenge's site link, which I always provided to help...


However I didn't know you had to log in to download , so I see your point, and I will switch to another cloud service.


Good luck for your evaluations!