MIX CHALLENGE - MC082 November 2021 - Winners announced

[AcademyCreations]

File: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jk4DKi ... sp=sharing

Tech Info:
True Peak: -3db
RMS: -16db
Max Crest Factor: 6.1

I have a very unique way of mixing stuff in FL Studio 20, i actually route most stuff which has no bass that being all the high and mid elements into one mixer channel (which is then routed to about 80 busses (with my secret sauce applied on it) and then the drums (kick has its own bus, hats have their own bus) So in this case i put the Kick styled drums into the kick mixer channel (which is also routed to 80 busses) and then the bass also has its own mixer chanel and is also routed to those 80 secret saucy busses, all in all it makes for a rather easy mixing experience and i dont have to do too much tweaking if the recording is bang on perfect, in this case i had to mess with volumes of the bass and kick drum as well as the mody and modx of the mid range and higher frequency elements to get a good balance stereo wise (as its all in mono), and then use my go to plugin Maximus to shave off the mids and lows of the bass and also the mids and highs of the mid and high range (vox, flute etc); to then get a more "smooth" sound.

And thats it, this is the result i got.

[beg]

Hi, the song is really cool i love it

True peak: 1.8 lufs: 16.8

Me too i use flstudio, i mostly use buss, flstudio stock eq, an ssl buss comp and raum for the reverb

The tracks was a bit muddy for me so i remove some low mid/mid and boost a little bit of high end on all busses with the eq, and compress a little bit (all the busses too)

Send them to differents size reverb (raum) for the ambiance. On the master i put an eq just to boost a little bit of high end and remove some mid and hybrid v3 for some stereo processing.

That it i didn't do a lot of thing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B4S4D6 ... sp=sharing

[EchoOread]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1si83Nw ... sp=sharing


Hello All. Great song to mix. Thank you for letting us mix your song. I remember listening to this type of music somewhere and my impression was how big the space. I don't remember the song name, so I mixed it based solely on memory and added some of my own takes on it when I ran into a brick wall. Hope you like it. Thanks.

Vision: I thought the mix should be wide and deep befitting its epic feel. The guitars and drums are the rhythm keepers. I tried to keep the drums powerful and deep and steady while the guitars would fill up the mid to top end and cut thru. Vocals should be laid back and lots of delays for space. The flute is the icing on the cake.


The following are things I did to achieve my vision.

Drums: Boost low end, cut lo mid, paralleled. Gated, compressed to control dynamics.

Bass: HP 41Hz, compressed, gated, compressed

Guitar: HP 82Hz, cut lo-mid, paralleled HP to 500Hz. Gated, compressed, hard-panned

Vocal: HP 95Hz, cut lo-mid, compressed, delay, mid-delay, reverb

Flutes: LP to 1kHz, HP 97Hz, compressed, long delay, reverb

Good luck to all!

[AN/DI P&R]

Hey guys. Thank you very much for hosting this mix competition and to the artists and producer for providing the song.

LUFS: -20.1 integrated (ITU-R BS.1770-4) Peak: (YouLean) -4.3
So please, turn it up when listening! I use a level of MAX 83dBA RMS (A) on the decibel meter FYI

Link for my mix: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V-RS1T ... sp=sharing

Here’s also a link to the full notes that I took during the process. I’ll summarise here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

All tracks followed the guidelines contained for the competition (only editing and processing, no production eg samples)
This took up around 19 hours of work, spread out over a week and a half.
This song’s parts were recorded relatively well, with only a handful of minor fixes (clicks and hum mostly ,tiny fades in/out for cleaning up) and each track received standard processing of EQ and compressions as well as reverb sends.
1st section(prelude): I wanted this to feel more intimate, closed in, a bit delicate and cold. Almost like a dreamlike state too.
Into the main song: I wanted this feel warmer and a bit more open. Like an outdoorsy feel, out in the sunshine, out in the town. This has different reverb on the instrument section (long predelay, like early reflections you’d hear out in nature, the first section had a church delay with reflections to make it feel a bit more closed in)
I aimed for more natural, organic sounds. Basically, I leaned towards more realistic imaging, but with enough creative imaging to make the recorded piece feel more exciting.
The most exciting part for me in the song is the climax towards the end before the coda. The big drum accents were well recorded, and with some simple EQ and comp, + a large hall reverb send, they were able to sound massive!
Once again thanks to all involved including my fellow competitors, I wish you all the best.
Cheers!

[pabloAT]

Hi all,
Many thanks to the song provider for this interesting track to mix, and to Mr. Fox for taking care of this game.
Please find below my mix, and some comments on the procedure.
Best wishes to all participants,
Pablo

[Dropbox's link to MC082]

Submission:
DAW = Cubase 11.0.41
Integrated LUFS = -16.5
True Peak = -7.04 dB
File Format: WAV, 44.1kHz, 24bit

Preliminary work : cleaning-up, raw balance, panning/stereo spreading, Removing glitches, noises, etc. and grouping tracks. All tracks benefited from the N console emulation of the classic Neve VXS analog console (from Brainworx). For most tracks I’ve applied the HPF/LPF and gentle EQ from the console strip. A lot of automation at the end of the mixing processes.

Drums
For each kit, the compression was applied from the N console strip. Drum and percussion kits sent to busses with early reflections, saturation, and extra compression for glue.

Bass
Functional compression and an instance of the CLA-2A compressor to shine the sound. Send to buses with early reflection and a bit of distortion. For the bass bow I applied tape saturation.

Bouzouki / Latina (guitars)
Functional (Rcompressor) and upward compression (MV2) to bring the most of these beautiful instruments. I’ve also used the CLA-3A compressor to bright-out the original sound. Sends to busses with instances of early reflection and reverb.

Flutes
Functional compression to even the sound, then a vari-mu (TuCo) compressor for body and extra detail.

Lead Vocal
Functional and upward compression (MV2) to bring the most of the lead vocal. De-essing at the end of the chain. Send to buses with early reflection, vintage reverb, doubler, delay and tape saturation.

Choruses
Heavy deesering, then sent to buses with early reflection and vintage reverb.

Drone
Vari-mu (TuCo) compressor for body and vintage vibe.

Stems & Master busses
Different instrument groups were sent to 3 stems (“Rhythmic”, “Melodic”, and “Vox”), where I used instances of tape machine emulators. The stems were in turn sent to the master buss, where I applied saturation, compression, and a touch of bx_digital V3 for final low/high end frequency adjustments and wideness (very subtle).

[unclesnuggles]

Hello everyone. Thank you for this song. Mixing was not easy for me.

Mixing done on Cubase pro10.5 and FocalsCMS40.

First, I set the gainstaging of my tracks, did a corrective equalization and a pan at my convenience. I got a lot with mono and stereo reverbs. On the chorus groups I sent them in a mono reverb. I used the Tsar from Softube. For the lead vocals I used a classic compression with 2 style 1176 compressors followed by a La2a. I also did it on the main flute. The bass is treated with an 1176 I added a little chorus. Little processing on the mixing of this song, on the other hand a lot of automation. I colored some tracks with an equalizer from Softube Tubetech.
I also made a parallel compression in dualmono on certain groups, in particular the flute, vocals, guitars.

good listening to you!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qT7BO- ... sp=sharing

[Diz]

Hi everyone,

This is my first submission here. Really excited to take part. Thanks for the opportunity. It’s also my first time to try to mix this style of music. It’s an awesome song. It was super fun to attempt to mix.

For my mix, I aimed to keep it natural and warm sounding. For this I kept it pretty simple and used some vintage sounding plugins.

To start a I made a static mix. I took a bit of a top down approach, starting with spreading out vocals. I wanted to make it feel like the group was surrounding the lead vocalist. I went wide with low vocals. I think this added to the warmth a bit.

Then I followed the vocals by adjusting the instruments to where I felt was nice and let them be audible without too much EQ.

Having said that, I added some subtle EQ mostly for that warmth I was going. I used Pultecs and CLA-2A plugins for this (The compressors are barely working on most things).

Around this time I decided to change up a bit. Instead of going for a more dead center bass sound like in a rock song or something, I added some sample delay and stereo spread(both in Logic X) to spread the low and mids out a bit and layer it with the low vocals. I thought this would help with a more intimate yet big warm sound.

To help with that, I added a similar amount of reverb pretty much across the board. I used Waves TrueVerb-Medium Concert setting for this.

I think after this I did volume automations. Mostly I did manual vocal rides on groups of vocals and the lead vocal. I also did some on individual instruments and groups such as the bass group. I tried to make the rides subtle, just enough to push the instrument a little when needed.

I did minimal panning automation. The biggest panning I did was with the flute to move out of the way of the lead vocals and then more centered when there were no vocals.

I think the last thing was to add some reverb throws to the lead vocal here and there. I used Soundtoys Plate for the this.

Ah I mixed with Oxide tape, SSL Comp and a Pultec on a separate back bus that I ran everything to, and then that to the stereo out. This seemed to add some warmth and some darkness to the overall sound. On the stereo out I have a loudness meter.

I like where I got with it. I think it feels warm and dark at the same time. I could picture them in a meadow on a misty overcast day or something to that effect.

Thank you!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16O6fpt ... sp=sharing

[Grof]

Hi to everyone. I was following this page for some time and now decided to jump in. First of all, thanks to admin and the band for this challenge. A nice opportunity to test my gear and skill.

Here is my entry:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s1_YXv ... sp=sharing
Clean pro mix, no master bus processing, master fader at 0.
I used K-14 meter on RME Digicheck + pair of analog VU's calibrated for 18 dBu and keep RMS arround 0 VU.

Unusual and minimalistic approach from me. I have used only 2 plugins and 1 piece of outboard analog processor (Fabfilter Pro-Q3, Eventide Ultraverb, Manley SLAM).
All tracks get the similar treatment, but there were some differences. Only for drums I have used RSD ECC801S in preamp, rest is done with Telefunken's ECC801S.
Drums were cleaned with Pro-Q3 and dynamically processed with FET.
Bass is the only mono track. Small resonant boost with 12 dB/oct hpf on Pro-Q3 and ELOP with 100 Hz scf.
Instruments were cleaned with Pro-Q3, added some reverb and stereo with Ultraverb and taken care of dynamics with ELOP.
Vocals seems to be overprocessed. Usually for raw vocals I go with ELOP, but here FETs were better choice since there was no headroom left, but yet dynamics that need to be better controlled. Some panning, reverb... And that's it.
I was focused on listening and thinking how not to process and keep the neutrality and naturality, controlling the low end and stereo image...
Less is more!

Some tech info:
DAW: Cubase 10.5
Monitoring: Pure2/HK680/modded JMLab 706/AESPRIT 308 (2nd opinion B&W685/RB-03)

Thanks and good luck boys and girls!
Cheers, Grof!

[ChrisK99]

Hi all and hope you enjoy my first submission to this competition despite stalking for quite a while.
Considering the nature of the song I decided on a very light touch when it came to processing with only light compression and EQ only on a few instances to fix issues rather than change tone.
Having just activated a subscription to Plugin Alliance I almost exclusively used their plugins to try them out. I chose compressors for their transparency and gentle touch over colour and character, Elysia mpressor on the majority of the instruments and SPL Iron on voices. In virtually all instances I was using a ratio in the region of 1:2.5.
Where EQ was needed (drum and lead groups) I used the AMEK 200 as I found it both effective and subtle. I couldn't bear to let a channel labelled bass not go through a pultec EQ so I used Wave's version of those on the bass channels to get a familiar sound.
Most groups had an extra bit of compression to help blend the individual sources and a final stereo compressor across the mix bus.
I used Smooth Operator in sidechain mode so the vocals could carve some space into the flutes, which in turn carved some space into the drones.
For panning and sound staging I originally had each collection of parts in distinct places across the stereo field as I imagined them to be standing in groups but slowly pulled individual channels to places where I felt there were holes or imbalance throughout the piece. I was originally tempted to not add reverb as the piece invoked epic landscapes of fjords and hills. I eventually added some light ambience, I guess the singing might bounce off rocks or village huts. Last-minute I realised I had Fiedler Audio Stage in my subscription and replaced the reverb on the voices and flute with that, pushing the chorus and drones further back.
A few phrases towards the ends of the lead vocal segments were pushed up ever so slightly with volume envelopes to stop them fading behind the accompaniment.

I mixed in Reaper to K14 using bx_meter.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/alq7yeytlq2go ... 9.wav?dl=0

[KarlxVinten]

Hi All,

Thanks for the opportunity to mix this.
Here is my entry:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2v5g6qbep9y91 ... n.wav?dl=0