MIX CHALLENGE - MC085 April 2022 - Winners announced

[Christoph_K]

First thank you for getting me a R2!

Just a quick question before I continue working on the mix: I revisited the vocal tracks provided by Mr Fox with the higher formant and I noticed that there is not much of a difference between these and the dry Vox tracks. And I may speculate here, but this is for a reason: When you shift the formants up more than 50 cent (and even below that) the vocals start to sound very unnatural and unpleasing (because what is lost is lost). And by doing so you're still not even close to a 30 years younger sounding Tom like in the original mix. I just want to be specific here about the direction this is going. I could youse the original tracks, but you can't tune them because of the FX baked in.

So what are your preferences here?

Cheers, Chris

[JeroenZuiderwijk]

oops - i forgot to write down one comment for

067 - JeroenZuiderwijk (Wild Card):

the distortion on the outro synth sounds very digital. try to make it more analog and pleasing ;-)

Many thanks for the detailed and very specific comments!

[floodo]

Thank you very much for choosing me, being among the 15 is an important step forward for me, I did the mix without listening to the reference and to personal taste, I recognize that I have a weakness for strong bass, as a bassist I love the low end, it is something I have to correct in me, again thank you very much for choosing me, but I will choose not to participate in the second round, I feel that the jokers are a kind of stigma, and I recognize that my mistake in the rendering was something silly for not paying enough attention, Total thanks!

[dima510]

hi christoph,

thanks for your post - you are right: none of the options for the vocals is totally satisfying. i believe, at some point the "dry" tracks have been downsampled from 48 to 44 khz while keeping the BPM, which caused the formant-shift. mister fox then asked for 48 khz tracks, noticed the error, and came up with the "brighter formants" version, that was then included in the archive for download. so: my stems have efx, the dry version is formant shifted and the "brighter formants" option is one way to go, but not the only one:

you can try to "reverse-engineer" the error.
you can use the dry version and recover the formants with a plugin of your choice.
you can try to de-verb my original version and mix from there. tuning should not be necessary here.

personally, i would first try to re-up-sample (option 1). but i admit that i have not tried this myself.

i am afraid there is no "this is what you need to do" - answer :-(

all i can say is: try to make tom sound as natural as possible and compare it to the ref-mix - one way or the other... sorry!

cheers, dirk.

[dima510]

Thank you very much for choosing me, being among the 15 is an important step forward for me, I did the mix without listening to the reference and to personal taste, I recognize that I have a weakness for strong bass, as a bassist I love the low end, it is something I have to correct in me, again thank you very much for choosing me, but I will choose not to participate in the second round, I feel that the jokers are a kind of stigma, and I recognize that my mistake in the rendering was something silly for not paying enough attention, Total thanks!

sorry to hear you are not going to round 2. i don't think that a wild card is a "stigma" - it is just a reminder, that in a "real-world" situation, a customer expects a certain format and will ask you to provide it, even if your mix is nailing it 100%. the wild card is not a result of our evaluation - we would love to hear your progress in round 2!

cheers, dirk.

[andreybenassi]

Hi guys, I'm a bit busy to interact but I always check around here, I'm very happy to be part of those selected for Round 2, and congrats for who made it as well!
I hope my interpretation of the feedback was correct and the result was better.

Greetings to all and good luck!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/17tkj5M ... sp=sharing

[Franz]

Hi,

A simple reflection. I don't really understand the topic about the voices. Is a sound engineer going to spend half the time
of the mix "correcting" a voice because the singer is not always "right" in his intonation ?
In the past, the songs were "right" when it came to the mixing stage. But times are changing. Long live artificial intelligence and Autotune.
Soon no need for a singer.

Isn't life beautiful ?

Franz

[Eight8]

Thanks for choosing my mix for round 2 and for great feedback. I totally agree with the feedback given and I feel that all the changes improved the overall mix. Here are the changes I did:

Vocal: I used the Manipulator plugin and added 0.9 formant to match the original.
I also discovered that the FX-vocals in the choruses (which had 4 different versions) only one was really in sync with the dry lead vocals. Replacing this tightened up the choruses.
Synths: I created a parallell compression bus with Distressor and Decapitator and fed it with the arp synths after the choruses for more power. I also added a little shine to the brightest arp synth.
I raised the volume of the synth in the intro.
Piano: I moved to low-cut from 110hz to 70hz for more body.
Rototoms: I realised that my de-verb killed a lot of the punch and tone, so I took that away and added a little top as well.
Plus I did some other minor eq and automation changes.

Here it is:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/z3cnk6122j7hc ... 2.wav?dl=0

[JamesMusic]

Thanks for selecting me for round 2!

Here's a link to my updated mix - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-rxJVj ... sp=sharing

[MattP]

Thanks for the Round 2 opportunity!

Here's my R2 version:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zgjy3p8anuaok ... 2.wav?dl=0