MIX CHALLENGE - MC091 April 2023 - Winners announced

[IbanezoO]

Here's my entry for this month:

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

This time I really tried to move fast with broad strokes. My basic approach:

drums: make it punchy (parallel compression on shells and drum bus) and reduce boxiness. the gated rack was a real pain to work with as the cymbal tails were horrible so I kept the toms quite low in the mix

bass: BOD pedal to add some grit and character, basic EQ and compression to keep the level

guitars: I tried to use DI only. All tracks got a JCM 800 simulation, lead guitar got extra delay and reverb

organ: basic EQ, LA2A and saturation to cut through

vocals: basic EQ, 1176 style compression, a little saturation and sends to a slap delay, a stereo delay and a plate reverb. for the bridge I used a bandpass effect and distortion

mixbus: smiley face EQ, Vari MU compression, tape saturation and clipping

Good luck everyone!

[zuboski91]

Hi,

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

Drums: Treated the kick and snare a lot with rbass, compression and distortion to get the tone. I added a room reverb to the room mic. The overheads were compressed. The buss had some compression and there were a few more parallel compression auxes.

Bass: Split it into two tracks. The low one has rbass and subsynth while the high one has a bassdude sim on it.

Guitars: I used the DIs and treated them with the SS11x. There isnt much going on in terms of s=effects. For the clean parts there's some reverb and chorus. For the distorted guitars there's delay. There's one heavily effected bit. That's just izotope trash with some impulse responses.

Vocals: Pretty simple again. Used distortion, compression, eq and dessing. There's also a tape emulation plugin on the buss. They're going through delays and reverbs. On the bridge section for the special effect I've used a spring reverb.

I automated things wherever it felt necessary. I've also used the glue on the mix buss.

[scottfitz]

Hi all,
had great fun with this one, but not so much time sadly. My main change was to try to create a wall of sound with the guitars, a bit like Husker Du. I achieved this using the fabfilter saturn plugin, 'stoner amp' preset. Once that was in place, I tried to tailor the rest of the sound to fit with that. I didn't do that much to the drums and bass, but definitely needed to gate out a lot of sound from kick and snare. On the vocal, I used oeksound soothe2 to try to tame some of the harshness, then send them to a slap delay and reverb.

Sorry but that's all the time I have to describe what I did, here's the link to the mix:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aT07Ch ... share_link

[Wohooo3000]

Hi all,
thanks for these tracks @JeroenZuiderwijk! It was fun to mix!
Which effect did you use to simulate the bass sound?

Here is my mix: https://1drv.ms/u/s!As0I9hEHG4zz9Q62uVl ... v?e=8ilS0g

Info about my mix

I did this mix with Cubase 12.

First I mixed the drums with stock plugins of Cubase. Later I gave it another try with the SSL 4000 G channelstrip from brainwork. I used HPF, Comp, Gate and EQ from this channel strip - and not to forget: the THD for saturation.

I also used the SSL 4000 G channelstrip and the AMEK 9099 channelstrip (also from brainworx) on guitar and drums bus.

I used the AMEK mainly for its high shelf EQ.

I reamped all guitar DI tracks with Amplitude 5.

All other plugins are Cubase stock plugins.

Good luck you all!

[Franz]

Excellent rock title. How could we resist it ?

Above all, it should be noted that we are strongly encouraged to allow ourselves to express ourselves completely
as opposed to seeking to imitate the original mix which has been a real blatant trend for the latest competitions to date.

Lots of work due to severe competition restrictions. Problems with the drum kit and a multitude of guitars
not always understandable. But hey, here we go...
From the outset, I chose the rock era of the 70s/80s which had a rather wide stereo orientation with all the excesses
that go with it and which made the "sound" recognizable among a thousand of a certain number of groups, at that time..

In fact I used two versions of this multitrack in Samplitude. A first version that included all tracks.
From there, I worked directly on the tracks with all the processes necessary to obtain a “satisfactory” sound.
Once this work was done, I exported the ready tracks to another version of Samplitude to (finally) perform the mixing.

An example: guitars.
I tried all sorts of things on these tracks in this case the amp simulations with Guitar Rig 5 and Vandal in Samplitude.
On DI tracks and even on tracks already treated !
I then selected the useful tracks (50% reduction of the original number of tracks) and therefore exported them in my new version.
Ditto for the drum tracks, which, once (vigorously processed) are therefore exported: I end up with a snare track, a kick track,
a toms track, an OH track and a room track.

Before we get to that, here are the treatments:

DRUMS
- snare: separate processing of the bottom track and the top track: Frontier to increase the level by 15 dB, multibandgate,
saturation, equalization, compression (chain of 3 compressors), and especially "Smasher" by D16 Group which brings an
incredible sound on the snare, Trax for the attack, then Tverb (reverb) for sticking the two tracks together, then doubling
the track obtained to make parallel compression. Note some manual corrections of the snare obtained to equalize the level
and the attack in certain places (for example the soft passage from 2'31 to 2'54).

-kick: Frontier to raise the level by 10 dB, noise gate, saturation (extreme), equalization (Impact), compression (Firepressor),
Trax and Equivocate from NewFlangled for the final equalization.

-OH: C4 for filtering, Ultramaximizer Wawes, TR5 VC670 compressor (IK)

-toms: problematic elements in the drum kit, difficult to control, gate for the floor tom, nothing for the gated rack (poorly done,
cut too fast) then the two tracks in Tverb to recover the sustain, then saturation, equalization, compression and Trax

-room: essential because it allows you to “recover the overall sound”: first switch to stereo with Expanse 3D, extreme saturation,
equalization, compression and Trax. Sharp cut below 200Hz and then parallel compression.

GUITARS: explained above and on the final bus: Firepressor + TR5 VC 670

BASS: two tracks, one with Artic, the other with Guitar Rig 5 (for the “live” side) then both mixed on a bus with
stereo Kramer HLS, I-LA compressor Babelson and TR5 comprexxor

ORGAN : equa

VOICE: vocal rider, Fx Vocal Channel (Samplitude), Auburn Panagement, Abbey Road Chambers, equalization, saturation,
TR VC 670 compressor

On the final bus: Ozone 9 to stay within the technical limits (-16,1 LUFS and - 5,07 True Peak)

All that remains is to listen to the final result.

We listen to it here:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AmTKE2 ... share_link
Cheers

Franz

[BenjiRage]

Ditto for the drum tracks, which, once (vigorously processed) are therefore exported: I end up with a snare track, a kick track,
a toms track, an OH track and a room track.

That's a decent mix you've made there, Franz!

But....I'm going to call it, you've used sample replacement on the drums!

[againstpower]

Hi all,

My intention was to create a big and good sound with the guitars. I have non used only three guitar track (number 05, 07, 04 ). With D.I. tracks I used gtrt
tool rack (02, 09 and 10 rhythm guitar tracks) and ignite emissary plus nadIR with the lead guitar. Lead guitar 11 and 12 has in insert TPA-1 for both and NRR-1 and The Anvil, respectively.
All the tracks were grouped with similar instrument, so I have a bus for the drum, guitars, voice towards a mixbus. I also used sub-busses to group guitars who played similar things, or for overhead, snare bottom/top, tom floor and toms. Drums and bass were fed into a bus and then into the mixbus.
First of all I did a proper gaing staging, a raw mix with the pan, levels and some automation. Then all the tracks were EQ and compressed.
For kick and snare I used a parallel compression and a little bit of reverb to the snare. On the snare sub-bus I used H-comp and LA3A compressors, on the kick just the first one. On Both the channel I put a noise gate.
ON the toms track I used tube compressor and DC13A on the floortom. ON the room track I used a heavy compression side chain with the snare, because it's sound not so good.
On the drum bus I used trash2 to add some tape saturation.
Bass: split for low and high, then compression side chain with kick and some saturation with blackbox.
Guitars: Sub bus guitar 09 and 10 I used Cla 3a and dpr (compressor), the others sslcomp for glue.
Vox: Voc1 some parallel compression with 4 different compressor: 1176, La-2a, rvox, Shadow hill
Voc 2: multi delay and dc1a3

short reverb for drums, medium with different predelay settings for guitars and voice, long reverb as ambient glue.
On the mixbus I used api-2500 as glue compression with no compression.


https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aaqpWw ... share_link

[Piranha]

Hi all!
This mix effort was focus especially on cleaning the drums from cymbals bleedings and fixing some groowing things in the guitar riffs, otherwhise the sounds where good and the playing likewise.
MASTER: Black Box set to bright and saturate the whole track (lowering the density a bit). Then some more saturation with MWaveShaper, a bit of eq shine and RBass armonics.
DRUMS: drums bus has Lindell 50 bus and Lindell SBC set with a really quick attack and release, then a bit of clipping.
Huge cuts at 170 and 250hz on kick, then some brightening. Snare had a bit of cleaning eq on tracks and then 1176 compression and saturation, to have a more controlled sound and longer tail. Some low mids cleaning on the toms and on the cymbals/room mics too. No compression on any drum track except for the snare. All the compressione comes from a parallel DBX-160 and Fairchild.
BASS: easy task, just a Sansamp from ToneX with a V-shaped eq setting.
GUITAR: there was a reamping of tracks 9, 10, 11 and 12 with bx_rockrack, Marshall emulation on the first two tracks and ENGL on the 11 and 12. Most of tracks work consistend on cleaning the low end and controlling hi-mids and highs.
ORGAN: Reamped with IK Multimedia Leslie and then some resonances where cleaned up.
VOCALS: eq shaping taming low mids and around 6khz. Stacked 2A-76 compression and some parallel distortion with Magma lil tube. Heavy filtering in the soft vocal part.
Then the usual reverbs and delays on instruments and vocals that needed a bit of space.

WAV

[Davias]

Hi, very interesting challenge again, with a cool song, I tried to inspire myself with the sound of Nirvana and Offspring and the likes.

I was very hard because of all the cleaning needed, that was a real challenge, I tried to make it punchy as usual, with focus on the drums, and I re-amped some guitars to give more grit.

I wish I had more time to polish it, but most of the magic happened during the last hours ^^

I used a Neve console to give some rock feel from the past beside the usual EQ, compression, stereo management etc....

here's the track : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZulqwF ... share_link

I wish a good luck to all participants !

[jeffssoloband]

Eek lost track of time... anyway, here's my mix: https://www.dropbox.com/s/d9qxylaw88om6 ... d.wav?dl=0

Did a beat map and tightened up the bass.

I was going for a vintage rush vibe, so I tried to recreate the "Fly by Night" guitar tone.

Vocals are compressed in series to try to even out the performance.

Lots of tape saturation throughout.

Hope I did the song justice.

Thanks for listening (and sorry for the limited explanation).

Jeff