MIX CHALLENGE - MC092 June 2023 - Winners announced

[zanox]

Hello everyone! Beautiful song and I have to say very well recorded, the bleed is really minimized, especially compared to the live shows in clubs that I usually mix.... About my mix I can say that I was very light, I "loaded" with plugins only the most important tracks, put some reverb, automation on the fiddle tracks. I did a bit of a pyramid mix, in the sense that I created subbuses (on which I did some processing) that then went into the final bus, on which I simply put an analog bank emulator to give it some warmth. I attach the screenshots from my DAW anyway.
The level is at -18LUFS with peak at -3dBFS TP.
I hope you enjoy it!
Giuliano

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

Screeshots:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JT9Hp4 ... sp=sharing

[DarlRarl]

Hello everyone, I've really enjoyed mixing this song, it's dynamic and fun with an aggressive touch. My mix focuses on keeping the bleed and making the most of it to avoid over-processing the song. I have used the bleed to my advantage by using it as a 'parallel compression'. This adds more density to the song organically. Regarding processes, I have used Melodyne to tune the choirs, in general subtractive Eq and a bit of soothe2 to correct harshness, transparent compression to correct excessive dynamics, a bit of additive Eq on some tracks to add color, colorful compression to awakening the different textures of each instrument and finally automations playing with the bleed to give the final touch. I have loved working with a cajun on drums, he brings a very interesting color to the drums.


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

[EmClrk]

Hello!

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

Thanks for providing a lively and dynamic track for us to have fun with this month. Full of energy and character.

With the artist's choice to record in one room for the most part to get a live feeling I tried to maintain that as well as I could while creating space and enhancing the dynamics and performances where appropriate. As a nod to the aesthetic choices in the live video and the themes of the song I aimed to create a darker sounding track with the backing vocals providing a slow descent from reality towards the end.

I created a buss with the drums and bass so that I could make use of the spill on the bass to bolster the drum sound and get the pulse of the drums to interact with the bass guitar to sit them together and create a solid foundation. For the cajun I initially went with more of a snare orientated sound leaning a bit too heavily on the snare wire track but on further listening to the artist's mix I decided to back off that approach a little and try to give a more subtle combination and more of a cajun feel. I tried to keep the cajun part prominent to drive the song forward. For the kick I combined the tracks to get a warm punch with a gentle knock to sit tightly with the bass. Tried to cut a little bit in the kick around 120-160hz to make a pocket for the bass notes in this region to cut through a little better on smaller speakers.
To add some extra bite for the cajun and kick I made a parallel compression track focused on lows and high mids and automated this in and out to enhance the performance.

I combined the other instruments into a separate buss and panned them to recreate the image on the artist's mix but with some extra widening. I wanted the accordion to growl in the middle and combine well with the fiddle A part when it arrived. I decided to sidechain the kick to the accordion to get a subtle ducking and reinforce the pulse. The banjo and fiddle B parts are intended to take the spotlight when their performances are at their most compelling. I created a parallel send for both the banjo and fiddle which was compressed and sent to the larger of my reverb sends to give them some contrast to the other instruments. The guitar part had some troublesome cymbal bleed for me at times but once I'd settled it well in the mix it wasnt as troublesome as I'd made it out to be. I tried to use the guitar to create a driving rhythm and to support the other parts rather than to stand out.

I felt that the performance of all of the vocal parts was something to be celebrated in this track so I tried to take a light approach with compression. I used clip gain to get a first pass of the dynamics before I applied some high ratio selective compression to tame some of the peaks and then a low ratio slower compression just ticking around 3db. I brought Magnus' tracks to the fore with a bit of brigthness via true 252 and a parallel compression track with through true dynamics with a healthy bit of compression and the output driven into distortion then folded in with automation to bolster the performance. I added some width using a microshift send too, I also ended up sending some of the lead instruments through this. I treated the other two main vocal parts as a wider pair and took a bit of high and low ends out to move then back from Magnus' parts. They were sent to another parallel distortion and compression track with the backing vocals that was adding a warmer tone and sent to a large reverb. With each entrance of Angel and Marianne's parts they become a little wider and the choral backing vocals become more prominent towards the end which I thought added a sort of dark presence sucking in the pleading lead vocal shouts in the end section.

I used 3 reverb sends. One was used to get the vocals to glue together with the instruments to counteract the fact they were recorded separately. This was a fairly short ambience with around a 12ms predelay with some low and high pass to take the edges off and get an appropriate room feel. I also created a larger space with a longer predelay around 120ms and a 1.34s decay. This reverb was mainly to give some sustain to the vocals and lead instrument parts and all sends were automated to get the right levels in each section. Lastly I created another short reverb that flipped the pan of the input tracks to create some balance/width with the guitar, banjo and wide vocal tracks. I also used two different delays panned hard right and left but mixed in very sparingly for the vocals and lead parts.

For the master buss I added compression and colour with some mid/side tape distortion to get some more interaction between the vocals and instruments and add some grit. From listening to the artist's reference and a few other tracks I made some eq decisions with True 252 and then some tidying up cuts for sub rumble and mono-ing the lows using ReEq.

Reaper tells me its 1.1 peak with 16.1 lufs so loudness rules should have been adhered to.

Cheers!

[unclesnuggles]

Hello everyone
beautiful dynamic and catchy song, a pleasure to mix! congratulations to the musicians and the engineer for the sound recording!
mix ITB / Cubase 10.5 / focal CMS40

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vu9rU4 ... sp=sharing

good listening

[Havol]

Hello everyone !
Really nice song to play with this month...but not so simple to mix

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZI-9vG ... sp=sharing

Vision
My approach was to keep this roomy ambience when adding some punch

Drums
As it is mainly samples, it was pretty simple to mix...so nothing fancy here.
EQ > Comp > Exciter > Limiter

Cajun
Here, I choose to pan one track in the middle, one left, one right to give more space for the percs.
EQ (Lowcut at 200Hz) > Comp > Exciter > Limiter

Bass
I used the "Royer track" for the Highs and the U47 for the lows

• Highs : Expander (to push back the bleed as much as I can) > EQ (Lowcut at 100Hz) > Comp > Heavy distortion > Limiter

• Lows : EQ (Highcut at 250Hz) > Bass enhancement > Comp > Limiter

Guitars
EQ (Lowcut at 170Hz, cut at 370Hz) > Comp > Fresh air > Stereo enhancement for the 3k-10kHz > Limiter

Banjo
I had a lot of troubles here to give this banjo the place it deserve. I made it brighter and then I did a lot of automations for volume and panning.
I hope that does the work.

Accordion/Fiddle
Added high end with the Aphex exciter and some M/S treatment to accentuate the sides.

Vocals
Lots of treatments here
Gate > EQ > 2x Comp > De-esser > Tube saturation > Limiter and a send for a parallel compression.

Reverb
All the tracks are sends to the same aux (except drums) for the room treatment.

Master
Just an SSL comp and an Pultec style EQ

I hope you will like it !

Good luck everyone !
Havol

[O'MIX]

Hello,
Thank you for this new opportunity to mix, and thank you to the supplier of the track for the original concept but which is great for the interactivity between the musicians and to make a good catchy track, the quality of the recordings is good and varied, many different microphones so the phase to be checked to have maximum impact on each instrument then I cleaned up the bass, banjo, vocals and acoustic guitar tracks using "Depaudio Ripix" to obtain a cleaner sound without the other instruments coming back into the microphones.

I mainly used for this:

Phase problem between microphones: Melda MautoAlign
Clean EQ per track: PA Kishhof- EQ (linear phase mode + dynamic eq)
Color equalizer: Pulsar audio 8200
Reverb: Gemini BM7, Melda turboverb
Saturation: Pulsar Modular P42
Vocals: Antares EQ+ Vocal Comp, AA Straw comp
To make room: Wavefactory Trackspacer
Compressors: AA Sunray, AA Olive, AA Strauw, Antares, SSL
Mix Bus: AA Straw pre, Pulsar Modular Sweetspot eq, Tone project Basslane Pro, Tone Projects Unisum, AA OCEAN, AA ASH, SSL stereo image.

24bit - 48khz,
Integrated loudness (LUFS - BS.1770) -18.06 (ITU)
Max. TPL (actual peak level - BS.1770) 2.47
DR (PMF dynamic range) 13.43
RMS -17.51

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10xGtmv ... sp=sharing

Good listening to all
Patrick

[Ozgen Sabuncu]

Hi Good Luck to everyone!
Groups summed with neve 8816 summing mixer.

Cajun: Balanced as a group and ssl channel strip on
Kick: ssl channel strip
snare: ssl channel strip
kick snare paralell: Omnipressor
Drum bus: Hornet tape
banjo: ssl channel strip
Guitar: ssl channel strip
Vox:
Main vox: ssl channel strip and omnipressor
mainvox paralel: locness v2
Back vox: İzotope nectar
accordion: Overloud Mod c
Bass: SSL channel strip and omnipressor
Mix buss: SSL comp, Satin tape, ik Dyna mu comp, dmg limitless for just catching peaks 1 or 2 db

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xufma1ahcwykw ... u.wav?dl=0

[zed999]

Hi!
Thanks for the opportunity to mix all these nicely recorded acoustic instruments.
Bleed is new to me and I nearly gave up because I was fighting it.
But I live on a boat and it's name is "Bluegrass" so I felt I should have another go and post it up whatever.

I didn't fight it this time, I tried to use it. Quite difficult to prevent the band that was recorded together being a bit mushy and distant so a lot of my efforts were trying to get them sounding closer rather than push the vocals and overdubs back to meet them. I wanted to feel I was a few feet away from a stomping good band with a pint of beer in my hand. I don't think I managed, but that was the direction for the mix. I tried to do as little processing as I could. Because of this I didn't worry if instruments jumped out here and there.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/i4tpp0b8 ... tk5jb6446v

I tried something I've never tried before, I gain staged all the tracks and bounced them through a tape sim, Taipei by London Acoustics to add some subtle harmonics and reduce the dynamic range just a little. That was the idea anyway...

Drums -
Balanced and to bus with some parallel compression and a tiny amount of short plate reverb.
Cut the highs on the kick but no other EQ.

Bass
Lows from one mic, mids from other, low passed and added side harmonics

Guitar, violins, banjos, accordian
Just high pass the multi-recorded ones, slight eq on fiddle1 and banjo1, no eq or other processing, send to bus.
Bus has high shelf and low cut + room reverb.

Vocals - Must comment what characterful voices you all have! Great timbre superb performances - brilliant.
BVox got some deep cuts and low passed + reverb
Angel/Marianne bussed together, low/high pass and a few db 4k boost + a little room reverb.
Marcus - such a presence! Wow, these vocals just suck up any processing and spit it out! A chain of compressors, high pass and 2 samall eq adjustments.

Mix bus
2dB soft limit to make the numbers work.

[EDIT] Oh dear, I'd been mixing something else to 48/16 and forgot to change the output for this. S1 defaults to the last used settings.

[Mange]

You are all very good at writing what you have done to the tracks. I don´t know what to add here, I have not done anything spectacular. 99% digital clean plugins. Used a modeled compressor on the bass, a tapesim and analog modeled compressors on the master. Some minor manual leveling on lead vocals, Some quiet phrases brought up, some esses that somehow wasnt detected by deesser.

Used two reverbs, one far and one close, Pretty much the same settings just different predelay. short for far reverb and long for close reverb.
Expose 2 reports -16.1LUFS int, -1.5dBTP

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xSRWQB ... drive_link

[AskAndy]

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Al0k-deoMtpH5DjHWNC ... A?e=F2yCg6
Fun piece. Challenging. I struggled to get any definition with the strings , with all the bleed everywhere .. but I tried to find their happy frequencies and cut/boost accordingly. I choose all my panning based on the video and just L C R . Vocals panned with their instrument with the exception of the end big chorus where everyone has a doppelganger paned opposite with an eq tweak. solid reverb on the Lvox, straight up the middle with the bottom( bass and perc).