MIX CHALLENGE - MC094 October 2023 - Winners announced

[45Garage]

Wow! How exciting! I am very honored. For plugin I’d like to select the NUGEN liscense. Thanks @BenjiRage for providing such a fun track to mix and thank you @Mister Fox for providing us with this community and the opportunity to participate in these contests. I’ve been having a great time with these.

[m_tree]

What a sudden result! Considering my spontaneous participation in the last few days of round 1.

I'd like to select the IK Multimedia T-RackS Tape Machine Collection.

Big thanks to @BenjiRage for this perfect organization. Certainly a lot of work.
And of course thanks to @Mister Fox for this continuous opportunity and for bringing some of the artists on the planet together for these challenges.

[Christoph_K]

Thanks @BenjiRage for your efforts and exceptionally quick processing of this challenge.

Congrats to the winners!

I’ll get in touch with @Mister Fox regarding the plugin. Cheers!

[fercobm]

Congrats to the winners!!!! Thanks to @BenjiRage and @Mister Fox for this Challenge!

[JeroenZuiderwijk]

Congratulations!!! Everybody did a great job. I've listened to the mixes and I understand how hard it was to pick a top 3. Thank you Ben for this opportunity and keeping the mix-challenge going.

Cheers,

Jeroen

[gonzacarmele]

Hi there, congrats to the winners and to all that have participated!

[Pavel Nebesky]

Congratulations to the winners!!!
Big thanks to @BenjiRage and @Mister Fox for giving us the opportunity to mix this great song.

Cheers, Pavel.

[againstpower]

First of all, a big thanks to @Mister Fox for the great work done and for giving us the opportunity to learn how to mix...by mixing. Moreover, another thanks and many compliments to @BenjiRage both for chance to mix this great song and for the reviewing and commenting on all songs submitted.

So, based on the comment received, I decided to improve the mix regardless of the challenge.

@BenjiRage
Kick is pretty good but the snare has too much bottom mic in the mix and sounds thin as a result. The cymbals could also be a bit louder. Guitars are a little bit dark, bass guitar has a good presence and level though. Vocals are somewhat undercompressed on the whole, it feels like a lot of the diction of the lyrics is lost behind the instruments despite the main body words being audible. Also, more synth please!

Here my new version:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15brkCf ... share_link


Snare/Cymbals:
In fact, the signal level of the top and bottom snare drums were similar, aiming for a thin and bright sound. I wanted to try something different, but it doesn't work: the song loses its energy.
In addition to raising the top snare signal level, I tweaked the EQ, raised the compressor threshold, and lowered the ratio. As a result I modified the EQ of OH shells and OH room slightly. Also I made the cymbals stronger.

Guitars:
I made them less dark, acting on the equalization of the individual guitar buses and on the type of saturation on the master guitar bus (on Black Box; flat instead of high, more "pentode" less "triode" and "alt tube" on). Again, I modified the equalization of stereo delay send by opening the high pass filter downwards, panning the return of the delay effect completely left and right and increasing the delay feedback.

Synths:
I changed my approach, using a different type of saturation for the two synths, modifying both the equalization of the effect send (pingpong delay and long reverb) and of the synths bus and finally slightly increasing the volume of the master synths bus.

Voice:
I changed the type of compressor used in the vocal bus channel strip, compressed it more by both lowering the threshold and increasing the ratio, changing the type of saturation and increasing it a little. I reduced the compressor release during the verses.

Finally, I increased the reverb a little for all instruments including vocals and backing vocals.

That's all, anyone who would like to comment on the new result is welcome. I hope there are feedbacks, from @BenjiRage it would be great

Ah, I forgot! Congrats to @45Garage , beyond the victory, the piece sounds great. I really liked your work.

[1ktone]

Congrats to the winners. Nice job @45Garage I listened back to this after giving it a few weeks and it sounds great.

Thanks again @BenjiRage for your honest/open feedback and to @Mister Fox


@againstpower I was thinking of doing a reprise mix as well. I tried a little, but I just found myself going further into a hole and so abruptly stopped that process. That guitar delay thingy you’ve put in there got me a little by surprise. My personal feeling is that I would make the core guitar parts more prominent and drop the delay to the background a bit, it might be an interesting effect in that way. I just felt that it washed the original guitar parts out a bit too much. I also felt that the guitars are sitting back a little too much in the mix. It’s a tricky balance with all those guitar parts and not wanting to wash out everything. You have the lead vocal up nice and clear and maybe the backing vocals could come up a little more around him to support in the chorus. The last shout by Johnny gets kind of lost in the noise a bit. I think you’ve got the snare sounding pretty good. I hope what I’ve said is helpful for you.

Personally, I found that the guitars were the trickiest part of this mix to get sitting right. They take up a lot of frequency space. I’m also wondering about the phase correctness of the Tom1 guitar in the original recording. I remember when I first listened to the Tom1 track in my headphones it went really, really wide and I’ve never felt confident that the phase isn’t completely stupid. All I’ve wanted to do is bring him up into the mix and he just doesn’t want to sit in the sweet spot without a serious amount of manipulation. It could be just me, but I have always felt from the start that those guitars should be sitting prominently in more of a pure form kind of like Blink 182 or something like that. I could just not quite get them to sit that way without losing everything else which makes me go back and question the phase relationship of the parts.

[1ktone]

@againstpower this is where I got to revisiting the mix.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/trsfdd5d ... nvtno&dl=0

Figured I’d give you where I’m at with it. Be aware I’ve been playing with Mastering Assistant In Logic Pro so the LUFS are a little louder (13LUFS), but it will give you an idea of where I’ve been heading with it as a work in progress. Any comments on this mix would be appreciated. It tends to sound OK in the phones and then I get in the car and it hasn’t been sounding as good there and i don’t know why so I kind of put it away and figured I’d just move on.