MIX CHALLENGE - MC39 December 2017 - Winners announced

[Dwic]

Here is my submission for round 2.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QNpkd ... _PmiEc5rCV

This is my commentary on my mix...

TL;DR too bad... you guys asked for it.

First I want to thank everyone involved in allowing me the opportunity to be a part of this, both the song and the contest. But I do wish I could thank Mr. Roan personally for bringing such beauty into people's lives.

So the first thing I do is form a strategy. Usually the goal of a song is rocking, or punchy, or funky, etc. But with this song it's beauty. So try and refine and increase the beauty of the song, luckily between the artistry and the composition it was easy: just get out of the way of the song. The trick would be to control two things: dynamics and density. That is, the song goes from zero to sixty and back many times, density-wise. Just a voice and piano have to stand on their own then cut through strings and choirs and children, oh my.

So I started with the lead vocal – it is the core of the song, the emotional centre. I wanted to get them to shine on their own and build everything around it.

Technically, I mix top down so I actually started with setting a master buss compressor – very shallow, very low ratio, barely taking anything off. Just to make it “whole”.

Back to the vocal – edited out the breaths, they were just too prominent and I was trying to keep things sparse, it was gonna get pretty packed. Plus I wanted to put some parallel compression on it and the breaths would of spoiled that. So for the parallel compression I just duplicated the track – makes things easier later than busing or finding wet/dry plugins. I labeled one “guts” and the other one “glory”. Guts was my crushed channel – a tape saturator into a bit of a notch at 530 Hz into a compressor to really smack it and then a transient shaper to take down the attack a bit. On it's own it's too beefy, but I believe I had it mixed low compared to the “glory” track. Didn't have to do too much to glory – best not to muck with it frankly, I could only spoil it. A little bit of compression to stabilize it, an eq to take out some muck, that's it.

My trick was going to be my send effects: to make them as stealthy as possible. I'm a big fan of plate reverb – it is hyperreal because in making an attempt to model a artificial analog device that's trying to model a room it somehow fools the ear into giving a sound a stage rather than a effect. In the translation it becomes invisible, especially the Soundtoys Little Plate I had just got, quite fortunate. I made two reverb sends: one short (2/3 sec.), the other medium (3 sec.) with a predelay and a band pass to “move it back” a bit. A two-beat delay and a stereo slap finished the sends.

Back to the leads again – with my sends setting the stage the lead (now summed to a buss) get rev1 to place it on stage, and a bit of rev2 to soften it and spread it out. Another great thing about plate reverb, you can combine them quite naturally whereas room simulations (or even real rooms) when you combine them it's a little odd and disorienting, but with plate you don't get that. A bit of delay (I love two-beat delay, I'd put it on everything if I could get away with it) and some slap to make it wider.

This setup for the lead allowed me really move dynamically – I could change the ration of guts to glory using automation. With a boost to the guts on the choruses and the ahmens as well as a reversal of the ratio of the sends to the reverbs the lead gets bigger or smaller without losing focus or emotion. Making sure to wrench every bit of emotion out of the lead was the goal so it had to seem very naked, the effects had to be subtle.

Once I was happy with a starting point of the lead, my strategy was to get the main instruments, the melody and song structure, together. So I started with the piano – a little tube saturation, and some eq so it would sit with the vocal. I put some compression but more to bring out the attack of the piano. Next was getting the strings to play nice with piano and vocal – the ensemble was the only real “bass” track in the mix so I reinforced this with some sub bass resonance and some eq to pull out the voice frequency range. I put a dynamic eq on the bass end to give it even more punch, but only when it needed it. The strings were all excellently recorded – nice and clear, singing with lots of emotion. The staccato strings had really nice resin to support the rhythm so I just had to tweek that a little with a bit of eq and some more of that slow attack compression. The organ sat nicely with a bit of saturation and some phasing to widen it.

Once I had the main song instruments sitting well with the lead, I wanted to get the rhythm elements going, of which there were few - just the bells and the glock. Both got the slow attack compression treatment with the bells getting a little sub bass and a boost around 200 Hz.

The rest was all vocals: the kids, the choir. Didnt have to do much with the kids due to, once again, a very nice job of tracking them. Summed them to an alto and an soprano buss, with each group spread over stereo. The choir got summed to busses for alto, soprano1, soprano1x, soprano2, and tenor. Some of these busses had a bit of eq to get rid of some build up but mostly to clear room for the lead. The kids busses were fed to a master kid buss and same for the choir.

Mixing in sections, the beginning set the tone so I listen to a bunch of Christmas music to get a feel for it. The tough part was getting the bells to sit properly, still provide a stable “beat” but not jump at you. The verses were a case of focusing the vocals and getting the piano and strings to sit nicely. The rest of the song was basically trying to reign in everything – quite a wild ride. I'm a big fan of lush density so this song was a real treat to mix.

[FixInTheMix]

Hey, here it´s my submission for round 2

WAV: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1J9UfB ... YNDlQQXyNh
MP3: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Lxk6G ... AnWbHdzDko

Thank you Alan for the detailed feedback, I worked on all the points you mentioned:
- added a fade out to the organ during the intro
- I high passed the "delay" (which was actually only a long reverb with a long pre-delay) around 250hz to clean up the low end a bit more
- re-ajusted the choir parts during the second chorus, lowered the sopranos and raised the altos and tenor (finding a better balance was the most difficult part)
- added a fade out to the strings to match the decay of the piano

I also noticed you mentioned something about a strange cut on the lead vocals around 2:43 to other users, turns out my mix had that too (guess you missed it lol) it came with the raw audio, maybe an error during the analog to digital conversion

That´s it, good luck to the rest of the participants!

[VasDim]

Hi all,
this is my mix to Round2:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/j9io5yphwj0ml ... 2.wav?dl=0
Good luck to all.
VasDim

[Photonic]

Hi Alan,

Thank you so much for the feedback and for choosing me for the round 2. Here is the new version:

MP3: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7zu1qeh7ed9mg ... 2.mp3?dl=1
WAV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jqlj6rk7wqou3 ... 2.wav?dl=1

What I did in round 2:
- I found some words in the choir with some audible sibiliance, so I used a de-esser for the choir too.
- I reduces the choir in the second chorus about 1.5dB. As you metioned, just a bit, but lower.
- I found that spot in the vocal where it sounded like a drop. Interestingly I allready increased this spot in the first version, but not enough like it seems. now it should be ok.

About the reverb. It is not a plate and I do not use a delay. The reverb is a hall program from the Verberate by Acon Digital with 28ms pre-delay.

Good luck to everone in the second round!

[Dwic]

I noticed I forgot to mention the revisions I made for round 2. I kinda liked the abrupt drop of the organ in the intro, but I did take a bit of the curse off it. Alan you mentioned the presence of the choir and the volume of the lead - at the last minute before I submitted I decided the reverb wasn't sitting right so I cut the presence on the stereo buss a bit. After eliminating that cut, and doing a re-ride of the lead in the verses, I think the lead and the choir play much better together. Re-jigged a few edits that I wasn't satisfied with, and submitted.

[OctopusOnFire]

I'm sad that I couldn't get around to participate in round 2. Just started vacation the day after round 2 was announced, had a trip planned, see family and friends and all that stuff.
So, good luck to the rest, and thanks for the song, it was truly a joy to mix.

[Mister Fox]

It's the 15th January 2017, 1:25pm - the 2nd Mix Round has officially ended.

Sadly, not all participants sent in their edits (missing are: Jonas Lasse, MGMIX, OctopusOnFire). Please check your upload links again, and have an eye on this thread for the final results.



I'm now opening up the room (again) for Q&A's and giving each other feedback (which is highly encouraged)

[JonasLasse]

Ahh.. I waited for this thread to come back for days, now i missed it. Ough.. Okay, more time for my concert exams. Thanks for the feedback !

[Mister Fox]

Short update:
Reached out to the song provider for a status update. Will inform you ASAP

[alancraig]

Folks,

My sincere apologies for taking so long to respond. Have you ever signed up for something at a time when you had almost nothing on your plate, only to have way too much on you plate when it was due? That's what happened. Anyway, my comments are below. Great job everyone. I truly appreciate the opportunity to have all of you work on Quincy's song. I know that he would have been honored. So here goes:

Photonic

Listening now. Sounds great. Everything sounds very well balanced. There is still some kind of glitch around 2:43. It’s probably the way it was recorded. For a final mix, I would make sure and get rid of that. I’m listening closely. Other than the glitch or unnatural cross fade at 2:43, nothing else stands out negatively.

I’m not sure exactly how to phrase, but this is intended as a compliment. When I listen to your mix, I don’t feel like I’m listening to a mix. I just feel like I’m hearing a song. That should be the goal anyway. Excellent job. Very well done.

VasDim

Listening now. Sounding good. Well balanced. It sounds like the plosive on “peace” is better, however I can still hear it on “praise.” Plosives can be a pain to deal with. You may have heard this before, but something that really helps me is doing a cut right on the plosive and doing a fade on both sides of it. At least, that works well in Reaper.

I’m hearing some kind of unnatural cut or something around 2:43. My apologies for not catching this the first time. I mentioned this for Photonic, but not for you. So I wouldn’t dock any points (so to speak) for something I missed the first time.

No other real issues that I am hearing. Nice job.

Fixin’ The Mix

Listening now. Sounds really good. The delay sounds better to my ears. All the way through verses 3-4 and everything is sounding great. On verse 4, the word “way” kind of drops off. Looking through my initial comments, I guess I didn’t catch this the first time. If it were the final mix, I would just want this corrected, which should be really easy.

Chorus 2 sounds great. Really nice balance of instruments, lead, and backing vocals. Same with the bridge section. I’ll second what I said the first time about liking the ambiance when the vocals drop out at the end of the bridge. It also sounds like you faded out the strings at the end this time.

Nothing is distracting me. Other than the word “way” on verse 4, I really don’t have anything negative to say. Great job.

Devin Wickens

Listening now. Sounds great. I’m not sure what you did, but your bottom end is killer. I’m on the first chorus and no complaints up to this point. I can hear everything I want to hear. Dynamics are well controlled, throughout the song and from section to section. Looking at my original comments, it sounds like you took care of the words dropping off.

Listening to the bridge section, it feel like I’m hearing the performance live. Very nice and full.

Nothing distracting here. Excellent job.

Wizzo

Listening now. It sounds like you took care of the word “stars” getting louder. Same with “the night”. Great job correcting these issues. First chorus sounds great. There’s the same weird cut around 2:43 that I mentioned on Photonic’s mix. Sorry for missing this on yours the first time. Second chorus sounds great too.

Bridge is great. Nothing is distracting me on this. Well balanced. Nice job.

I was told that I needed to pick my top 3 favorites. Not exactly an easy job as these were all really good mixes. But since I had to pick 3, here they are in no particular order.

Photonic
Devin Wickens
Fixin' The Mix

All for now. Thanks again!