After a while here you get to know who consistently enter good sounding mixes and you are on that list for me.scottfitz wrote: ↑Tue Apr 23, 2024 02:35 CESTThanks very much malene, I notice that you didn't submit an entry for this challenge, but I hope that you have given it a go because it's an ideal project for learning mixing as we all are here.
Listening back to my mix which I had to do in a rush due to other commitments, I would say the bass is too high, not way off, but just to the point where the other sounds are a little bit engulfed into it. This would be hard to detect when listening on a laptop
The weird thing to say about this one if you like my mix is that I really didn't do that much at all and I think this perhaps a key realisation. The easiest way to get a bad mix is to do lots of things, if you have like 6 plugins on every channel, it's probably going to sound awful. Sure, there's great mixers out there who can do incredible things with lots of plugins used to create something innovative and new, but it needs to be noted that these kinds of people would have got to that level because to them it was too easy to do a normal mix - to do what we are doing here. They did a normal mix like the first time they ever tried and then they became advanced overnight and began to explore amazing things. For us mere mortals, we need to concentrate on learning the basic things and then progress later. The reason less is more in mixing is that every recorded piece of audio is a perfect thing in a way, the frequencies of a persons voice for example, if it's well enough recorded it will be a beautifully balanced sound just as it is. We can easily destroy it by making a 3dB cut almost anywhere. We can easily destroy it by compressing it by much more than 5dB or with bad release time. Because it's so easy to make something worse and hard to make it better, the rule I have is I must always be sure something is better and not convinced into it by some bias of mine. Unfortunately this means that you have to spend your life gain matching everything. If on every step you take you can make something a tiny bit better then the sum of all the tiny bits becomes a nice mix. Sadly, just one bad mistake will destroy everything. So these days I think of it as a very delicate process in which we are cautious to take steps and require a lot of testing to 'prove' that a move was indeed good or called for.
And of course you didn't ask for any of this
For the sake of discussion.
In general I agree. You get a fader balance with this particular multi track and already it sounds pretty darn good. I don't hear a bunch of tracks with problems that need fixing. Quite the opposite! The provider knows the basic balance should be straightforward so the question is what do they hope to hear beyond that? Emulation of analogue gear? I doubt that's even on the list.
There were some pointers I thought. Technical things like the reverb and echos on some tracks of course but mainly the vocal which was for me impossible to get up front and personal (because that was not the intention?). Exaggerating a little, mixing this like a band in a small club wasn't going to work. Not to mention cello, violin, strings, brass, the choir, the low vocal, the wail - all very dramatic "big scene". Almost maybe 70's rock opera / 60's cinematic faux orchestra bigness was called for. Ha-ha nurse! The subject/lyrics/delivery of course also steered heavily - big, serious, positive, philosophical "we're all in this together, do the best you can to live positively"?
My intro is weak.
But it gets going and by the end the music seems to come out in constant waves of one thing after another. I am of course biased. My kick takes up too much energy though, it made the whole mix sound a bit quiet and there are of course other balance changes I'd make through the song (automation fine tuning).
). Good advice: I'm usually focused on the global sound not paying too much attention on this kind of details, and I should, for sure.
