MIX CHALLENGE - MC098 June 2024 - Mix Round 1 in evaluation

[PonySho]

Having the track a organic music feel, my main focus was to make all the tracks sound coherent sounding, especially to make the various percussive samples sound like real drums....

Hey Piranha. Nice mix! Super clear.

[rvalle]

So nice to hear a mix that's not over compressed.

Thank you so much for your feedback, @PonySho ! Really appreciate it!

I chose not to use any compressors on the masterbus, precisely to maintain the more natural dynamics of the song. I remember that dynamics was a concern for the song provider and I also think that in this style of music there is no need to tighten up the sound too much or to have a high loudness value. The only thing I compressed quite a bit was backing vocals bus. I always do this for a a less difference on the several vocal takes, volumewise.

[BenjiRage]

1. I'm using a lot of parallel compression to not kill the dept in the mix.

2. The challenge with this song was the vocals. The already mentioned ''eee'' and some harshness.

To fix this I did 3 things:

1. Saturation on the vocal tracks and vocal busses
2. Notching out couple of freq that was annoying
3. Last but not least, I used de-essers to soften the ''eee'' sounds

Hi Steinar

Good mix, I like your vocals; I think the work you've done on them has paid off. I also like how you kept both lead takes in there at roughly the same volume - I went for similar approach as it sounds thicker and almost robot-like in places.

I think you've explained it in a previous thread, but I'm just curious when you say "dept" do you mean "depth" - as in the distance front to back?

Best regards,

Benji

[sthauge]

Good mix, I like your vocals; I think the work you've done on them has paid off. I also like how you kept both lead takes in there at roughly the same volume - I went for similar approach as it sounds thicker and almost robot-like in places.

I think you've explained it in a previous thread, but I'm just curious when you say "dept" do you mean "depth" - as in the distance front to back?

Best regards,

Benji

Hi Benji

Thank you for taking the time to listen and commenting and for nice words. You did a pretty good job on the vocals yourselves, no annoying ''eee'''.

Yes, I used both tracks, but I spread them a little bit apart. It would almost sound as one voice, but it becomes, sort of fuller and with a bit of 'air' in it. I don't know if that's a good description but can't find anything better ways to describe it.

Yepp, I tend to write 'dept', but it should of course be 'depth', so you are quite correct.

Your mix sound good, nice work. To try to give you some, hopefully valuable, feedback on what I think could be improved (that's the way we learn), I had to listen carefully to find something. It's only minor things, it's what I think, other might have other preference and you might know this already or disagree.

You have the guitars somewhat leaning to the left and the piano to the right. Because a guitar is more pronounced then mix feels 'heavier' on the left side. To avoid this, gain is one option, but I think it's better to brighten the piano, use a eq, compressor or transient designer to make it as pronounced as the guitars. This will probably balance the mix better.

You have the guitars and piano span over the vocals, meaning the piano track are panned left and right of the vocal. In this situation the vocal and eg. the piano will be fighting for space in the mix. We usually want the vocal bright and clear. To give the vocal the space needed, you can try this: send the two piano tracks via a bus and put an mid/side EQ on that bus. On the EQ reduse the mid by some dB in the freq range where the vocal needs to be 'alone' eg 2/2.5 kHz to 5kHz. If needed add some of the same freq on the side channels. This will make space for the vocal without losing the presence of the piano.

The kick could have more foundation, try to add some 70-80 Hz to it. To add power and heavy impact to the drums in general use two buses and make one of them a parallel compression bus. Set up the compressor to let the hit through and the use a high ratio to reduce the rest. Now you can use the parallel bus to fade in the hits until the drums are as heavy and powerful as you like.

I hope this comments are useful and I wish you a very good luck in the competition.

Cheers

Steinar

[BenjiRage]

Your mix sound good, nice work. To try to give you some, hopefully valuable, feedback on what I think could be improved (that's the way we learn), I had to listen carefully to find something. It's only minor things, it's what I think, other might have other preference and you might know this already or disagree.

You have the guitars somewhat leaning to the left and the piano to the right. Because a guitar is more pronounced then mix feels 'heavier' on the left side. To avoid this, gain is one option, but I think it's better to brighten the piano, use a eq, compressor or transient designer to make it as pronounced as the guitars. This will probably balance the mix better.

You have the guitars and piano span over the vocals, meaning the piano track are panned left and right of the vocal. In this situation the vocal and eg. the piano will be fighting for space in the mix. We usually want the vocal bright and clear. To give the vocal the space needed, you can try this: send the two piano tracks via a bus and put an mid/side EQ on that bus. On the EQ reduse the mid by some dB in the freq range where the vocal needs to be 'alone' eg 2/2.5 kHz to 5kHz. If needed add some of the same freq on the side channels. This will make space for the vocal without losing the presence of the piano.

The kick could have more foundation, try to add some 70-80 Hz to it. To add power and heavy impact to the drums in general use two buses and make one of them a parallel compression bus. Set up the compressor to let the hit through and the use a high ratio to reduce the rest. Now you can use the parallel bus to fade in the hits until the drums are as heavy and powerful as you like.

Hi Steinar,

Thank you for the mix feedback, i really appreciate you taking the time to have a listen and I agree with your all points about the guitar, piano and vocals - these are some great tips you've given me, which I will be trying if I make it to round 2!

With the Kick and the drums in general, I was cautious not to over inflate the low end as in my mind it wasn't appropriate for the folk genre. However, maybe I was too reserved and the drums are in fact a little quiet and underwhelming - something else to revise, once again many thanks!

All the best,

Benji

[elements]

Hi @sthauge ,
Nice mix. You are usually doing good things with your mixes.
I am curious as to how you find working with Mixbus 10 and Linux as your audio work station. I have been somewhat entrenched in Apple land for a few years, but I am not so enamoured with the company themselves and I like the independent nature of Linux. I know my way around the operating systems well, but my last attempt at audio on Linux wasn’t a super happy one. I think I had a few issues getting Bitwig to run properly without buffer over runs and such. I am very interested to hear about your viewpoint as I like Mixbus a lot and I have a Bitwig licence so as far as I can figure that is all the work station software I probably need at this stage. It’s all those extra plugins that I probably don’t need that seem to keep me tied to the commercial computer world.
Cheers, VJ

[sthauge]

Hi @sthauge ,
Nice mix. You are usually doing good things with your mixes.
I am curious as to how you find working with Mixbus 10 and Linux as your audio work station. I have been somewhat entrenched in Apple land for a few years, but I am not so enamoured with the company themselves and I like the independent nature of Linux. I know my way around the operating systems well, but my last attempt at audio on Linux wasn’t a super happy one. I think I had a few issues getting Bitwig to run properly without buffer over runs and such. I am very interested to hear about your viewpoint as I like Mixbus a lot and I have a Bitwig licence so as far as I can figure that is all the work station software I probably need at this stage. It’s all those extra plugins that I probably don’t need that seem to keep me tied to the commercial computer world.
Cheers, VJ

Hi VJ

Thank you for the nice comment on my work.

I'll give you some info on Mixbus and Linux as well as some input on what I think of them and why I use them. This is maybe a bit of topic for the competition, so I'll try to make it short.

About SSL/Harrison Mixbus:
1. My origin to mixing is as a FOH engineer, so I'm very happy with the predefined console style of mixing, complete channel strips and busses and the workflow that Mixbus introduce.
2. I'm a fan of free and open source software and Harrison use the open and free Ardour DAW as basis for their commercial Mixbus product. They do that in a very positive way by cooperate with the development team behind Ardour and by contribute new functionality back into Ardour. A lot of functions in Ardour today is made by Harrison and donated back.
3. Everything you need is included in the DAW, at least in Pro edition. I use some other plugins as well but you could use only Mixbus if you like.
5. Mixbus is available on windows, Mac AND Linux and that's a good thing. You can download full functional versions of the different Mixbus tiers(10, 10 Plus and 10 Pro) and test them as long as you like. They only gives a burst of noise now and then until you buy a licence if you want to use it.
6. Last, but not least, it sound better than other DAWs I tried. I don't know what ohidohi stuff their doing behind the scenes, but it makes a great sound.

So to Linux(I was an operating systems guy in my early career):
1. Apple and Linux is based on the same operating system heritage so they are both good at handling audio. Linux is able to handle heavy workload and scale very well. An example of this is the large stock exchanges in the world that have migrated from windows to Linux to run their heavy load transactions systems. Linux outperformed windows 20 to 1 in their time critical system on the same hardware. Real time processing capabilities is important in all audio systems.
2. There's a lot of free plugins available, some very high quality ones, like LSP(Linux Studio Plugins). Eg. I tend to always revert back to MVERB that is a simple and free plugin made for demonstration mainly. Many commercial plugin providers also have Linux versions available, but you do not find Waves or UAD among them.
3. Linux today is plug and play. It's easy for everyone to test. Download an Linux image file, copy it to a USB pen, boot from the pen, play around with the system. If you like it press 'install', if not, just restart your PC.
4. There's distributions that are already prepared for audio, with everything you need preinstalled, like Ubuntu Studio and KXstudio.
5. Most hardware drivers are preinstalled and every 'class compliant' audio interface will work out of the box.
I think I'll stop with more Linux info here

So to your problems with Bitwig on Linux:
1. Many use processors from Intel that have hypertreading. Hypertreading have no place in audio so you need to turn it off and only use the real cores in the processor. You WILL have XRUNs(crackeling) if hypertreading is on and the load is getting high(I guess that it's XRUNs you are talking about when you mentioned 'buffer over runs')
2. You need a 'low latency kernel' that are configured to deliver, yes, low latency. This is already in place in the distributions made for audio. For other there's just some click away in the distributions 'App store'.
3. Close all other apps an get of WiFi so it not interfering with you DAW.
4. There's some need to setup real time priority correctly, but that's also in place in the audio distributions.
5. You can use ALSA(Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) directly without going through sound servers, patchbays etc that will introduce extra latency and risk for XRUNs. Mixbus can connect directly to ALSA.

Well, hope this gives you some answers and hope this is ok to share this in the competition forum as it a bit of topic.

And by the way, your mix is good sounding, good luck in the competition.

Steinar

[kombainera]

A little add on from me to the previous post for Linux and Music production. Last month i am messing with ubuntu studio and not for the first time and every time i am telling my self that this time i will not go back to windows but ... So Ubuntu studio is using pipewire wich is like to have free talk back from the sound card. All audio can be route as u wish even every single input or output of a channel of the Daw ( only for Ardour for know as far as i know ) so doing stuff like audio from daw to obs is realy " Plug and Play" Latency is 0 to non. There are some good free plugins but at least i cant work with them only didnt find even single one good saturator for example. Its not big of a problem since 80 % of the windows vst plugins can be installed with wine and most of them work but today i hit a wall trying to mix song with only 30 tracks in Ardour .I was using 3 or so plugins on the master track and 1-2 plugins on the most of the tracks and at some point the gui start to sluggih very very badly to the point that i just cant work.The funny part was that the computer was not even on 50 % cpu ram on 20 % and audio was flauless - 0 X runs and still i cant work. So even i am big linux fan myself and can see a lot of benefits from using it its far away from ready for professional use if u ask me and that is very sad because there is a lot of potential. And one more funny mension related to the topic so " Neural amp modeler" wich is free and open source software as we all know is develeped mostly for win and mac in the same time there are milions even free plugins for this Systems. On linux there are 1 or 2 amp sims and neural modeler version is barely made and very very old... shame.

[elements]

@sthauge Hi Steinar, I appreciate your reply. It was using Mixbus in this challenge that reminded me of the enjoyment factor that can be had from playing with this DAW.
All the best for the comp.

[Mister Fox]

A quick status update regarding the Statistic Sheet:

⚠	Moderation Message from Mister Fox
	You might be wondering, "Where are the Statistic Sheets (post #128)? Shouldn't they be available by now?" The release of the Statistic Sheets are delayed due to various reasons. These include (but are not limited to) time constraints and behind-the-scenes communication regarding certain entries and their final status. The PDFs are fully layouted and ready to be published. However, I will not be able to write the usual follow-up report until later this evening. Thank you for your patience.

Please have an eye on this thread.