MIX CHALLENGE - MC098 June 2024 - Winners announced

[zed999]

Anyone care to comment on dealing with the stick hit?
On many, perhaps the majority of the uploads I've listened to, it sounds very, very separate not just to the kit but to the entire track, like someone is in the room with me tapping on something.

In the end I pulled out mostly around 500 - 1K, boosted about 1.5db at 4.6K with a dynamic eq and put it through a blend of the logic distortion plugin. I find that the distortion plugin helps to round things out a little while giving it a little presence. Actually one of my favourite things to add on snares as well.
I wasn’t trying to emulate a kit as such….

I like that your guitar has body that seems absent on many of the mixes. I like your mix overall, nice job, stick sounds great... but a little too dominant for my taste. At this point I'm probably too focussed on that stick though!

[elements]

Anyone care to comment on dealing with the stick hit?
On many, perhaps the majority of the uploads I've listened to, it sounds very, very separate not just to the kit but to the entire track, like someone is in the room with me tapping on something.

In the end I pulled out mostly around 500 - 1K, boosted about 1.5db at 4.6K with a dynamic eq and put it through a blend of the logic distortion plugin. I find that the distortion plugin helps to round things out a little while giving it a little presence. Actually one of my favourite things to add on snares as well.
I wasn’t trying to emulate a kit as such….

I like that your guitar has body that seems absent on many of the mixes. I like your mix overall, nice job, stick sounds great... but a little too dominant for my taste. At this point I'm probably too focussed on that stick though!

Thanks for your feedback. I had the sticks further back in the mix for a while, but I felt they needed to be a little more prominent as I found they were emphasising the core rhythm and then I thought of them more like someone smacking a couple of rhythm sticks together and it made kind of sense to me then.
I was thinking of the drum set as more of something a giant robot baby was playing and not so much a straight out drum set. It gave me a little more freedom to place things in the mix at different levels.

I worked a bit on getting that guitar to sound right to me. Spent a lot of time messing around between mono and stereo and listening to it on iPhone headsets and the like. I delayed the second guitar track a little as well and played around with the panning.

That’s the problem when you start focusing in on something that intently. It’s really hard to reset the hearing and not hear the frequency that irritates you until you find a way to make peace with it.

I liked your mix. It has good depth to it and I like how you handled the backing vocals. They are nice and prominent. The ending was a nice touch. I don’t think there is any issue over where you placed that stick hit. I think it works in relationship to the drumkit as a whole and with the picture you’ve created.

[zed999]

@elements Thanks for your kind comments.
You need two brains to mix don't you? - one for detail that you must learn to switch off to use the overall picture / emotional reaction brain. The best mixers do some really odd things if you pull their mixes apart technically, I guess that's what sets them apart.

[Tony Black]

Anyone care to comment on dealing with the stick hit?
On many, perhaps the majority of the uploads I've listened to, it sounds very, very separate not just to the kit but to the entire track, like someone is in the room with me tapping on something.

It is simply too loud in the majority of the mixes.
You want to mix it lower than the snare, because otherwise there's no volume difference between a stick it and a snare hit, which is weird.
Stick hits are background sounds, not main sounds.

[Davias]

I went the "creative" way I guess, coming more from electro, any sound can have any level if it "fits" the vision of the mix. To me the song lacked a proper snare to have that boom boom tchack rhythmic feeling, so I did put the stick as prominent as I could, without, I hope, it being set too much appart from the rest. Interesting to read all your comments on the matter ^^

[Strange]

It is simply too loud in the majority of the mixes.

I agree, often it bothers me.

[White Punk OD]

I just had an idea about the stick balance issues.
We have a very sparse production, compared to major releases with 120something tracks.
Only one guitar, one piano, sparse drum arrangement sans overhead sound.
The consequence is that balance depends much more on the monitoring/listening device than usually.
I think we need to split (at least in our mental part of hearing) into bass, mid, treble, also for sounds like that stick.
(There are tools for the master chain to select frequency bands with sharp separation. Do we hear the stick in the bass band at all?)
The balance has to be right in all frequency bands each on its own. This means to focus on sound components that are secondary, that we rarely think about, especially when we are inexperienced beginners. How can we know the correct second-order balance? Experience will tell over years.
In a dense production, the stick sound may have zero low frequencies. Here, we might have to give it some lower bands to represent something in the mix, that would otherwise be empty space, and a glaring hole. So without that, we are tempted to put it too loud.
In short, my JBL smartphone ear plugs represent the stick too loud, but the Austrian Audio cans let it swim nicely in a much fuller sound.

[White Punk OD]

Just to entertain, here is the screen shot about the stick.
In the mix docu, I forgot to mention that I used the notorious ERS250 ambience mode (borrowed from the classic EMT 250), and funny enough, I made a ctrl-V error and inserted it twice, did not see it for some time, and then it sounded good, and I went for it.
Another detail is that I put it on a bus together with the snare, and then have a drum bus, on each node some effects that colorize the whole thing together, eg. a saturator at drum bus level.
I allowed it to be a strong element, but can offer to turn it down a dB.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y9JPax ... sp=sharing
"whatever works"

[zed999]

I just had an idea about the stick balance issues.
We have a very sparse production, compared to major releases with 120something tracks.
Only one guitar, one piano, sparse drum arrangement sans overhead sound.
The consequence is that balance depends much more on the monitoring/listening device than usually.
I think we need to split (at least in our mental part of hearing) into bass, mid, treble, also for sounds like that stick.
(There are tools for the master chain to select frequency bands with sharp separation. Do we hear the stick in the bass band at all?)
The balance has to be right in all frequency bands each on its own. This means to focus on sound components that are secondary, that we rarely think about, especially when we are inexperienced beginners. How can we know the correct second-order balance? Experience will tell over years.
In a dense production, the stick sound may have zero low frequencies. Here, we might have to give it some lower bands to represent something in the mix, that would otherwise be empty space, and a glaring hole. So without that, we are tempted to put it too loud.
In short, my JBL smartphone ear plugs represent the stick too loud, but the Austrian Audio cans let it swim nicely in a much fuller sound.

The most difficult thing to judge in headphones is the level of sharp transients but yes for me there was too much highs and boosting low mids rounded off the sound for this instrumentally sparse mix and listening via monitors from the next room at a volume where only the louder elements are heard if the mix is unbalanced (I do that making coffee in the kitchen). Even pros wander around listening.

For what my opinion is worth, yeah maybe your stick is a dB loud for my taste but nothing like what I was describing when I started this micro discussion.

[White Punk OD]

The most difficult thing to judge in headphones is the level of sharp transients but yes for me there was too much highs and boosting low mids rounded off the sound for this instrumentally sparse mix and listening via monitors from the next room at a volume where only the louder elements are heard if the mix is unbalanced (I do that making coffee in the kitchen). Even pros wander around listening.

You can also add some lab-pink-noise to the mixbus and turn down volume. The instrument that is too loud sticks out the same way.

Meanwhile I listened to your mix, just personal opinion,
overall balances are good and reasonable for this music,
guitar and choir vocals sound great, lead vocals very good work but might afford a bit more lows,
piano is a bit soft but not extremely missed here, sound is beautiful anyway,
(I did something similar in preferring the guitar)
drums sound basically great with good reverbs, but for me the stick sound actually might become louder, and the reverbs in some parts have a long tail that creates some impression of loneliness, which may be an artistic choice, I just think that in a sparse mix such a thing quickly can become overweight,
(so I tried not to get caught with effects that are not deliberately front-end and carrying like I did to the outro choir),
and finally a little remark, top end with hihats, cymbals, vocal sibilance etc. is a little bit sharp around 8-10k, and I guess this comes already from the source files. It might be seductive to boost highs, when we attenuate the stick!
So what I did for the top end, just to compare for the readers, I used the 354 3-band comp on the brass samples, multiple but subtle lowpassing at different points, and for the vocals the WARBLE (14.4 hi cut which actually does something quite complex beyond that number) and the dual de-esser.