MIX CHALLENGE - MC100 October 2024 - Mix Round 1 in evaluation

[Rc²]

Hi all,

great to see so many participants already enjoying mixing my song. I know it is a challenge, I also struggled with the tracks.

I do have a request. This is for most of us (including myself) a learning experience. So it would really help if everybody not only mentioned the plug ins they used but also the reason behind certain mix decisions and how the plug ins are used. I am personally not interested in what brand eq someone used but I want to know why you think something was necessary to apply to the mix and why you tried to solve it in the way you did.

That would, for me at least, makes this mix-challenge extra interesting.

Cheers!

Jeroen

Hey @JeroenZuiderwijk I have added some more mix notes in case comment that was directed at me. Honestly I have never get past round one in these things and so struggle to believe anyone would ever be interested in what I did, so my apologies, I do get lazy with it and at some point I just want to submit it and move on, however I have added some more detail as I do understand that is a big part of this for people. If you (or anyone else) are interested in anything in particular let me know and I will be more than happy to embellish.

@Onni thanks I'm glad you liked it! Its always great if someone gives you constructive feedback. Your right I did struggle with those vocals and now you say it I know I should have listened to that niggling voice inside. I felt they needed to be really in there up front but I was feeling they were cluttering the main vocal and I think it just ended in a bad frequency battle where I should have made space!

[MemphisB]

Hi MC100 & Mixers

great Punk rock n roll song to mix

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_mkBZP ... sp=sharing

With this track set up a Vocal, Drum & Bass & Music Bus all with Kolin compressor on to glue it
All tracks had a little Transformer Pre amp

Drums
Kick a little eq tone shaping and Transient shaping
Snare EQ & Tone shaping with transient shaping and some room reverb
Rest of drum tracks EQ , Transient and a bit of stereo

Bass Compression and EQ but split into two tracks to create a mid front track to mix in

Vocals eq , compression , de-ess & Tone Shaping with a little room reverb on Voc 03 to separate it from the backing vocals

all mixed into a mix bus with Ferric & Density to glue it all up and some mild tone shaping to make it lively and balanced (Hopefully)

a couple of minor pans and volume automation

Thats it good luck to all

Memphis B

[JeroenZuiderwijk]

Hi all,

great to see so many participants already enjoying mixing my song. I know it is a challenge, I also struggled with the tracks.

I do have a request. This is for most of us (including myself) a learning experience. So it would really help if everybody not only mentioned the plug ins they used but also the reason behind certain mix decisions and how the plug ins are used. I am personally not interested in what brand eq someone used but I want to know why you think something was necessary to apply to the mix and why you tried to solve it in the way you did.

That would, for me at least, makes this mix-challenge extra interesting.

Cheers!

Jeroen

Hey @JeroenZuiderwijk I have added some more mix notes in case comment that was directed at me. Honestly I have never get past round one in these things and so struggle to believe anyone would ever be interested in what I did, so my apologies, I do get lazy with it and at some point I just want to submit it and move on, however I have added some more detail as I do understand that is a big part of this for people. If you (or anyone else) are interested in anything in particular let me know and I will be more than happy to embellish.

@Onni thanks I'm glad you liked it! Its always great if someone gives you constructive feedback. Your right I did struggle with those vocals and now you say it I know I should have listened to that niggling voice inside. I felt they needed to be really in there up front but I was feeling they were cluttering the main vocal and I think it just ended in a bad frequency battle where I should have made space!

I was talking more in general but yeah, I probably noticed your mixing notes too. It is something I always think with the mixing challenge. i listen to other peoples mixes and think to myself...hey, how dit they accomplished that? Or how did they came to that decision. That just makes more sense to me if we need to write something about our mix.so thank you for the extra effort!

[JeroenZuiderwijk]

................

Great idea, us mixing nerds tend to focus on WHAT we do, not WHY we do it Allow me to go first

Kick
I slightly distorted it through the preamp as I find it adds both a subtle compression, as well as bring out some edge, if done right.

Snare
I normally don't care too much about bleed in live drums BUT the already applied gate made the bleed very apparent so I first filtered out as much as I could. Then I used distortion to add some grit and shave of the biggest transient, and the rest of the effects where applied to add body, and make the snare smoother and fatter. Gated reverbs are awesome for this on snare drums and was also widely used in the grunge era (In Utero, Golden State for example).

Room
Adding massive compression kills all the transients and helps bring out the dirt in the room mic. Works well when you don't want the drums to sound to clean and you want to bring up all of that good stuff happening between the hits.

Drum bus
I distorted the overall drum bus during the first verse as I felt it was more laid back in terms of playing. I just wanted to emphasize this by pulling the drums back, and also to get a bigger dynamic leap going into the first chorus.

Guitars
Automation always add life to a mix. Some of the things I did was pulling guitars more into the center during the verse, and using more reverb/delay on the verses on the long chords to give space. Then reducing effects on the choruses when the guitar is playing more rhythm, and reverbs tend to blur it out. I for example added lots of delay to the final chord of the intro, just to get more sustain going into the first verse.

Vocals
The vocals were already quite processed so I just tried to control them a bit and respect that processing that was already done. If a choice has already been done for me, I will assume that choice was done for a good reason!

Apart from that, really fun song to mix. I love to mix rock, and especially live drums. Regardless of how the drums are recorded it brings a completely different energy to a track than "artificial" drums do. Without rules I probably would have triggered some of the drums, not to replace the original sounds, more in order to add stuff that I found was missing. Basically I tend to search for samples that sound as much as I perceive the original drums would've sounded in the recording space, and then blend that sample into the drum bus to add clarity/punch or whatever might be missing from the recording. The goal should always be to make the drums sound as good as possible, not make them sound different.

Hi Edlin....I was wondering....I am happy with your notes on the mix you made. But I don't see a link to your mix. Was it your intention to only post your mixing notes or also to upload your mix. If that is the case....where can I find your mix?
Cheers,
Jeroen

[JeroenZuiderwijk]

Hi MC100 & Mixers

great Punk rock n roll song to mix

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_mkBZP ... sp=sharing

\

Thats it good luck to all

Memphis B

Hi Memphis B,

I can't acces your mix. It is asking for permission Could you please check what is wrong so you can particpate with the challenge?

Cheers,

Jeroen

[zed999]

Hello everyone!

Here is the link to my mix: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E3lqF_ ... sp=sharing

Kick: Eq, KSHMR
Snare: Eq
Toms: Eq, comp.
OH: comp.
Drums bus: saturation, dyn. Eq

Bass: Eq, Distressor

Guitars tracks: opto comp. if needed, Kramer HLS
Guitars bus: saturation

Synth: opto comp., Eq & saturation

Lead vox: Silk Vocal, Pultec Eq, comp., Fresh Air, de-esser, tube saturation, limiter

BG vox: Silk Vocal, Pultec Eq, comp., stereo widener

Reverbs: 1 plate, 1 room

1 parallel drums bus: 1176 comp.
1 parallel rear bus: vari-mu comp.

Master bus: dyn. Eq, SSL bus comp., tape saturation

I like this one. Clear and powerful, very nice.

[PonySho]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xv8ddg ... sp=sharing

Thanks
Firstly, thanks to @JeroenZuiderwijk and Mr Fox for organising this.

Mix comments
This is a great hard rock song that was mostly straightforward to mix. The complex part was taming harsh, baked-in resonances caused by the metallic-sounding reverb, problematic pre-EQing that caused harshness, and A LOT of clip editing by me. The goal here was to translate the energy of the song into the mix.

Snare
Lots of work here. Noted by the song provider that the snare was not to their liking.
The snare track had a lot of hi-hat bleed. I painstakingly manually edited out the hihat hits as my attempts to gate it out weren't working the way I wanted.
I duplicated the snare into 3 tracks so that the snare had enough energy to push through in the denser parts of the mix. Each track had a different treatment: the original track with a little EQ push in the lows, a transient push on the second track, and a trashy long verb on the other.
*No drum replacement was used*

Kick
The kick was doubled in the choruses and with different treatments (one dry and one with EQ, compression and verb).
*No drum replacement was used*

Other drums
The remainder of the drums had a bit of EQ, compression and reverb for correction and character.
I panned the overheads fairly narrow as they punch better with a narrow spread across the stereo spectrum.

Bass
Interesting to note that this was created via a guitar and a pedal, not a bass guitar.
I used the original single track with a little automation to push the level in the choruses and solo.
I used a multiband exciter to severely excite the mid-hi frequency range with just a little excitement in the low band. The provided bass was fairly well levelled, so minimum compression was applied.

Guitars
Interesting! When I brought these into the session, the tracks seemed 'all over the place' regarding where things should be positioned in the stereo panorama. I chopped them up a bit and moved them onto tracks that made more sense in terms of the song. All the guitars provided are playing in the song.

Synth
No compression was applied, but small edits were made to the start/finish of the parts to remove error notes. A little EQ was used to remove harshness.

Vocals
These were a challenge. They had some very nasty resonances (to my ears) brought on, I suspect, by a very metallic reverb colour and possibly some pre-EQing done before the tracks were provided. I spent some time trying to remove resonance without killing the energy. Most of this appeared at specific points in the 2kHz, 3kHz and 4kHz regions. I also edited all vocal tracks in Izotope RX as there was mouth noise/clicking that became very apparent with dynamics and EQ treatment. I trimmed all vocal parts to prevent the reverb from running on.

Buss processing
This went through a few digital plugins (Voxengo Teote > BX digital V3 > analyzer)
and into a hardware chain (LTL Silver Bullet > Handsome Audio Zulu > Elysia Karacter > Successor compressor set to parallel process).

After mixing out the analogue version, I put it through some light mastering and a clipper to control the loudness and peaks. I love the Plugin Alliance ADPTR Metric AB for spectrum analysis.

File Info (Izotope RX)
File format: WAV, 44kHz, 24bit
Length: 2.54
Loudness: 17.5 LUFS ILk
dBTP -6.5

[MemphisB]

Hi MC100 & Mixers

great Punk rock n roll song to mix

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_mkBZP ... sp=sharing

\

Thats it good luck to all

Memphis B

Hi Memphis B,

I can't acces your mix. It is asking for permission Could you please check what is wrong so you can particpate with the challenge?

Cheers,

Jeroen

Thanks mate I had not set the share function , thanks for the heads up ,
Memphis B

[Edling]

Hi Edlin....I was wondering....I am happy with your notes on the mix you made. But I don't see a link to your mix. Was it your intention to only post your mixing notes or also to upload your mix. If that is the case....where can I find your mix?
Cheers,
Jeroen

Sorry for the confusion! I posted the link to my mix earlier in post #33, I just wanted to add some more context around it!

[JeroenZuiderwijk]

Hi Edlin....I was wondering....I am happy with your notes on the mix you made. But I don't see a link to your mix. Was it your intention to only post your mixing notes or also to upload your mix. If that is the case....where can I find your mix?
Cheers,
Jeroen

Sorry for the confusion! I posted the link to my mix earlier in post #33, I just wanted to add some more context around it!

Ah, now I see. Thanks! I missed that one.....