MIX CHALLENGE - MC100 October 2024 - Mix Round 2 in evaluation

[Mister Fox]

...anyway I would not mind sharing the vocals without the reverb if that is allowed.

Let us please stick to the official multi-tracks.

Although you can share your "clean-up" settings/processes for everyone to learn from. There are plenty of "de-reverb" tools out there, each with their own distinct features and final sound.

[Vanilla Puff]

Happy 100th mix challenge everyone!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDqWw6 ... sp=sharing
-16.2 LUFS, -2.0 dBTP, 24bit, 44.1kHz.

I'll share my thoughts and general process while mixing this track.
Began with drums, then guitars and vocals to get a rough mix that moves me. After that, I was looking into ideas and factors, which could unite this song into a solid unit. A thought kept emerging of me playing Tony Hawk on PS2 when I was a kid. Distinctly remember that feeling when AC/DC's T.N.T played for the first time and I felt on top of the world in that game. So I went with this idea, of giving it that contagious energy. Since most of that energy in this case is in the guitars and groove of the track, I started refining it. Gave guitars a cardioid like stereo panning with a somewhat "choked" sound signature that is akin to a feeling when you try to do something hard physically. Drums on the other hand were left open and "light on their feet", giving it a brawl like quality. Once everything was polished, added automation and final touches to the balances, to keep the song going without it letting go. Guitar solo is quite short for my taste. Wanted to make it big without sounding big, like a thought well said. Made sure that automation led to it well and guitar solo sounds like solo even in low listening levels. That's the basics of my thought process. Had a blast mixing!
As always, thanks to Mister Fox and song provider!

[PistolPete]

Loudness_Value;-17.2 LUFS
Max_True_Peak_Level;-5.36 dBTP
Sample Rate;44.100 kHz
Average RMS (AES-17) Left;-17.71 dB
Average RMS (AES-17) Right;-17.92 dB
DC Offset Left;-oo dB
DC Offset Right;-oo dB
Bit Depth Left;24 bit
Bit Depth Right;24 bit

My submission:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gVMSXG ... sp=sharing

My True Peak came in quite lower than I intended however all other parameters were in required ranges and I didn't want to mess with the True Peak since I really liked the sound it had.

General Session Start: Loading Tracks, coloring tracks, adding mixbus, adding VCA channels, cutting dead noise from tracks...etc.
After session setup and maintenance, I used pink noise at -16db to bring all instrument tracks to the same audible level and establish a baseline mix. I listend a few times and shuffled panning on the guitars until I got a nice gainstaged rough mix that was similar to the original but to my own liking.
I listened to the demo and then read @JeroenZuiderwijk notes.

Notes from @JeroenZuiderwijk that I tried to keep in my mix:

• Maintain energy
  Overdrive distoration on bass.
  Added a bass rider to the bass to give it a realiztic vibe to take away the flatness.
  Added a lot of thickness and backup fx to the vocals to drive energy and changes
  Focused on the drums a lot, brought clarity, worked with transients and tone of drums, added some saturation,
  kept the snap of the snare quite a bit but added some distortion fizz to smooth out the bleed which I liked.
  Used all the guitar tracks

I think it turned out great and hopefully the song submitter likes it as well.
I took screenshots of all my plugins and routing so I wont get into that.

Bass and Drums
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12eh9t_ ... sp=sharing

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

Guitar Synth N Vox
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vPRtnV ... sp=sharing

Vocal Channel and FX and Mixbus
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AJoCMK ... sp=sharing

The song submitter said they didn't really like the bass in the original mix so I used Devil Loc and rally distorted/fuzzed/overdrive the bass to give it a different sound, I used a bass rider automated rider to give it more movement and real feel to the dynamics. I also used a channel strip and eq/color plugin to help create the sound I wanted and then hit it with a limiter to control the dynamics and mix position a bit.

Drums
Definitley needed some love as they didn't sound very clear and had a little bit of phasing /timing issues so I used auto align to make sure they were in phase which helped clean them up quite a bit. The kick was giving me a lot of trouble to realy get it to sit in the mix right but after using a lot of side chain with similar frequency channels, and adding some fuzz and distortion with devil loc, it really seemed to sit nice.

Snare
I didn't do much besides a little eq, compression and fuzzed/distorted it with devil loc which actually brought out the bleed from the drum kit a bit which I liked.

Drums all had various FX sends and some were automated to create buildups, including a verb, saturation, and compression.

Guitars
I was a big overwhelmed and had a hard time to really get them to "flow" in a good 3d sound field as well as to have the changes in the song impacted properly. Each guitar track I treated separately with tons of plugin to create filter, tones, modulation of panning, delays and reverb to really help all the guitars accentuate their reliant parts and to make them stand out and move int he mix to prevent it from being too dull. i also wanted to crunch the crap out of the song with compressors to hold it all together so a lot of automation was used to help the song have dynamics still.

Vocals:
I didn't like the brashness and harshness on the Voc 01 track as it just clashed with my ears a lot. I wanted to give it a softer pillow, add some deeper tone, reverb the crap out ot and make it bigger and more powerful, without the shrillness. I did this by doubling the track, panning each extrem L and R and treating each side differently, One I lust cleaned up with some eq and soaked in verb, and the other I took a completely a different rout to add doubling, movement delays and really make it sound full. mission accomplished I believe

Voc 2 and Voc 3
I treated differently since one was mainly the versus and the other was the chorus. Voc 2 I spent a lot of time crafting the tone to make it more filtered sounding and thick. saturation, eqs with color helped to craft the sound. Vocal 1 liked as is so I just gave it a desser, a little channel strip love and left if fiairly blank.

Most of the vocal magic I used parallel VX channels which level automated to different changes in the song, and words..etc.

automated and blended to create thickness and build ups in different parts of the song:

• A VOx compressor FX send,
  Verb Sent,
  a clean compressed send
  and a saturation send

I used a FX send Compressor Brauerize approach where all tracks were running full send to 1 of 3 compressors, one for lows and mids, one for high/wid e and one for vocals.

Mix Bus I wanted to really squash the crap out of the song, but still keep it wide and dynamic, but to also keep the guitars vocals and energy throughout the song. I used an EQ, clipper, limiter, bx glue and adptr hype (stereo, harmonic, tone balance).

Overall I really like the mix I did, the sound is a bit different but I think I hit all the points the song submitter mentioned they wanted.
I really enjoyed this song and mixing was quite fun. I probably could sit and go surgical with edits if I wanted I am very satisfied with the results and I hope the song provider digs it.

[PonySho]

I used a FX send Compressor Brauerize approach where all tracks were running full send to 1 of 3 compressors, one for lows and mids, one for high/wid e and one for vocals.

Hey PistolPete
Cool that you're using the Braurize technique. I like the system but found it difficult to keep my head around which tracks were going to which compressor. One thing I found important is to continuously check the compression GR as you mix coz it's super easy to not hit the comp too hard as you develop the balance. MB only hits them around 2-3 dB of GR. Anyways, good stuff.

[PonySho]

Hi there rock fans. Thanks to JeroenZuiderwijk for your awesome track. If there ever was a genre for me it would be this one, a perfect track to mark the 100th Mix Challenge! Also thanks to Mister Fox for your continued generosity with your time and for your quality.

Here’s the link for my entry. Again I wanted to try to force myself to mix quicker so I’m calling it quits here at a point I’m pretty happy with. While I know it could be improved, I feel it’s diminishing returns territory.

Love the mix. Cool how you keep it narrow in verses and open it up in the choruses. Love the balance, too.
Are you using the API2500 hardware?

[scottfitz]

Hi there rock fans. Thanks to JeroenZuiderwijk for your awesome track. If there ever was a genre for me it would be this one, a perfect track to mark the 100th Mix Challenge! Also thanks to Mister Fox for your continued generosity with your time and for your quality.

Here’s the link for my entry. Again I wanted to try to force myself to mix quicker so I’m calling it quits here at a point I’m pretty happy with. While I know it could be improved, I feel it’s diminishing returns territory.

Love the mix. Cool how you keep it narrow in verses and open it up in the choruses. Love the balance, too.
Are you using the API2500 hardware?

Ah thanks for the kind words PonySho. I don't have any hardware. I honestly wish I did, but I can't afford it and when I found out that Michael Brauer had gone totally in the box that's the moment when I realised you don't need the hardware any more.

My opinion about the plugins is that they are going to be all great so long as you don't hit the aliasing issues. The UAD API2500 is modelled with internal oversampling as I understand it, so hopefully this compressor is pretty safe to use. In the Brauer approach I would say make sure that you are ultra careful on any bus plugins, always use oversampling or plugins with internal oversampling. With single tracks maybe we make a mistake once in a while and miss the aliasing but if we have 12 tracks all running into a bus compressor like with the drum bus for example, the plugins which operate on that drum bus need to be carefully set.

On the API2500 I believe this is the best compressor for the mixbus. It's got just enough controls to get the sound how you like . I find the SSL just a bit too simple, I get that this is the point, but if it doesn't have 1.5:1 ratio and doesn't have 50ms release and doesn't have dual mono capabilities then why would I use it?

However as I've referred to before in my posts, I believe that the mixbus is kind of a huge red herring in mixing. I feel that I learned a lot by going through a phase of having nothing at all there. My advice is just don't waste much time at all on the mixbus because you will almost certainly make your mix worse. I feel like it's a kind of cheap and lazy mixers way out. "Ah, my mix doesn't sound that great, let's just slap this stereo widening saturator on EVERYTHING and see if any presets make all my problems go away!" It sounds a bit harsh and I don't mean it like that at all. It's just where I've got to with mixing, feeling like I've been a horribly long way around, making just about every single mistake you could make and I can imagine others would be following along similar paths.

Good luck!

[PistolPete]

I used a FX send Compressor Brauerize approach where all tracks were running full send to 1 of 3 compressors, one for lows and mids, one for high/wid e and one for vocals.

Hey PistolPete
Cool that you're using the Braurize technique. I like the system but found it difficult to keep my head around which tracks were going to which compressor. One thing I found important is to continuously check the compression GR as you mix coz it's super easy to not hit the comp too hard as you develop the balance. MB only hits them around 2-3 dB of GR. Anyways, good stuff.

Thanks PonySho...

Yea on this mix I used a Brauerized setup where everything was originally routed directly through 1 of 3 compressors on FX sends, and the main out of each track was set to a "dummy track" which went nowhere. After getting deep into the mix I decided to route the tracks from the dummy track to the mixbus instead and treated the Braurized comps as parallel processing instead.

It provided much needed glue but also gave a little extra dynamic to the transients as well. Seemed to work nicely on this mix. I did end up using multiple compressors through the mix and on the Mixbus as well to really squeeze the crap out of the guitars to help them play nicely with each other

[MartialFromentin]

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

Thanks zed999, I'm happy you like my mix!

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

Good idea JeroenZuiderwijk. I didn't had a lot of time when I posted my mix but I can bring more details today, I'll try not to be too long...

IMO the main things to do were to get energy and glue, respect the song as much as possible and not to overprocess.

First of all, I processed the tracks to have a flat mix:
- linear parametric Eq on every track to clean frequencies (mainly substractive but not only, just to get a nice sound in solo)
- gain staging
- first balance: as I am not a professionnal I always find this step a little bit hard. I use a pink noise (-12dBFS) to do that, obviously it's just to have a starting point. Once it's done I remove the pink noise and I adjust depending on my tastes.
- stereo panning: another little trick that helps me is to mute the center instruments to focus on the tracks to pan only, it helps to have a clearer feeling.

Note for the guitars 02 and 04: I blended the different amps for the tone shaping and sent them to aux tracks.

I think that the main important things to keep the energy were:
- the snare
- the cymbals hitting hard
- a guitars "wall of sound"

DRUMS:
The snare track is heavily gated but there are the OH tracks to help, so I considered the snare track being the "final layer" for the snare sound. The goal was to get a proper balance between the body and the presence. I Eqed it quite hard with Manny Marroquin (+7dB @ 220Hz, -1.6dB @ 400Hz, +3.8dB @ 1.6kHz, +1.4dB shelf @ 12.5kHz).
For this song, I found that the kick didn't need snap, but sub. I struggled to get the sound I wanted, tried different things that didn' work, and I remebered that I have the little "KSHMR Essential Kick" plugin (easy to use: sub, transient shaper, comp., multiband comp...) that did the job. I added some sub based on the kick key that is B if I'm not wrong. Before KSHMR, there is "Coffee The Pun Eq" (I really love it for the kick), with +3 @ 50Hz (boost), +4.5 @ 320Hz (att), +6 @ 4.7Hz (bell), and the germanium preamp on.
The other drums tracks are processed in a classic way. Eq and comp. for the toms, comp. for the OH, and I used the room track as a natural reverb.
Drum bus:
- saturation for the glue and the harmonics
- dynamic Eq: I wanted to hear the cymbals hitting hard but not too harsh, so they are tamed with this Eq (shelf comp. @ 10kHz, and also a little bell comp. @ 50Hz to control the kick)

BASS:
I wanted its sound "close to the kick", I didn't process it too much: Bass Professor mkII to Eq, Distressor in optical mode and with saturation on. I added a dynamic Eq sidechained to the kick (dyn. comp. @ 50Hz).

GUITARS:
I wanted some kind of analog summing for all the guitars, so I've put a Kramer HLS channel strip on every guitar track.
I've calibrated the input to get -18dBFS=0dBVU and to bring saturation, then I Eqed them. I find the Kramer HLS nice to bring body and presence to the guitars.
There's a LA2A on the clean guitars to control their dynamic, and a LA2A on the guitar solo to help hearing the larsen at the beginning.
Here are the panning:
- center: 01, 04, 05, 06, 08, 09, 10
- 60% left/right: 11/07
- 90% left/right: 03/02
Guitars bus: once again, a saturation for glue and harmonics. There is also "FAST Reval" sidechained to the vocals to prevent frequency masking (30% ducking between 175Hz and 5.2kHZ).

SYNTH:
I wanted it to be more a layer (too much dynamics IMO), I've put "bx_opto" (optical comp. with speed parameter) then "BootEQmkIV" (Eq and saturation). Its natural stereo places it "between" the centered vocals and the 90% panned guitars, I found it nice.

LEAD VOCALS:
Nothing really noticable here:
- Silk Vocal for de-essing, resonnances, and a first little comp.
- Pultec Eq
- 2 comp. in a row
- Fresh Air for presence
- one more de-esser to tame the Fresh Air processing
- Tube saturation
- Limiter

BG VOCALS:
Quite simple: Silk Vocal, Pultec Eq and comp. But the most interesting is the stereo widener to push the bg vocals aside and to get a wide sound (working with the 90% panned guitars) on the chorus.

REVERBS:
To respect the song, there are only 2 reverbs.
- A room reverb for the ambiance and to place the instruments in the same space: toms, OH, room, guitars 02 03 09 10, synth, bg vocals
- A plate reverb for the upfront instruments: snare, guitars 07 10 11, lead vocals
These 2 reverbs are filtered.

PARALLEL BUSES:
As I wanted to get a powerful result, there are 2 parallel buses:
- 1 for the drums with "Pulsar Smasher" (1176 modified in British Mode, easy to use: input, output, and the GR meter)
- 1 "rear bus": all the other tracks except the drums. The goal is to get around -6dB GR when there are vocals and -3dB GR for the instruments, with a true stereo comp. It creates some movement and it increases subtely the instruments volume when there are no vocals.
I was really happy with the result but at that time my mix was too loud (-13LU integrated if I remember well), I decreased the volume of these buses to stay below -16LU integrated.

MIX BUS:
A final touch for the whole song:
- a little bit of dynamic Eq, mainly to tame the cymbals once again. They contribute to the power but I wanted them under control
- a SSL bus comp. for glue (attack 30ms, release 100ms, ratio 1.5, 2dB GR max.)
- a tape saturation, once again for glue and an analog touch.

And that's all, I hope you'll enjoy these explanations.

[Onni]

Loudness_Value;-17.2 LUFS
Max_True_Peak_Level;-5.36 dBTP
Sample Rate;44.100 kHz
Average RMS (AES-17) Left;-17.71 dB
Average RMS (AES-17) Right;-17.92 dB
DC Offset Left;-oo dB
DC Offset Right;-oo dB
Bit Depth Left;24 bit
Bit Depth Right;24 bit

My submission:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gVMSXG ... sp=sharing

My True Peak came in quite lower than I intended however all other parameters were in required ranges and I didn't want to mess with the True Peak since I really liked the sound it had.

General Session Start: Loading Tracks, coloring tracks, adding mixbus, adding VCA channels, cutting dead noise from tracks...etc.
After session setup and maintenance, I used pink noise at -16db to bring all instrument tracks to the same audible level and establish a baseline mix. I listend a few times and shuffled panning on the guitars until I got a nice gainstaged rough mix that was similar to the original but to my own liking.
I listened to the demo and then read @JeroenZuiderwijk notes.

Notes from @JeroenZuiderwijk that I tried to keep in my mix:

• Maintain energy
  Overdrive distoration on bass.
  Added a bass rider to the bass to give it a realiztic vibe to take away the flatness.
  Added a lot of thickness and backup fx to the vocals to drive energy and changes
  Focused on the drums a lot, brought clarity, worked with transients and tone of drums, added some saturation,
  kept the snap of the snare quite a bit but added some distortion fizz to smooth out the bleed which I liked.
  Used all the guitar tracks

I think it turned out great and hopefully the song submitter likes it as well.
I took screenshots of all my plugins and routing so I wont get into that.

Bass and Drums
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12eh9t_ ... sp=sharing

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

Guitar Synth N Vox
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vPRtnV ... sp=sharing

Vocal Channel and FX and Mixbus
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AJoCMK ... sp=sharing

The song submitter said they didn't really like the bass in the original mix so I used Devil Loc and rally distorted/fuzzed/overdrive the bass to give it a different sound, I used a bass rider automated rider to give it more movement and real feel to the dynamics. I also used a channel strip and eq/color plugin to help create the sound I wanted and then hit it with a limiter to control the dynamics and mix position a bit.

Drums
Definitley needed some love as they didn't sound very clear and had a little bit of phasing /timing issues so I used auto align to make sure they were in phase which helped clean them up quite a bit. The kick was giving me a lot of trouble to realy get it to sit in the mix right but after using a lot of side chain with similar frequency channels, and adding some fuzz and distortion with devil loc, it really seemed to sit nice.

Snare
I didn't do much besides a little eq, compression and fuzzed/distorted it with devil loc which actually brought out the bleed from the drum kit a bit which I liked.

Drums all had various FX sends and some were automated to create buildups, including a verb, saturation, and compression.

Guitars
I was a big overwhelmed and had a hard time to really get them to "flow" in a good 3d sound field as well as to have the changes in the song impacted properly. Each guitar track I treated separately with tons of plugin to create filter, tones, modulation of panning, delays and reverb to really help all the guitars accentuate their reliant parts and to make them stand out and move int he mix to prevent it from being too dull. i also wanted to crunch the crap out of the song with compressors to hold it all together so a lot of automation was used to help the song have dynamics still.

Vocals:
I didn't like the brashness and harshness on the Voc 01 track as it just clashed with my ears a lot. I wanted to give it a softer pillow, add some deeper tone, reverb the crap out ot and make it bigger and more powerful, without the shrillness. I did this by doubling the track, panning each extrem L and R and treating each side differently, One I lust cleaned up with some eq and soaked in verb, and the other I took a completely a different rout to add doubling, movement delays and really make it sound full. mission accomplished I believe

Voc 2 and Voc 3
I treated differently since one was mainly the versus and the other was the chorus. Voc 2 I spent a lot of time crafting the tone to make it more filtered sounding and thick. saturation, eqs with color helped to craft the sound. Vocal 1 liked as is so I just gave it a desser, a little channel strip love and left if fiairly blank.

Most of the vocal magic I used parallel VX channels which level automated to different changes in the song, and words..etc.

automated and blended to create thickness and build ups in different parts of the song:

• A VOx compressor FX send,
  Verb Sent,
  a clean compressed send
  and a saturation send

I used a FX send Compressor Brauerize approach where all tracks were running full send to 1 of 3 compressors, one for lows and mids, one for high/wid e and one for vocals.

Mix Bus I wanted to really squash the crap out of the song, but still keep it wide and dynamic, but to also keep the guitars vocals and energy throughout the song. I used an EQ, clipper, limiter, bx glue and adptr hype (stereo, harmonic, tone balance).

Overall I really like the mix I did, the sound is a bit different but I think I hit all the points the song submitter mentioned they wanted.
I really enjoyed this song and mixing was quite fun. I probably could sit and go surgical with edits if I wanted I am very satisfied with the results and I hope the song provider digs it.

Hey! Really interesting mix! I like all the creative choices you made with guitars etc. its like listening to this song for the first time again after already mixing it myself haha. Cool stuff for sure. One thing im missing in my listening is the kick. Would love to hear it more in the mix.

[PistolPete]

Hey! Really interesting mix! I like all the creative choices you made with guitars etc. its like listening to this song for the first time again after already mixing it myself haha. Cool stuff for sure. One thing im missing in my listening is the kick. Would love to hear it more in the mix.

Thanks Onni for the feedback. I did really take this song to a much different place than the original so hopefully the song provider likes what I did.
Its similar but also quite different in places.

I agree with your feedback on the Kick. I had a lot of trouble with the kick (and generally with rock drums) as my genre of choice to listen to is rap/hiphop, where the bass, kick and snare really lead the drums and are heavy in mixes.

In rock they seem to play more of a background role and I'm still getting use to their position in the mix for rock. I had a hard time getting the kick to punch through so I used some ducking on the bass and some of the lower frequency guitar tracks to help it shine, but I also tried to keep in mind I usually tend to bring the kick too far up in the mix (because of my rap/hiphop influence). Definitely great feedback and I really appreciate you listening to my mix. If I make it to the 2nd round (which I never do) I will definitely add the kick to my list of focal points to work with more. I may have do do some EQ cuts on the bass to help it punch more, or maybe EQ it slightly different...

I really enjoyed having fun with this mix and the song was very enjoyable to mix. I hope the song submitter likes the choices I made as some are pretty drastic with how I handled the backup vocals and some of the hooks.