MIX CHALLENGE - MC102 February 2025 - Mix Round 1 in evaluation

[floodo]

I would like if some charitable soul could give me a feed back, especially of the bad things to have a reference for a next time because so far I have never been selected, I leave you my mix below ---> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W6q-3X ... VxVj2/view

Hi Floodo

I particularly like the verses in your mix, they have a very nice air to them with the balance of the pads against the vocals.

Here are a few things I think you could improve on:
• For me the drums have a little too much room sound, bottom snare, and high frequency. They're also a bit loud in the overall balance.
• The lead vocals seem to have gone out of tune in places (eg: "belong" at 0:28, not sure what might have caused this?)
• The guitars in the choruses sound very wide and phased, and they're lost if the mix is mono'ed.
• Rhythm guitars in the mid section are a bit quiet against the solo gtr, which is on the loud side.

I think you've created a pretty good mix on the whole though. Out of interest, were you mixing on headphones and/or monitors?

Best regards,

Benji

Hi, thanks for your comments, they are very useful, yes, the drums are a little strong, at the last minute maybe because of fatigue I decided to lower the guitars and increase the voices, I guess that left me too much in front of the drums, the out of tune voices I will review, I passed them through melodyne maybe I detected the wrong scale, and the rhythm guitars are always with the same panning 100 L and 100 R, maybe I should leave them at 80, I was working with some bad headphones, some presonus HD7 that I flattened with the acústica sienna, I will make the modifications that you suggest to see how it all sounds, thanks! !

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

[MixyMcMixFace]

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

I'm hopeful the permissions are correct this time..

"What was the mood you tried to create, and how did you get there (e.g. focus on certain instrument sections)"

The song kind of juxtaposes itself, and I didn't really do much apart from trying to bring out what was already there. I think some of the detail could have been lost in the arrangement, so the mello gets a fabulous boost on occassion. It provides a simple, stable beat and bassline, and lets the vocals and lead instruments go back and forth.

On the drums, then, I was hearing a city-pop sorta vibe, and I ran with that (non-linear reverb, behbeh). I did not have a good time at first with the snare, I think it was perhaps humanised slightly heavy handedly, so the occassional snare didn't have the crack of those surrounding it, and the tuning was a little odd. I didn't want to crush the life out of it by cutting out all the middy meat, but when I zoned in on a super close overtone I couldn't hear anything else. Similiarly, with the kick, I could hear a bunch of 1k in the original mix. I automated most of the Amb mics in and out, as I felt the sections wanted slightly more demarkation, and toward the same goal I automated some rhythmic effects.

Used a bunch of the mixes here as references, sounding good guys

[RayK25]

Great thanks to all that provide their time and effort for these contests!!

https://mega.nz/file/Y7YQ0QiB#jLoceaipu ... O8X6B1zzpc

The targeted goal is to always develop the project into something that can compete with other commercial releases.
From my library, I used The GooGoo Dolls as reference.

| ** | | ** | | ** | | ** | | ** | | ** | | ** | | ** |

First impressions is that this is a powerful song that should have steady drive but also dynamics to show serious emotion.
So the drums were tightened up with added attack with the bass being just a lttile out front. Main vocal stout, up the middle, but sitting in the mix.

Tracks that received treatments:
Kick - clipped with moderate 1176. cut sub freq with heavy increase around 87hz. other eq to manage the snap.
Snare - clipped with strong 1176. Limiter to catch remaining peaks and OTT up/down compression. significant eq of 200hz boot and sub freq rolloff. snare was reference point when phase aligning to OH and ROOM.
Toms - were clipped with sub, 1k & 10K cuts. (panned audience perspective)
Some upward compression to the Skins BUS (Only drum shells BUS)
Moderate parallel compression from shells blended in (cockos reacomp)

Bass - all tracks at the same level. heavy limiter with mild 1176. TSE BOD for manageable grit. lo pass filtering with very small boost around 108hz.

Guitars - have small amounts of widening to help with ideal pan placement with only a few cuts for smoothing. small flanging during chorus.
Acoustic received moderate limiter with sub 100hz rolloff and gradual lift at 100hz above for air. stereo widener (pan delay) to add space.

Keys - were simply panned with only the mellotron that received some small amount of eq & moderate reverb.

Vocals - have minimal limiting. saturation with some high eq (TDR NOVA) for air. Some de-essing afterwards. Vocals have very small traces of effects with the most as an automated flanger through out each chorus.

Instrument BUS - tilt eq to brighten and Ferric TDS tape emulator to supplement the dynamics followed by a pultec with 100hz attenuated about 25% and 8K high end boost, 20k attenuated (40%).

Mix BUS - SSL channel strip with compression and eq to taste. Mid-Side encoder
MID SIDE - MID cut at .74db & SIDE boosted by 4db. SIDE has bell boost at 650hz & 2.7k with sub rolloff below 100hz.
Master - mid-side decoder; master limiter to catch any outlying peaks

Automation - most notable are the lowering of acoustic at the bridge after the solo. Verb effects at the end of C2 'dig your own grave' and bridge section 'the person that you'. flange effect on the nasty electrics (to make even more nasty) in each chorus and a very faint flange on lead the vocal -each chorus. both chorus are slightly elevated in volume.

Gear:
Reaper(v6.83) under linux(kubuntu studio 24.10).
SONY MDR-7506; IK mulitmedia iloud micro; Beyer Dynamic DT-770 (250 ohm); Ford truck and consumer hifi stereos for cross checking

- RayK

[pabloAT]

Dear Song Provider and Mr. Fox,
I thoroughly enjoyed mixing such a wonderful track. Many thanks for this fantastic opportunity.
After the usual HPF/HLF, EQ, compression, grouping, panning, delay, reverb, tape effects, etc., I focused mainly on two objectives: (i) adding some "dirt" to the drums (they were too polished for my taste for the vibe of this track) by creating a parallel channel with exaggerated distortion and compression; and (ii) differentiating the verse and chorus sequences as much as possible. I (think I) achieved this with extensive automation and an instance of the excellent The WoW Thing (by Korneff Audio) for openness on the mix bus.
I hope you like my mix!
Best of luck to all participants,
Cheers,
Pablo
Dropbox Link -> [Dropbox link to MC102]

[vitamin]

Hey!

My mix: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Fa2F-N ... sp=sharing

I used whatever was on hand for mixing: Audeze MM-100 and Logic Pro .
• Drums: Enjoyed using the UBK-2.
• Bass: Tried a trick with the Eventide H3000 on a parallel channel.
• Vocals: Added some distortion using tape.

Good luck, everyone!

[LowlandsWave]

Hello,

Very nice tracks to work on this month, a lot of mixing and very little to no fixing ....
Mix entirely in the box. Mixed with LUNA on a Mac mini M2. Adam Audio T7V speakers with Sonarworks correction and DT1990 Pro with Realphones correction. Room slightly treated with DIY rockwool panels.

Main thing I tried was to get some contrast between the chorus and the verses. Something that's already part of the orchestration, but add to that. Off course volume plays a roll besides the use of parallel compression on drums. The flow of verses and chorus, to me, feels like the cycle of "The person that we see" getting lost and finding the strength or a way to keep going. Emphasis on the dirt guitar was also a way to strengthen the before mentioned contrast.

Mixed using my Brauer style template,
First off some housekeeping with eq and gates on seperate tracks
Grouping to bussess: DRUMS, kick, snare, tom s, oh, room, percussion; BASS; GUITAR, rhythm, solo; VOCALS, Bg vox, Lead vox; all bussess have a SSL 4K E channelstrip and Neve Summing.

delay on the guitar solo
reverb on the vocals and extra delay on lead vocals

here is my mix: LLW mix

[Mister Fox]

A friendly reminder:
Including today, 07 days left to submit your mix.


So far, we have 32 entries (compared to 148 Mix Pack downloads -- now in standard ZIP form, that doesn't need special apps).
Please continue to pay attention to detail (see bundled TL;DR Rules.txt and/or post #003)

[Ferenc]

Hello,

Considering the excellent vocal tracks, I am entering the contest with a vocal-centric version. I tried to adapt to the given style somewhat, but my main goal was to make a version that I like. During the mixing, I tried to preserve the dynamics of the song, that the soft and loud parts fit the structure of the song.
I boosted the sound effect at the beginning of the song a little, increased its dynamics with FabFilter Pro-G, then it got a tremolo effect, and then Valhalla Shimmer made it complete.

The mixing was done in my half cube (unfortunate) shaped home studio, attenuated with self made bass traps. Mixed in Cakewalk, using Behringer TRUTH B2031 monitors and a Magnat SUB 302A which receive the signal through a dbx DriveRackPA2. I checked the mix with ST 770 PRO headphones too.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_tSCUw ... drive_link

[Heretic208]

Hello everyone,
first of all I would like to thank you for the great song! It was a lot of fun mixing this one.

It's my first time participating here and I hope I followed all the rules correctly.

The mixprep took about 30 minutes to have a basic volume mix and then use rough EQ settings to clean everything up a little of the frequencies that I didn't want in the mix.
I always mix with subgroups, i.e. for drums/bass/guitars/keys and vocals. Then I have a subgroup for the instrumentals and the vocals. On the master I have Gulfoss, a compressor and the Tomo Lisa for a little multiband compression.
From there I start the actual mix and used additional eqs and comps. After about 2 hours I had a static rough mix and ended up doing automations for about 1 hour.

The original mix is ​​really nice, so I used that as a reference.

And if anyone is interested, I use a Fireface UFX2 and go straight from there into a couple of Focal Trio 11s. I also always listen to the rough mix with Ollo S4x and simple PC speakers.

Best regards
Alex

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/wmu3omfd ... vcips&dl=0

[Dodgingrain]

Nice track. Here's my mix, its a more of a modern US style mix. The fade out at the end is done so it feels like this could be a shortened version of an extended track with the fade out occurring as the song transitions into an extended jam by the band. This was done by using different fade outs for the different instruments.
https://1drv.ms/u/c/6b8275e712f941aa/EU ... A?e=EReHev

Notes: Drums: Lots of eq cutting to create space. The room tracks were mixed low as I went for a lot less reverb vs the production rough mix. There is also some gating to get rid of drum tails and transient designers to reduce volume on the frum tails. Nothing special on compression other than a few instances of dbx-160's to get more of the transient to come out.

Bass: Some distortion added and lots of eq cutting. The bass tracks also duck triggered by the kick. I did add a little bit of width on the high end of the bass while keeping the low end mostly mono.

Gtrs: Some low end cutting triggered by the bass. Otherwise its mostly automation including both volume and eq automation. A decapacitator also is automated in on the chorus to add more excitement.

Keys: Some small eq cutting, a little bit of added width and some tape saturation to smooth them out a little bit. Given how low these are mixed there wasn't much that needed to be done.

Vocals: Pretty standard stuff here with an 1176 peak compressor, opto style compressor for general compression, some eq changes, and a little bit of soothe. The vocals also have side chain compression mixed in and a little bit of de-essing. There is a little bit of hard panned delay added as well to create some width on the vocals.

Mix bus: Some tape saturation and an API 2500 compressor for glue.