MIX CHALLENGE - MC050 December 2018 - Winners announced

[dobebon]

Here is my submission for this round.

WAV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/iizp4aa0ckab5 ... n.wav?dl=0

MP3: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9934dvgqt50ns ... n.mp3?dl=0

No drum reinforcement or replacement, although I was tempted to replace the toms. The only processing plugin on the 2buss is a brickwall limiter set to -1dB but I don’t think any peaks even touched it.

Pads - EQ out some low end rumble, added some echo and panning

Drums - Sent to a drum buss with a buss compressor and some EQ shaping
OH - HPF around 170Hz, boost around 15KHz, small cut at 1KHz
Kick - LPF, boost at 63Hz, cut around 280Hz, large boost at 4KHz
Snare - HPF around 200Hz with a shelf boost at 170Hz, large cut at 450Hz and some small boosts at 4KHz and 9KHz
Toms - The toms seemed to be gated pretty hard so I tried to recover them with a transient designer and some EQ shaping
Room - pretty much left as is

Bass - HPF at 80Hz and LPF at 10KHz, cut at 90Hz and SDRR2 for some saturation

Guitars
Elect - HPF around 80Hz, cuts at 4 and 11KHz and a boost at 200Hz
Acoustic - Cut at 160Hz and 250Hz and a boost at 10KHz to remove boxiness and add some air
Lead - LPF at 110Hz and cuts at 680Hz and 200Hz, added some echo and reverb

Vox - 1176 style compression, de-esser and a touch of Microshift on the main vocals. Backround added some saturation and MU style compression.

Reverb to taste on drums, guitars and vox. Not a lot of compression used (except for the vocals), mainly just to catch peaks. Volume automation.

Good luck everyone!

[MOA22]

Loudness : about -19 LUFS i
True Peak @ -1.3 db (DR about 10)

Very nice song to mix, amazing vocal tone and interpretation. Challenging eq (a huge cleaning work)
Tried to mix it sweet, wanted a folk sounding song.
I’ve listened to the client’s mix lately, and I found we’ve had some similar ideas. Loved the energy of it. My goal was to mix it the way to be able to solo the acoustic guitars the solos and the vocals tracks without being distubed. The most important elements of the song for me. That’s why my drums are pretty quiet, so the e guitars.(NO DRUMS REPLACEMENT)

Mix description :

Drums (LOVED IT BUT A LOT OF WORK ON IT)

Bus : Slate MU glue comp, Slight stock eq, TDR Nova to control at 170. Bus driver to destroy a bit (limit a db), Stereo reduction about @70%

Kick : polarity, lo mid/ mid cleaning, Bark of dog to recover the subs, Saturation and audified U73B comp parallel (wet at 35%)

Normal Snare : polarity, ring cleaning, bass boost, high boost, saturation, slow attack comp + transient designer (more attack, less sustain)

Snare : duplicated wet track to clean the cymbals (fast duck, hi pass over 700, phase switch)

OH -> sub bus panned @ 100%. DeEsser, bass boost, huge broadband mid cleaning, ringing at 345hz killed, high boost. Hi mid dynamic eq slight attenuation 4k, parallel saturation.

TOMS : low mid cleaning, lo and hign boost, LA2A style comp.

ROOM : ringing at 670 and 445 killed, hipass, lo pass. SPL Transient (more attack, killed the sustain, found it weird).

BASS : ringing at 810 and 350 killed, low mid cut, bass boost. Parallel Saturation, some lo mid recover, 1176 comp)

Rythms Guitars

Acoustic Gtrs : ringing cleaning, low, and lo mid cleaning on each track, panned at 11 and 1 o’clock -> bus : (saturation, gentle bass boost, slow attack comp, slate revival low and high excitement) DeEsser to keep it bright and sweet at the same time.

EGT1 : panned full to the right side, low cut, highs mid and mid boost. Compressor for the attck, Slate Revival.

EGT2 : nearly the same thing but the panning at 8’

Tremolo GTR : Full left side, something like the other E guitars but a huge broadband boost at 400. Big spring reverb inserted (like from the amp). Pre pan send to the reverb to recover a kind of balance.

Saturated gtr : Eq, pseudo stereo with sample delay, the guitar is there to fill a bit without being clearly there, it comes to life only during the quiet moments (choruses ending)

Lead Guitars : each solo has his track, the sound is not the same. Low cut, lo mid cleaning. Huge spring reverb (from the amp). Compression.
Inserted a delay in the tracks (25% wet)

PAD : High pass, paned at 9’ and 3’

Lead vocals : A track for the choruses and the verses. Ringing at 2450hz cleaned, then Neve style Eq (high boost, cut at 1.6, boost below 200). Distressor style comp OPTO mode + dist3. Post Eq high mids boost, Revival excitement (lo range). DeEsser.
TDR NOVA multband to keep the control at 1K

Sent to a verb and a kind of slapback delay

One verb aux (hipass+ Slat verb 224XL Plate, 1,3sec, 25 ms predelay, big width) panned at 00:30.
The mono slapback aux is panned at 9’

MASTER BUS : eq, VBC MU glue comp about 0.5 reduction, Virtual Bus, virtual tape. The mix is done thrue those plugins, it is not a kind of mastering…

+SPAN always on, youlean, sonarworks reference.

EDIT WORKS :

The drums are edited (some hit’s gain), not in a grid, but I prefer the drummer to bea bit late (at 3:49, I loved it) than too fast , so I moved some hits)
Bass guitar has some note that have been moved.
Some ms delay (about +20ms on EGT1,Tremolo, AGT,
+40 ms on the first solo, -20 ms on the second one)

Flex pitch edit on the vocals track, really carefully on the lead vocals track, wanted to keep it natural, drastic on the other vocals.

That’s it, good luck to everybody, and thank you for the excellent song !!!
WAVE
MP3

[MOA22]

MP3 preview with Dropbox is CRAP !!!!

[MOA22]

Dobebon,

wow ! Your mix is so cool !!!! Nothing to to say but maybe a db too much of e-bass. (my taste)
Everything is clear. What a lo mid !!!

[RichardClarke]

I really enjoyed this track, I am definitely a 90's child! I really like the voice and found myself humming this song at work quite a few times Thanks very much for providing it.

I did try to do some tempo tracking to tighten up the performance but its not something I am practiced at and so I abandoned it in the end as I was running out of time to work on it. It taught me a bit about how to approach that and I wanted to do it as part of the challenge but in the end aside from a couple of very obvious wobbles its not the end of the world.

Drums:
Ran the overheads into a group and made the mono below around 300hz with vitamin, then added a little EQ with SSL channel.

Kick I put through SSL G channel with some EQ and then used maxx bass to try to extend the lows a little (still not sure about that last choice).

Snare was gated and had SSL channel on it (compression and EQ).

They are all then sent to a group which had C4 multiband compression to try to smooth out the performance as a group (it was just one of the presets for drum buss) and then the SSL G buss again just for subtle compression and its tone. This is then routed to a parallel compression track where I used the CLA 2A with the drum buss setting, I also used the drum buss setting on the F6 too boost some lows and give some width with its M/S EQ. They original drum buss also goes to a drum verb.

Bass:
I put through the F6 and side changed to the kick, CL76 for compression, then some gentle compression on the group too. I also router


Electric Guitars:
Added some EQ, compression and a leslie effect to make it a bit more psychedelic. These all went to a group and were compressed again there to make them sit together.

EGT gain I used Scheps omini channel on 'scheps setting for throaty guitar and then dialed it back a little.

Lead Guitar:
I used the F6 to tame some rought frequencies, compressed it and then used Tape delay J37 to make it a bit more interesting. It was also sent to the Vocal Verb plate I had set up.

Acoustic Guitar:
Sent to group, Applied some high pass filtering, compression from the CLA-76 (acoustic setting) and then some Aphex Exciter to try to add some sparkle and presence.

Lead Vocals:
I auto tuned the vocals a little, not a lot and to be honest it probably was not worth it. I thought they sounded fine without it for me and I was really just practicing technique. I also used F6 to pinch out a couple of brittle high frequencies to smooth them out a bit. Then sent to stereo group where I added some CLA-76 compression and Super tap ping pong delay. sent to vocal plate.

Pads:
Just had low pass applied and sent to Vocal plate.

Backing Vocals:
Tuned with Waves Realtime and then printed to save CPU. Some EQ with F6 to smooth them and compression from CLA76

Vocal plate was Abbey Road Plate
Drum Verb was Rverb (i tried Abbey Road plate, it sounded lush and beautiful on the snare, sadly though my old PC can not handle the processing needed and it kept crashing so I settled for Rverb).

Stereo out:
Just had J37 on standard Abbey Road setting for gentle tape saturation/glue and brickwall limiter to avoid any distortion from random transient peaks.


Wav file - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vlWqC ... 50sblvGsVt
MP3 file - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1sbdIB ... EdAnqQ7jda

Drums - https://drive.google.com/open?id=15kAqL ... VIEJbKdI4Y
Other channels - https://drive.google.com/open?id=16VBju ... IOGiipsA4H
Groups and Aux Tracks - https://drive.google.com/open?id=15O2a7 ... vsA_ik5m7w

[dobebon]

Dobebon,

wow ! Your mix is so cool !!!! Nothing to to say but maybe a db too much of e-bass. (my taste)
Everything is clear. What a lo mid !!!

Thanks MOA22, my wife also told me the bass is too loud but the studio is overrun with family now!

I really like your mix, great balance with the guitars.

[delicate]

Here is my mix.

MP3 preview — yadi.sk/d/21VeVV4_A1ZsiQ
WAV (44.1) — yadi.sk/d/MN2ApVaSP84Lwg

Overall
— I've used bx_console N on each channel just to get a little saturation and drift.
— Slight cross-talk accross the channels (4%).
— Slight volume automation here and there (just started incorporating this quite simple tool into my mixing approach)
— No samples used

Drums
— Kick was clipped, EQed, and moderately compressed with +10db Compressor with 25ms attack.
— Snare was also clipped, EQed, and compressed with +10db Compressor with 25ms attack.
— Overheads SUM was saturated with Omega 458a, dipped at 450hz, and then again EQed.
— Toms were highpassed and dipped at 800hz.
— Room was dynamically EQed and compressed with an 1176-style comp (roughly 7-10db of gain reduction). The track was much lower in volume than other drums, just to give a little depth. I wanted the drums to be pretty dry.
— Drum BUS was slightly compressed in parallel, and saturated with XLA-3 compressor.

Bass
— Bass was slightly distorted and EQed with REDDI, and then heavily compressed with XLA-3 (~80% wet).

Acoustics Guitar
— AcGtrs were blended and grouped, then I used Haas effect.
— Gently highpassed at 180hz, with several notches across the spectrum.
— Then EQed and compressed with SDRR.

E-Guitars
— EGT1and EGT2 were panned left and right, and grouped. Then micro-pitch shifted with Eventide Ultrachannel, notched at 2.7khz, slightly compressed with McDSP u670, sent to a plate reverb.
— EGT GAIN was treated with Contemporary Color (LoMid & HiMid bands), notched at 2.47khz, dipped at 465hz. Sent to a plate reverb.
— Lead GTR was saturated with Omega 458a, treated with Contemporary Color (LoMid & HiMid bands), heavily comoressed with XLA-3. Sent to a slap-back delay (stock).
— Tremolo was treated roughly similar to the lead, with a notch at 2.47khz.
— All guitars were grouped, with automated EQ band that is dipping wide range at 2.2khz to make space for vocal (1db). Tremolo was heavily ducked in the same-range with Nova EQ.

Pads
— Just high- and low-passed.

Vocals
— Lead was treated with tape, a kiss of transformer saturation, dynamically EQed, compressed in series with XLA-3 and MJUC. Sent to a hall reverb (1.5s) with 600hz-8.5khz band pass.
— Backs were panned, grouped, treated with tape to tame harshness (not to a great extent), heavily dipped at 2k to make space for the lead, and compressed with XLA-3.

Mixbus
— Highpassed at 28hz, 2db notch at 164hz, and -0.7db at 2.5khz.
— Then Solid Bus Comp with 30ms/400ms settings.
— Then I used SmartEQ2 to slighly alter the overall spectral balance (+1db at ~90hz, -0.5db at 200-1000hz, +1db at 5-8khz).
— Just passed through a Pultec emulation for additional highpass and saturation.

[Photonic]

Hi all,

What a nice song! Thank you so much for providing it. It never got boring during mixing.
My approach was to bring out your nice deep voice very well. More intimate than in the original mix. More upfront to the listener. I used all provided voice tracks.
And this time I did a bit more than just mixing the provided tracks. I had the feeling that the song needs something to break the pure repetition of the chorus. So I muted all the instruments at the begin of the third chorus and shifted the begin of the BG Vox a bit to make more attention to the voice. I can only hope that you like this idea!

Mixed in Reaper v5.51

Drum-Bus: ReaEQ, Presswerk (Drum-Compressor mode)
Kick: ReaEQ, ReaComp
Snare: ReaEQ, ReaComp, Transpire to reduce the transient a bit.
Toms: ReEQ
OH and Room: ReaEQ, ReaComp

Bass: Bass Professor II (Sonic Anomaly)

AGT: ReaEQ, ReaComp, Transpire to reduce the transient a bit.
EGT 1&2: ReaEQ, ReaComp
EGT Lead: ReaEQ, ReaComp, NastyDLA
EGT Gain and Trem Guit: ReaEQ, ReaDelay to produce a stereo effect with a short delay on the second channel

Pad 1&2: ReaEQ, NastyDLA

Vox Lead: ReaEQ, Presswerk (Vocal-Compressor mode), TDR Nova (de-esser), ReaDelay for a short slap-delay
All other Vox: ReaEQ, S.LAX (Sonic Anomaly)

Mix-Bus: MQ57, Presswerk (Bus-Compressor mode), Span
All Reverbs: Acon Digital Verberate

MP3: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e4ja50cpma1oq ... c.mp3?dl=1
WAV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/i2bcfcciesc4w ... c.wav?dl=1

[Dodgingrain]

Here are mine:
mp3: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AqpB-RLndYJriuUVS78aR5sTladBuQ
wav: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AqpB-RLndYJriuUWZ69MuxGaeFwfAA

I used an old Crash Test Dummy's song for reference as the vocal and the instrumentation was similar. Other than balance work there really isn't anything super fancy on this mix. I tried to get things to balance and breathe and just make it sound good. It was also a good opportunity to do my first mix in Cubase 10. This one is mostly eq, compression, some delays, and reverb.

For the drums I did some hard parallel compression and enhanced the kick and snare with some samples to reinforce them. I left the rest of the drums as is other than some eq and a little bit of reverb. The kick has the typical smiley face eq settings. There also is some transient designer work on the original drums to give them more punch.

I made pretty heavy use of the ACME Opticom XLA3 compressor which is becoming one of my favorites despite its limited control set. It can give a nice crunch sometimes and I used it on the lead vocals and lead guitar. I'm pretty happy with what it did to the lead guitar solo with the fast setting. With the lead guitar and vocals there is also some delay. In the case of the vocals there is a slap delay along with a longer tempo synched delay. The treatment on the lead guitar is similar in regards to delays.

The pads have lots of reverb to try and widen and wash them out.

The backing vocals and lead vocals have a little bit of opposing eq to get them to fit better with each other.

There is some dynamic eq on the backing guitars and tremelo guitar to make space for lead vocals and the guitar solo.

Typical eq settings on the bass to cut at the kicks frequency and boost just above that. I did also run through a bass amp to add some harmonics.

There is some volume automation and eq automation in a few places to try and add more drama to the song.

Beyond that there is an SSL bus compressor on the pre main that is hitting 3dB of reduction on the loudest parts to help glue things together.

I look forward to feedback on what does and doesn't work.

Have a great holiday.

[Sham]

Hey folks,
first of all thank you for this opportunity.
I had a go at this competition and I had a lot of fun to be honest.

Here are the links:
WAV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1julobvtgg84v ... m.wav?dl=0

MP3: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6mde40z4eqlsp ... m.mp3?dl=0

The Song is really good and the recording is maybe not the best, but it's a sympathetically lively performance and I tried to keep that character.
A good song is a good song.

Now to my mix..
I mixed this at home with my old 2010 MacBook Pro in Logic.. so there wasn't a whole lot of processing power.
I made a lot of busses and tried to stick with stock plugins where possible .. still I maxed out the ressources.
While I do have an office with a powerful computer, that I actually use for mixing I wanted to try it at home with limitations.
The sound reference is early CCR which I took some influence from, soundwise.
But also I found this should sound as modern as possible to stand a chance to shine so my personal reference was the johnny cash version of hurt even though it is a very high aim.

I tried to keep it natural and went pretty gentle with compression except for a drum crush bus, where I parallel compressed the living shit out of the OH and snare to add some tiny bit of excitement into that drumset even though I didn't add a lot of it in the final mix.

In the beginning I focused a lot on the acoustic guitars which had a lot of unflattering frequencies going on, somewhere around 10k I even had to de-ess them.

next up the drums. It was pretty straight forward I didn't feel like I needed to replace anything it's not a heavy rock song it doesn't need a hard hitting resonant snare. So I did the obvious - EQ'ed, tried to tackle the offending cymbals, taking some of the junk frequencies out.
The OH and the Room Mics share one drumroom the snare got its own channel of reverb and delay. I empowered the toms a bit more, by making the fundamental pitch dominating in the frequency spectrum, and let the overtones roll of evenly, which made them quite a lot bigger and fuller in my opinion.

Bass
I had to fiddle with it quite a lot as you can see in the screenshots there are a lot of plugins on that thing. I was looking for a really carrying bass that is not overpowering the whole mix but is very present without being annoying. I side chained the bass to the bass drum with fast attack and release for them to get outta the way of each other. Because I had to do so a lot to it I tried to use a lot of different eq plugins and made small steps, when it comes to certain frequency spectrums. The surgical cutting I try to do with as few plugins as possible, obviously.
Also a touch of good, ol', trusty RBass and a bit of compression, just to keep it tame.

Electric Axx
I couldn't get to grip with these. While the acoustic guitar was played sweetly with nice feeling and vibe the electric guitar was a bit painful.
the distorted one was super out of tune and sloppily played, so I tried to find the right volume for it to drive the chorus a bit but at the same time not be too audible. same for the trem guitar, the tremolo on it was too hardcore in my opinion, so I mellowed it out with some delay so it doesnt go from loud to dead silent.
Lead and Main 1 + 2 were okay. But I felt the acoustic guitar should be the leading one or at least be the same level as the electric guitar.

Pads
Well they're ambient and I think they add to it and sounded alright. I just highpassed them basically.

Vocals
While the performance is certainly not perfect I felt that it was quite charming. A bit of falling up and down the stairs pitchwise sometimes but beautiful voice with nice timbre to it.
I think the microphone used didn't do it much justice. The sibilance was pretty harsh I de-essed the vocals at around 5.3kHz and found the lower octave of that, so around 2.6 kHz, also quite offensive, still doesn't sound great but i think it's alright.
Now if I took some more time for it I would've debreathed the vocal manually, going through the track but that's not a lot of fun and the resulting mix anyways couldn't reach a level where that matters. I wanted to make an RE20 out of that mic so I boosted quite a bit around that 100Hz area and I cut all the offensive mids and highs surgically. I felt then that I went too far and went back a bit. The CLA-3A helped the sound quite a bit but honestly I didn't compress too hard. I didn't want to change what it is I only wanted to enhance it to the best I could.

Well I guess that's about it.
The Master Bus has a bit of SSL G Buss Compressor on it with 3 ms of attack and .6s of release.
Gain Reduction less than 4dB and 4:1 ratio.
It seemed to me that this made it better.
I did very few automisation- only vocals

The resulting track has a nice healthy dynamic range, good stereo field, mono works out okay and the frequency analyzer shows a nice picture.

Here are some pictures
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/aa2yi4bokjcc ... ftzqa?dl=0

Hope you like it and I am gladly awaiting all of you guys' feedback