MIX CHALLENGE - MC066 June 2020 - Winners announced

[Icetone]

Hey,
R2 is still on. With that in mind,
mix audio .wav
mix background image .jpg
Thank you for your time.

[Flood]

Hi everyone,

Here's my mix for round 2:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3l04ddzvvem98 ... 2.wav?dl=0

What I've done:
- reduced reverb on vocals
- high filter cuts on reverbs (even more than before)
- tried to reduce overall harshness by taking away some of the harsh frequencies on the different instruments and vocal
- worked on snare since I felt it was to much distorted and not pleasing
- reduced some muddiness of the drums

Thanks John for this challenge!

Good luck to all as well!
Cheers,
Flood

[john]

Hello,

Here is my mix for round 2. I reduced the bass, and re-balanced the elements to put a little more emphasis on the guitars.

Thanks again for sharing your tracks, and critically listening to all these mixes!

Cheers!

-John

Dropbox: MC066_Mystic_Io_TheReason_john_round2.wav

[Denzzony]

Hello ! I worked a little on balance, made the drums less aggressive, added more reverb to the vocals, made automation. Here is my mix:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UQ6r1r ... sp=sharing

Thanks to the organizers and all participants.

[Mister Fox]

It's the 30th June 2020, 01:50 (UTC+2) - the 2nd Mix Round has officially ended.

Sadly, not everyone has sent in an edit (VasDim)
We have no submissions after the deadline.

Please check your upload links again, and have an eye on this thread for the final results.



I'm now opening up the room (again) for Q&A's and giving each other feedback (which is highly encouraged)

Please check out all other games on the community.


See you on the flipside.

[ThaSome]

Hello again!


I know I'm not the authour but I wanted to give you to all guys some words..

In this commentaries for all, I just wanted to say that I'm focusing on the best things I'm
hearing for each of your mixes, constructive comments.

I hope no one is left.


AndrewMcPherson:
When I hear your drums I feel like a pumping thing that you only hear when you listen
to mastered tracks, great job. This makes my hair stand on end.
Well done with the voice, the presence is more in 2Khz feels quite nice.



Denzzony:
In your mix I'm liking that it sounds like good recording (those are the words that come in mind to me so DOESN'T mean
that original recordings were bad),
good balancing and pretty good job with reverbs.
It was just curious for me the effect at 2:08 of the guitar.


Flood:
Your mix is musically sweet for me, and I think that this mastered could raise
a lot of details in your mix, because it feels with quality and uncompressed.
The drums are rock.


Icetone:
As contrary to John, yours feels for me cold and mysterious.
The pianos of 'She told you, to listen...' made this to me a feeling of:
'What is going to happen next!?'- Nice and cool one mix.


Jerze:
Incredible job with panning, accoustically great space for everything to sound.
And those drums are not taking the entire protagonism as my mix for round 1.
Really wanted to emphasize that guitars are well panned.


John:
I'm sure you have worked so fine with micro-pitch to the main vocals.
Your mix for me sounds warm and I think you did a good job avoiding some harsh frequencies,
Maybe you worked with less reverb than other mixes, but cozy feeling feels nice.


Kirurg:
The room you recreated is very natural,
your mix doesn't have harshness. This sounds Vintage.
Good job. This mastered I'm sure will get even more potential. Good work!


MattRocket:
Crunchy guitars, piano vibratos, incredible micro-pitched vocals!
You have a lot of heavy artillery (effects) that sounds Great.
Matt that is really creative mixing. Well done!


Miha:
Your drums sound so organically, that is spectacular, I would really like
to hear how did you make those kicks to sound like that.
Everything sounds in harmony for me, I just missed a tiny tiny bit of vocal presence.


MiniTooth:
Good job with bright mix.
In your mix everything sounds panned but organized, never messy.
I want to get to a swimming pool with your track playing. Good vibes mate.


Rvalle:
Snare drum feels to me imponent and with enough presence in lows.
I really enjoyed the transitions of the song with this. It's like when a car needs
a good transmission to the wheels, and 'this car', have it. Gj


Skible:
Well balanced.
And nice reverb effects.
Perfectly radio-ready/streaming-ready sound, I feel it! Gj


Zsolt:
Well done with balance of drums and voice, good snare tail/reverb.
The general eq you applied to each track feels like in your entire mix has a
filter for reducing some frequencies. This isn't bad, sounds good.



To all participants:


I bet that there is a reason for John to choose 15 participants...

It's my first time inside the Roundup 2, I just wanted to say to everyone that thank you and
would be great if at some time we can give support also to people that
didn't get into this round, if you have someone particularly you want to share a comment, in the another forum discussion for this mix challenge.
Or if you guys want also some feedback (from round 1) I would love also to give some friendly comments for you,
just ask for it in the another post.

Thank you and good luck to all.
ThaSome

[White Punk OD]

Thanks so much ThaSome.

As I was not picked, still I did a new mix and added it to my old posting #59.
( https://mix-challenge.com/forum/viewtop ... 7978#p7978 )

To me, it is hard to guess what the wishes by the client are, I adapt to people I know in person, and who's life and art I know about.
So what I did is apply my own standards, and this means I have to work until I love the SONG.
It's all about the song. Mix this, drums that. It does not matter. People must love the song in a playlist.
BTW the outro was played with love, no way I could fade it out.

So, that's all a bit - how can I tell with my poor English - where is the song? It all sounds so dry.
A couple of mixes I liked best, thats RJR and rvalle, but also Miha for the raw energy, this does not come without skill and a heart.
ThaSome has a lot of merit in the later parts. It becomes really dense and the groove gets into motion. Very good vocals.

---
What did anyone do about the drum tracks, that have a spectral cut-off at 10k ?!
This is a challenge, and many mixes suffer from this. I duplicated the overhead track, and pitched it 8 semitones higher, and highpassed it, mixed it in very subtly, and then threw a tape plugin on the drum room bus (that's what I do, almost everytime cymbals+overhead+room mics will get stuffed into a room bus that creates the 3D expression as well as all the pumping.)
For the HiHat I created higher frequencies with a saturator.
Then, the DSM spectral processor could eventually make something good of that.

I decided that I want to follow those masters that sell top of the pop, and who showed in their educational examples, that the mix should sound practically the same as the final product, thus a lot of compression and balancing and "style effect" has already to be done on the mix bus.

Thanks to anyone listening, and sorry to Mr.John if I could not meet your taste, but thankyou so much anyway, I am very confident you could play this to your fans, and at least they will have a good laugh, but probably a lot of fun just about the music that will remind them of these good ol' times, when Duran Duran, Billy Idol, Alphaville, Ultravox, Talk Talk were all around, and reverb was the drug that alone did half the job, no matter what intake we had. While mixing, I dialed in Youtube about all these bands. Some uploads have more like cassette quality but many million plays.

I did not do the full amount of reverb, but placed quite a lot here and there. Sure more than anyone else, I guess.
I hope I didn't too bad, still very humbly.

[Denzzony]

Hello again!


I know I'm not the authour but I wanted to give you to all guys some words..

In this commentaries for all, I just wanted to say that I'm focusing on the best things I'm
hearing for each of your mixes, constructive comments.

I hope no one is left.



Denzzony:
In your mix I'm liking that it sounds like good recording (those are the words that come in mind to me so DOESN'T mean
that original recordings were bad),
good balancing and pretty good job with reverbs.
It was just curious for me the effect at 2:08 of the guitar.


Greetings! Thanks for the feedback! On solo in the first part, I used Eventide Micropitch with a Dive press and automation.

[Miha]

Miha:
Your drums sound so organically, that is spectacular, I would really like
to hear how did you make those kicks to sound like that.
Everything sounds in harmony for me, I just missed a tiny tiny bit of vocal presence.

Hey thanks for the feedback Thasome !

I'm usually not that good at shaping drums so I'm glad you like what I did !
Here is my sauce :
I first balanced the overheads, cymbals and hihat as a whole, trying to get a natural drum balance on their own. Then the room 2 is ducked -2dB by the overheads to help adding a little focus on the overall drum picture. I also put a tape saturator at the end of the drum bus chain.
For kick and snare, no fancy trick (not even parallel compression):
Kick : transient designer 5dB atk > Comp Tubetech CL1B = Ro @ 4.1, atk @ medium-slow, Rel @ medium-fast > EQ API 550 = +6dB @ 50Hz, -3dB @ 500Hz, +6dB @ 1.5 kHz
Snare : Tubetech CL1B = Ro @ 4.1 atk @ medium-slow, Rel @ medium-fast > EQ API 550 = -3dB@ 400Hz, +5dB @240, +1dB @ 3Khz, + 1.5dB @ 12.5kHz

Good luck for round 2 !

[White Punk OD]

Meanwhile, I hope it is ok to post some statistics and remarks.

Above grouped names, there are page numbers. Name is follwed by #posting number.
§§ = entry made it into top 15.
* = I like the mix, but I did ramdomly listen into a few only, and left out some.

I made some sporadic remarks, and beg for forgiveness in case the very shortened wording does not sound polite.
My focus is on elements that I suggest might be subject to experimenting and some change, if the mix gets a review.
So there was no room to list everything that was good, and it was a wonderful lot of good stuff!
I try to assume the position of a listener, so there is much of opinion in this, and I may ignore a couple of technical issues.
If not mentioned otherwise, it is an analysis only about R1.

===========================================
-1
1 chriskamery 8
2 filipandrei 9
-2
3 Photonic 12
4 Necaster 13
5 ramgonzalezlo 14
6 soundhoneystudios 17
7 SuC76 18 *** feels authentic, very clear vocal sound, great drums, the right thing to do
8 rapidstone 19
9 Alex Van mixland 20
-3
10 jeffssoloband 21
11 Spinum 22
12 alavault 23 loud, echo becomes distracting, general EQ too much into "smilie curve"
13 PenguinJon 24
14 copyc4t 25 voc too far in the backgrd
15 pabloAT 28
16 MiniTooth 29 §§
17 Milosz 30
-4
18 Dodgingrain 31
19 Nonlinear 32
20 MFTWC 33 very dry, bass might afford some sound shaping, else sounds good
21 doobop 34
22 hjchjc 35
23 GB Real 36
24 VasDim 37 §§
25 ZioPaperone358 38
26 Green-Dog 39
27 Miha 40 §§
-5
28 Oba Ozai 41
29 takafinir 42
30 Jerze 43 §§ loud, plz shape the bass a bit differently, vocals sound clear
31 Schwefelhard 45 snare is dull
32 kirurg 46 §§
33 FromAtoZMix 47 404 gone
34 RJR 48
35 mattim 49 now thats a bit much reverb on sn, intensity depends on other sounds that push rev aside, so in some moments it fits, e.g. chorus is good
36 Skible 50 §§
-6
37 Flood 51 §§ loud, snare seems boomy
38 MattRocket 52 §§ ** a lot of the "raw energy", good epiano chorus effect, but sounds fuller than I need in verse 2, nice harmo vc but voicing does not work too well in a couple of notes, solo is a bit loud
39 ThaSome 53 §§
40 Pemberley 54
41 zeminor 55 *
42 AndrewMcPherson 57 §§ R2 ** snare a bit hard and super punchy for that style, good vocal sound, solo: echo distracts from melody
43 EchoOread 58,71
44 White Punk OD 59
-7
45 cpsmusic 61 locked
46 bluesation 62 keyb good, drums dry, git sometimes too buried, during solo we might like more rev on drums and a thicker bass; bass disappears when vocals or keyb are loud
47 beyondthemind 63
48 gambler 64
49 Zsolt 65 §§
50 Icetone 67 §§ ** kick: can we hipass a little bit?
51 john 68 §§
52 Matik 69
-8
53 andrepvh 72 * git has extra distortion effect on chorus? instrument section during chorus sounds a bit boxy - for this also try make kick and bass sound bigger. hihat is loud and masks the snare that appears a bit dull therefor.
54 rvalle 73 §§ ** not sure if R2 is really better because the reduction in the subs went a bit far.
55 Blang 74
56 Moses 75
57 canese 76
58 Lewshwa Music 77
59 SyroniC_GP 78
60 Franz 79 **
61 linden6790 80 ** HH in vers 2 seems too much, very good 80ies effects
-9
62 Denzzony 81 §§
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