Mix Challenge

This is my first time participating, I am a mixing engineer from Japan.
Competitions themselves are almost non-existent in Japan, so I was surprised to see how active this community is...!
I would like to participate actively from now on.

I saw the request rules in translation, but I'm sorry if I'm wrong!

Track -> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VKDwEH ... sp=sharing
-------------------
When I heard this song, I suddenly felt a warm feeling in my heart. On my way home after a long journey, the lights of the city in the distance reassured me, and I thought of the smiling faces of my loved ones - such moments naturally spread out before my eyes.

So, fundamentally, I imagined a sound with softness and warmth.
It is possible that the sound may differ from the image of Strange, but I know from my past experience that music is ultimately a subjective product, so I trusted my sensibilities and mixed the music!
I hope you like this proposal as one answer.

There are many points that I was particular about, but I will only mention the points that I like the most because it may be difficult to read if it gets too long.

For the vocals, I used Abbey Road Plates Vocal Reamp and Driven Vocal Room to create space, and H-Delay was added as an afterthought to create depth on the sides.
It sounds very roomy, but on the contrary, I think it sounds impressive!

For the drum bass, I used Pulsar Mu with a bass comp to make the drums sound a little crisper.

Monitor speakers are GENELEC 8330AP, corrected with GLM.
TAGO STUDIO T3-01 is used for headphone check.
I/O is RME ADI-2DAC fs.

This was a very nice piece of music! I am looking forward to the release!
Thank you,, Strange...!

Sorry if it is hard to read as it is translated by DeepL!

Very interesting song.

Here's my mix.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uUxbOH ... drive_link

I'm still not sure if I like it or not, but a good mixer will try and find ways to bring out the right spirit of the song. Even if it's not immediately apparent where to start or what to focus on.

To start, I listened to the version on Soudcloud and the version provided. Something that I noticed on both mixes was that they felt rather narrow in the stereo field which left it feeling a bit claustrophobic to me. Due to that, I felt that the "bouncy and soulful feeling" that Strange was looking for might be better achieved by trying to use a sense of space and motion.

With that in mind, I used a ping pong delay at the very beginning with the electric piano to immediately give a sense of movement by having it changing the subdivision of the beats. I feel that this also gives the listener the correct tempo to expect when the rest of the song kicks in.

Next I bussed the bass to an aux track and used a chorus on it to fill out the low end and give it a sense of moving. It's a subtle thing, but it's effective.

Something else that I did was use stereo delays where one side is set to 0 ms and the other to something like 24-33 ms. Then I pull down the delayed side a bit and this gives the song a sense of balance between the instruments as well as making it sound like it's being played in a room and bouncing off the far wall. This sense of space helps things like they are living in the same space. I did this on the guitars, the vocals, some of the claps and some of the synth parts.

Something else I paid attention to was how the drums and bass were working together. If those two things don't groove, nothing laid on top of it will. The kick drum was rather difficult to get to sound the way that I wanted to, and I would have probably layered the snare sample that's in with the hand claps over the snare in the rest of the song if given the opportunity.

There were a few other tricks that I used to try and get a better sense of cohesive space in the song like delays run into reverbs run into a stereo widener on things like the snare drum or on my submaster fader.

Lastly I ran the mix through a Black Lion summing mixer and back in before bouncing it out of pro tools. I find that it has a particular sound that I like, particularly in the bass and the kick.

My mixing setup consists of Pro Tools, a Tascam US20x20 interface run out through a Black Lion summing mixer, then back into the interface/Pro Tools and out though a par of Fostex PM 8.4.1 monitors coupled with a Presonus T10 sub. My room is untreated, but there's enough bookcases, couches and some other things in the room for it not to matter too much.

Anyways, my goal in mixing was to get the song to dance and the meet what Strange was looking for in making it sound happy.

My version : https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code ... vz5bVPxANk

Mostly done with stock reaper plugins + some Tukan ones - bus compressors and revurbs.
A bit clipping on kick and the snare and paralel compression. Rest is simple eqing and 2-3 compressors here and there.
I don't really think about feelings when I mix.
Mixed on simple relatively flat computer speakers + finale check on beyerdynamic Dt 900 pro (250 oms) + eq preset to make them flat and by flat i mean ----- not harman.

Strange wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 03, 2025 02:39 CEST

Swiv_In_Da_Mix wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 03, 2025 02:01 CEST

Hello Everyone,

1st time posting on this site, hopefully my mix is uploaded .
The song is energetic and I enjoyed the process, I'm not going to bore you with all the mixing steps I took none the less I'm learning how to mix and this was a good file to practice on . Thank you to the producer who is very talented to produce and play all the instruments etc, I'm looking forward to your future release.

Swiv_in_Da_Mix
NYC, USA

Listen MC103__Strange__WegZuDir__SwivindaMix@gmail

Notes
Love the transition at the 2 minute mark
Mix Buss:
UAD SSL E 4000_added some 12Khz and 50HZ
Black Box_Saturation
SSL Bus compressor 2_Glue the mix, release @100 and attack @ 10, gain reduction around -3db

Hi Swiv_in_Da_Mix,
Thank you for your interest in my music, but I can’t get a public access to your upload, perhaps you have to change some options for sharing…good luck!

I Mr. Strange thank you for informing about the access issue. I went to my settings and changed it to public, perhaps you can let me know if this resolved the issue.

Respectfully,
Swiv_in_Da_Mix

Hi everyone!


Listen here!

Equipment

Mixed with Behringer Truth B2031 w/o sub & Sennheiser HD-599.
My mixing environment is not treated for speakers or headphones.
I used Reaper to mix.

About the mix

After reading the notes and wishes from Strange. I gave also a listen for the reference tracks Happy and Original mix.
Notable, but minor changes are 8th note delay for hihat, re-amp for the c-part and some vinyl noise for outro. I hope you like the minor changes.

For intro whistle I used high shelf and bell EQ to get the air sound, then used Raum to generate nice reverb tail, mixed this a bit with the synth whistle.

Maybe image tells more than 1000 words, so check the DAW image linked below:
https://drive.usercontent.google.com/do ... authuser=0

Making the Kick and Bass work was most challenge for for me. Bass had some extra sounds, aka free string playing some parts, which I trimmed with Reaper's transient based split, but i didn't quantize it to grid, even i was tempted. I discarded the bass amp sound totally and used DI sound with Guitar rig, ran it later trough tube dist as well. For kick I used Gate, EQ and transient master and added later distortion to get more power for the sound.

Snare was another problem for me, but I tamed it with Melda AutoAlign, EQ and finalized the sound with camel crusher and transient master to give it more punch.

For guitars I used ping-pong delays and reverb and EQ, and some chorus to widen the sound field.

Hopefully you like the outcome!

- reaby

Swiv_In_Da_Mix wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 03, 2025 13:04 CEST

Strange wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 03, 2025 02:39 CEST

Swiv_In_Da_Mix wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 03, 2025 02:01 CEST

Hello Everyone,

1st time posting on this site, hopefully my mix is uploaded .
The song is energetic and I enjoyed the process, I'm not going to bore you with all the mixing steps I took none the less I'm learning how to mix and this was a good file to practice on . Thank you to the producer who is very talented to produce and play all the instruments etc, I'm looking forward to your future release.

Swiv_in_Da_Mix
NYC, USA

Listen MC103__Strange__WegZuDir__SwivindaMix@gmail

Notes
Love the transition at the 2 minute mark
Mix Buss:
UAD SSL E 4000_added some 12Khz and 50HZ
Black Box_Saturation
SSL Bus compressor 2_Glue the mix, release @100 and attack @ 10, gain reduction around -3db

Hi Swiv_in_Da_Mix,
Thank you for your interest in my music, but I can’t get a public access to your upload, perhaps you have to change some options for sharing…good luck!

I Mr. Strange thank you for informing about the access issue. I went to my settings and changed it to public, perhaps you can let me know if this resolved the issue.

Respectfully,
Swiv_in_Da_Mix

It works, thank you!

Hello,

thanks for an interesting submission of multitrack for this contest.

I approached the song as follows:
*got all tracks in a project and set them up in subfolders and whatnot
*incrementally listened to tracks piling up from kick to the FX meanwhile adjusting each of the volume as I saw fit to get a rough mix
*started panning things around and got to the vibe of the song

First tried to understand it and then enhance things one by one to make this a "happy" song, warm and playful
Naturally started with the kick, because it's the rhythm driving instrument, then snares and right after that got to play with the bass.
The bass took the lows and sub lows from the DI and cut everything above it, then took the attack, the crunch and rumble of the bass amp and blended them together, I felt like the bass amp did not have the low end I needed to compliment the roundness of the kick drum, needed something more.
Gradually I moved from instrument to instrument from the rhythmic to the "ear candies" and finally I have put the vocals on top to sit in the middle and focus the listener on them.

I did a bunch of automation to move things around where they make sense to sit in that moment of the song, treated a bit the song as a whole to give it the character I wanted with some mild saturation.

If interested in the plugins I used for this, feel free to contact me in pm

I worked primarily on Sennheiser HD650, those are my main trusted headphones to work on, after I got a mix on them, I checked it on my Kali IN5s installed on stands about 1,8m from myself. No Sonarworks corrections, I feel like the "flat" does not work for me. When trying to finalize the mix and the overall tone I kept bouncing from monitors to headphones back to monitors with an EQ I set up in my monitoring chain, where I cut everything below 200Hz and everything above 5k, to "emulate" a single driver speaker like a phone or a BT speaker, I made sure basically that the main elements are still there even on small devices even in mono, this song is mono compatible surprisingly well, kudos to the arrangement. And listened of course on my trusted no name earbuds, just because I know how they sound.

That is basically it, here is the link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EkyuoS ... sp=sharing

Cheers,
GeorgeCorg

Hey all this is my mix

https://soundcloud.com/niklas-str-m/103 ... al_sharing

Swiv_In_Da_Mix wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 03, 2025 02:01 CEST

Hello Everyone,

1st time posting on this site, hopefully my mix is uploaded .

Hey Swiv_In_Da_Mix I just checked out your mix and noticed it sitting around -11.3 LUFS while the maximum loudness permitted is, -16 LUFS. Maybe normalise your mix and reupload it.

DSBotez wrote: ↑

Fri Apr 04, 2025 10:11 CEST

Hey Swiv_In_Da_Mix I just checked out your mix and noticed it sitting around -11.3 LUFS while the maximum loudness permitted is, -16 LUFS. Maybe normalise your mix and reupload it.

Re-Uploading is not allowed. The entry is final.

The Rules and Guidelines have been crystal clear about that.

Please do not assume my role as host and keeper of the rules.
Thank you.