MIX CHALLENGE - MC098 June 2024 - Winners announced

[Pingafuego]

Thanks @Arnwyn for this beautifull song, very well produced and recorded!

Thanks Mister Fox for hosting this mix challenge!

My entry:


https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uu1KjN ... sp=sharing


This song was mixed in Universal Audio Luna, using Brainworx Console_N plugin in all channels for console emulation.

All channels have Luna built in UAD Studer A800 tape emulation (250 Tape, 15 IPS), for subtle compression and saturation, summed to built in API Summing emulation.

In the master bus there are: Slate VTM tape (2 track emulation), Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor with very subtle compression, Ozone 10 for de-harshening and micro dynamics management (Dynamic Eq, Impact and Stabilizer modules – the mastering limiter was not used), Bassroom eq for low end control, and bx_limiter True Peak for tone enhancement, peak control and metering.

The drums all have Console N for eq and compression, into Drum Bus with API 2500 compressor, for glue and a bit of smack. Reverbs are CLA Epic (drum room) and Bricasti Plate (stick and snare). There’s a parallel send for drum crush (1176 Rev A). There is a clipper applied to the toms (BSA Clipper) for peak control.

The bass has the console emulation for low, low mid, and high frequences, and Softube VCA Compressor for dynamic control and tone.

Piano has stereo panning, with console for eq and filtering, and LA-2A compression.

Acoustic guitars are hard panned, with console (tone and filtering) and 1176AE for compression and character. There are send to instrument room reverb (Lexicon 224 Hall), and ADA Flanger for color and a little movement.

Lead vocal channels are balanced and go into console (Neve high frequency and filtering), 1176 Rev A and LA-2A Silver emulation, and last Lindell 902 De-esser. There are reverb (Soundtoys Little plate) and delay (Repeater) sends.

Background vocals are mixed into a bus with La-2 compressor and Noveltech Vocal Enhancer, for tone and presence, and sent to Eventide H3000 plugin for the Dual H910 preset (micro pitch). There are also plate (Little plate) and Lexicon 224 (Hall) reverbs.

The mix challenge rules parameters were checked with Mastering the Mix Expose 2 software.

Thanks for listening, and good luck to all!

[GersonArdilaVerjel]

Excited to Share My Submission for the "Robot Baby" Mix Contest!
Hello everyone, I'm thrilled to present my mix for the "Robot Baby" song contest. Inspired by the techniques of Andy Wallace, using approach to bring this track to life.
Mixing Techniques and Processing:
Reverbs and Delays: Implemented three primary reverbs of short, medium, and long durations. (and more)
Added delays and a vocal doubler to enhance the vocal presence.
Parallel Processing: Applied parallel processing to the drums, especially focusing on the toms, which were quite challenging at first. Extended this processing to the kick and guitars for added depth and punch.
SSL 4000E Emulation: Emulated the iconic 4000E on every track, ensuring that classic analog warmth and precision. I think that it is with the song mood.
Creative Enhancements: In line with the artists' recommendations, I automated some parallel sends to effects using "OVOX - Waves," adding a robotic feel and dynamic contrast where suggested. To emphasize the robotic theme, I used effects, creative panning, and sound treatments, particularly on lines like "permission to birth," "the motherless life," and "sleeping feeling confused." This approach added a non-human, artificial layer to the vocals. (01:17, 02:23, 02:38)
To maintain the mix's integrity, I made subtle high-frequency corrections to eliminate harsh sounds, particularly focusing on vowel whistles and extraneous harmonics, like artists has mentioned.
Artistic Vision: The song carries a profound emotional weight—it's a sad, almost grieving piece, tinged with anger. My goal was to reflect the "emptiness" and "hollowness" of a disconnected mother and robot baby. I paid close attention to dynamics, especially in quieter sections, to capture the live performance's energy, which was noted as lacking in previous mixes.
Vocals and Effects:
Plugins Used: SSL 4000E, Decapitator, UAD 1176, Inflator, UAD Manley VOXBOX, Chandler Limited Curve Bender, Soothe, Pro Q3, Lexicon PSP42, Lexicon BM60, Lexicon Chorus, SSL Native Bus Comp… Etc
I also meticulously automated various instruments throughout the song to ensure movement and contrast, further enhancing the emotional journey.
Thank you for the opportunity to share my work. I hope you enjoy the mix as much as I enjoyed mixing it!

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

[ggibson1988]

An interesting / quirky little song. Thoroughly enjoyed working with this one.


My Mix:

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

Kick:

Used Izotope Neutron Transient Shaper, slightly reduced attack and increased sustained from 0-200 hz. Removed most attack and sustain from 200 - 1.3k. Increased attack and reduced sustain from 1.3k to 20k. Committed track.

On rendered track added BSA Clipper (set ceiling at -9db with no attentional gain and ProQ 3 (Carved out some low mids).

Snare:

Duplicated Track. One for actual snare hits and the other for all side sticks. Clipper and Pro Q 3 on both. Routed to Snare Sub with Neve 1073 plug-in with +10db on Pre and slight EQ. Sent to plate and room reverb. Side sticks were sent to 1/8 note delay.

Hats & Crashes:

Lofi on all for added distortion (light distortion, no saturation) Pro Q 3 on all and Distressor for compression on Crashes.


Toms:

Spent quite a bit of time on these. Izotope Neutron on all. Added API 550V with Rack tom presets on 1 & 2 and Floor tom 2 preset on tom 3. Additional EQ with Pro Q 3 then into clipper and onto distressor and finally into another Pro Q 3 for final polish.


Bass:

Duplicated Track. One with High Pass Filter, the other with Low Pass Filter. Added Sans Amp to high pass. Both Sent to Bass Sub with limiter, Pro Q 3, Distressor and Studio D Chorus.

Guitars:

UAD LA2A for slight leveling and PRO Q 3. Panned l & r with Left sent to mono Right Reverb and Right sent to Mono Left Reverb.

Piano:

UAD LA2A and Pro Q 3, sent to 1/8 note delay, routed to Keys Sub Bus with distressor with send to room reverb.

Lead Vox:

Duplicated 14 & 15 twice, for verse, chorus and bridge.

UAD 1176 LN on all with about 3db or GR. Wave Silk and slight delay. Routed to LV Sub with Oxide Tape Slight De-Essing and Pro Q 3.

BV:

Classic 1176 / LA2A Combination with EQ Via Pro Q 3. Chorus and reverb on BV Bus.

[wkanegis]

Hi guys! I enjoyed working on this one and look forward to hearing your mixes!

A few of the main things I did:

I didn't do a a lot to the lead vocal, but put a couple of deep cuts in the mid range in the backup vocals that come in for harmonies intermittently, and I found this added a lot of clarity and separation when they were all singing together, as well as some panning to the extra voices. I did de-ess the vocals slightly. I also did a bit of mid range scooping on the two guitar parts and concentrated the piano into the midrange, so it occupied that space and I think you can hear both the piano and the guitars fairly clearly. I also used the fruity phaser in a static setting applied to the guitars to do a bit of 'comb-filtering', which I also think added to their clarity relative to the other elements of the mix, giving little open pockets in the spectrum where other things can be heard more clearly. I put a little bit of distortion on the drums as a whole in a bus together, a few deep and narrow cuts on the rim shot helped concentrate it more nicely in the frequencies in between and I think it comes through pretty nicely. I enjoyed the sound of the reverb I was using on the snare and toms, so I made it pretty prominent on them compared to other elements of the mix. I automated the dynamics of the kick and guitars and intuitively made them louder and softer when I felt it sounded most musical. The kick was also something I mid-range scooped a bit, so there was a bump in the lows and plenty of energy left around 3k where it cuts through. To the bass I cut at around 300 hz and used with a boost below that, and boosted around 1,350 hz as well, which I think made it more musical at some parts. I was mostly using stock FL studio plug ins like parametric eq 2, maximus for compression, and blood overdrive for a bit of distortion. I did put a free plugin called ThrillseekerVBL on the master bus for gentle bus compression on the whole mix. I would be happy to give more details if anyone is curious!

Here is my mix:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E5HZpl ... drive_link

[Clueless]

Another attempt @ a mix
I know I'm going wrong most of the time
Without feedback its hard to judge progress
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/g7sj7x10 ... wghv3&dl=0

Bass
2 types, one sub, the other more airey, both with vol automated with chrus & verb on airy version
Drums - sent to Room very
Kick, 2, same as bass, no automation
Snare, plate verb
Hats, air added & automated
Stick, as hats
Piano, fx to brighten, & automation, sent to verb
Guitar, fx to brighten, sent to verb
Vocals, eq, stacked slew to soften, just an attempt, sent to verbs & haas
Back vocals, eq & verb
Master
Dc offset, tape, minimal comp settings & peak limiter, which was for saftey


It's been interesting listening to others & getting ideas on what to use
Only problem is, I think I add too much

[Blang]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for providing this cool song. Really enjoyed mixing it, because it was both hard and easy at the same time

The mix:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18AgiN8 ... sp=sharing

After hearing the song, I believed spotlighting the vocal (harmonies) would be the best way to make it as emotive as possible; Even more so than in other pop/folk songs. A big part of this, was simply having them loud in the mix. It doesn’t always have to be hard

The second way to further achieve this goal was, as the song provider mentioned, to enhance the dynamics. This proved to be a slight challenge since the dynamics of the drums are very stable and the only element that comes in and out and the backing vocals. To create an ‘illusion’ of dynamics I added contrast by automating levels, tone and effects to have more distinct sections and unique moments. I also made creative mutes: Lead vocal mostly undubbed (seemed more natural and more contrast with the harmonies), male backings in first line of verse 2 and drums after the bridge. From reading the rules I realise this is frowned upon, but when a beautiful song asks, I can’t say no

Below I’ll share a few notable mix choices:

Guitar: To get a more natural sound I used an impulse response of a Dread-35 SR25 acoustic guitar on the ‘git1-orig’ track.

Bass: Ampeg SVTVR by Plugin Alliance amp/cab sim for a more rounded tone with weight (bass).

Drums: I found these difficult to blend with the organic, natural sounding instruments. The click of the kick I reduced with a high shelf. Then I on the drumbuss, I put the Soundtoys Echoboy without delay in Binsonette mode. In this way it acts a (upwards) compressor, saturator, dark filter. This gave the pristine drum samples some vibe.

To make the part bewteen the 2nd chorus and bridge more intense/emotional I sent the Backings through a sel-oscillating echo (Echoboy set on Space Echo). This creates a certain pad/drone/soundscape, however you wanna call it. In the outro I did something similar.

Outro vocals: We’ve hear “robot baby” quite a few times now, so it felt logical in the story arc to give these voices a distinctly different sound. I used my Echoboy Binsonnette track again, but this time I added modulation and blend the dry signal in, resulting in a trippy, artificial, roboty? chorussing quality.

Hope you like it and happy musicing!
Blang

[elements]

Hello everyone,

First of all, a big bunch of gratitude to @Arnwyn for a lovely song to play with and to @Mister Fox for keeping this site up and running and alive for 10 years.

This is my mix:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/10in31z4 ... yte5e&dl=0

16 LUFS
-1.1 True Peak

I have mixed this using a pair of Sennheiser HD 300 Pros as my main monitors. Kind of tricky as they say they are flat and maybe they are just a little too flat sometimes. I am interested in any feedback anybody might be able to provide in how the mix translates and anything else you might notice.

This has been an interesting song to mix. It has had it’s challenges. Technically, not too many, but more in the decisions of where things needed to be in the mix. I envisioned this robot baby kind of moving around - a mix of something mechanical and also something gooey. It took a bit of playing around before I started to understand where this could go.

I started this mix using Mixbus C32 v5 on an old 12 year old iMac that I had access to. I just want to say that I loved playing in Mixbus especially once I understood how I could best use it. During this time I lost access to this setup and moved my mixing to Logic Pro for iPad which actually worked out pretty well. Basically I used Mixbus with a combination of Airwindows plugins and the beautiful onboard EQ to colour the tracks. Here I discovered a way to pretty much dehiss the parts using Air3. Then I exported the individual tracks to continue on. Using MixBus got me thinking about using the tape saturation in parallel in replacement of just compressors.

I have lost count of the number of changes I made to the kick drum sound alone before the current iteration. I decide it needed to be lighter rather than bottom end thumpy. I ended up putting an instance of Saturn on it using a medium saturation setting and then using an API style graphic EQ to carve out the frequencies until I had the sound I wanted. I was looking to accentuate the rhythm more like a hand drum than a full on kick drum to work with the flow of the guitar rhythm and the gooey bass.

I figured that between the hi hat pattern and rim shot was the actual mechanical operations of the robot. I added a little effect from Airwindows that did a silly LFO move on these two parts to give them a subtle change in tone as they played and also I found it gave the open high hat a bit more texture to play with and made it a little more messy.

I purposely put those pesky tom sounds to the right with the hi hat because I thought it would be nice to do something a little more interesting with them and I found them distracting bouncing across the stereo field. It still has a feel of movement as the snare is still sitting in the centre and I panned them all a little off each other around the hi hat area. I was thinking of a flower shape of sorts with the hi hat and cymbal in the middle.

In keeping with the demo I kept the mix overall pretty dry.
I really wanted to bring the piano out a bit more as I felt that it got kind of lost on the demo. I worked on lifting it up a little more in it’s mid range and lifted the top end a little to help it be more present throughout. I used a transient shaper to assist the percussive elements of the notes cut through a bit more.

I also wanted to get the backing vocals more into the mix. I think I’ve managed to do that to a point. The male vocal sounds kind of like an old 40s style radio voice - I like that. It adds a nice contrast. With the female BV I wanted to accentuate the more breathy texture. I played with each voice as a separate sound rather than just grouping them together. I feel this way gives me more freedom to adjust things as I go. The only element in the entire mix that got bussed together was the outgoing vocal chorus. I have been working on giving these a slightly different sound to the rest of the vocals as they were given to us in that manner and they just sounded different from the start. I’m not sure I’ve completely nailed it with them yet, but they are what they are for now.

I like your vocal style Rebecca. I didn’t do too much the sound of it as I liked it natural. I just added a touch of parallel compression, a little parallel tape compression stuff, a little bit of reverb and tweaked some small amounts of eq, but nothing radical. I chose to mostly use vox2 as the take was cleaner and more even throughout. vox1 had a bit of distortion in places and some rough editing that I am taking was done for cleaning up purposes. If you think that Vox1 is your preferred option I am more than happy to swap them out and maybe just comp a little where the rough bits are. I used both vocal parts for the lullaby section - which, by the way, had me feeling very sad at one point early on. You express yourself very well.
No de-essers were used on this mix.

With the guitar parts, after playing around with just being on the left side, I went for a stereo image of sorts and placed a little sample delay on the effected part and panned that part to the right to sit in the space with the hi hat and percussion bits which gave the guitar a nice position in space in the stereo image. I used a multi compressor on the bass to curve the sound a little more and to attempt to accentuate the bouncy feel I had in my mind.

Anyway, thank you once again for providing such a well played track for us to experiment with.

[cpsmusic]

Hi Everyone,

Here's my entry for Mix Challenge 098.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16VLtfa ... sp=sharing

Thanks to the song provider and to the challenge organisers.

Rather than go through the plug-ins I used track-by-track I thought I'd highlight a couple of interesting things that I tried with this mix. The first of these involves the drums. The supplied tracks used a fairly disparate collection of drum hits that sounded quite "separated" in the demo mix. I felt that the song would be improved by a more organic approach so one of my goals for the mix was to create a coherent drum sound, like that of a real drum kit. This involved two steps. The first was to make the individual samples sound more similar. For this I looked to the world of electronic dance music (EDM) for inspiration as producers in this style pretty much always work with a collection of individual drum samples. A great source of information was the Mercurial Tones YouTube tutorials. One of the basic ideas I found there is to make the envelopes of the individual samples more similar which I did by using a combination of clipping (transient reduction), compression (attack and release shaping) and saturation (adding the same harmonics to each sample). So this was step one.

The second step was to make the individual samples sound like they existed in the same physical space. This involved more than just adding a reverb! First, a very short room sound was added to each sample. But this wasn't enough. For the next step, I created a set of "faux overheads" by using delay, EQ and transient reduction (all effects which simulate the increased distance of the overhead mics from the drums). These tracks were sent to an "overhead" bus which was used to create the basic "kit" sound. This then fed a longer "room" reverb, an idea I picked up from a Chris Lord-Alge video in which he says that he usually sends the overheads to his reverbs rather than the close mics (the close mics are used mostly for their transient content).

The second thing I thought might be fun was to add a slightly "robotic" sound to the backing vocals for the bridge section. For this I used Studio One's built-in vocoder. The "robot" backing vocals ended up being fairly low in the mix as I didn't want them as an obvious effect, more as a textural element for the supplied backing vocals.


Specs:

24-bit/44.1 kHz
-16.1 LUFS (int.)
-2.6 dBTP

Good luck to all contestants and once again thanks to everyone involved in the challenge.

Cheers!

[pabloAT]

Dear all,
Many thanks to the song provider and to Mr. Fox for such an interesting and challenging song to mix.
I’ve spent most of the time of the mix trying to get a nice balance, looking for separation and clarity of different tracks using only the fader, panning and automation. Equalization was used mainly as HPF/LPF and to provide some air where needed. In most of the tracks, I’ve used subtle compression and tape saturation. I spend most of the time on the lead vocal tracks, trying to keep to a minimum the harshness while keeping the nice vibe and dynamics.
Kudos to the bass player :-) !
Best wishes,
Pablo
[Dropbox's link to MC098]

[AskAndy]

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Al0k-deoMtpH5xurd7u ... H?e=D2XK4c
Well I really like this piece. My goal is just to get the file name right.


what I tried with this mix is spliting all the vocal trackss into 3 groups , Back up, Lead, and alead harmony. Each is bused directly into its own set of parallel compressors then directly to the mix bus. I uswed 4 compressor for the back up and lead harmony, and 6 for the lead vocal. i think i am getting a rich tone to vocals by diong this. boosted the low end of the bass, lnked it with the kick on a aux compresssion bus , hoipefuuly getting more chest feel in the mix . not alot of reverb but it there .
thank you for the music