Mix Challenge

Hi.
My mix: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/iut28zrf ... l8rik&dl=0

Hi everyone, here is my mix:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jkGi6a ... sp=sharing

!

Bonus Info

I have enjoyed a lot working on this project, despite having been really challenging to me, as I rarely encounter projects with this recording features, raw and bleed, I think I am now hooked again to this music, great song, I am honored to wok with it,. I have approach the mix following the “client^s” wishes, so I have focused the work on getting a bass that cuts through the mix and a snare with more musical impact. So I have started with a basic low end clearance, making some space for the kick and the bass with a side chained dynamic Eq, then I blended the 2 signals wit each respective parallel processing,: - Parallel processing for the bass, Hi pass Eq around 120 to remove any boom, followed by a Decapitator 20% mixed and heavy compression using 1176 type and LA2A type stacked. -For the kick surgical equipment and a gate for removing bleeding. - The drum bus took me some time to clean up bleeding and resonances, but once it was done, simple bus processing blended with some NY parallel compression did the job . _ The guitars were complicated, I dedicated a lot of effort on figuring out the right position in the space, also I found that mixing some at the right level were producing very nice harmonics, I tried to keep those alternating with more distorted passages. For the vocals I have also followed a parallel processing approach, EQ, Comp, and some saturation I can give all the details if anyone has some curiosity, I’ll be glad to. Many thanks , DrZimago

Here is my submission:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/x8jmq1n2 ... 5eedr&dl=0

This is my first time posting in a very long time- it appears that my username was likely deleted due to inactivity. I'm happy to have a mix to Submit for MC100!

Approach:

I wanted things to be in your face and messy - compressors slamming, heaps of distortion of various sorts. I want it to sound loud an aggressive.

Drums
I used EQ and tape saturation on the kick to help bring out the low end and what I could find of a batter sound. The snare also has some EQ and was sent to both Reverbs (plate and room). The drum bus is compressed with a UAD Distressor (every opportunity to add some distortion is taken).

Guitars. / Bass
I panned the guitars out in a manner that seemed to work and be balanced. I put bit a bit crusher (Bite) on some of the guitars to differentiate their sound, add distortion and perceived brightness. The bass had the low and some mids boosted as well as a bit of tape saturation. The bass and guitars are all side chained to the kick using Fabfilter Pro-C with aggressive and very non-transparent settings.

Vocals
I did my best to remove the printed reverb via RX. It did a reasonable enough job - definitely an improvement given the other vocal treatments
For compression, I used a UAD Distressor into a UAD 1176 as inserts and then applied parallel compression using a Tube Screamer emulator to compress the parallel bus. For EQ I used the UAD Neve 1073 preamp and pushed it a bit to add more distortion. Finally, I applied Fabfilter DS to remove some sibilance,

Master bus
My master bus consists of:
UAD Fairchild (gluing things together with about 1dB of gain reduction shown on the meters).
UAD Pultec (boosting 30Hz very slightly and cutting a tiny bit of high end)
UAD Chandler Limiter (little if any visible gain reduction)
A peak limiter set to -2dB true peak just to catch any strays and keep the file safely within the guidelines.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S00llp ... drive_link



Kick: Overdrive
Snare: Overdrive, boost mids, compression
Overheads: boost highs

Bass: Softube amp

Guitar 02 Amp cleaner distortion: HP filter at 97 Hz

LP filter at 9.5 KHz and narrow boost at 4 KHz on:
Guitar 02 Amp
Guitar 05 Amp
Guitar 03 Amp

Vocals:
Some amp distortion from softube guitar amp

Thank you to Silverstone and producer Jeroen for providing us with their song.
Mister Fox, our thanks for keeping things together.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n2FH06 ... sp=sharing

VOCALS
- only deessing and dynamic eq to control the sibilance
- high pass on Voc 2 & 3
- compression
- no f/x added

SYNTH
- no processing

GTRS 6 to 11
- eq for clarity and taming harsh frequencies
- added delay to solo... :-)

GTRS 1 to 5
- high and low pass with a little dip at 2.3kHz

I set up 3 different spring reverbs and a room for the guitars to use.

DRMS
- minimized resonant frequecies with kick and snare
- minimized bleed, compressed, removed boxy freq on kick, then added top end
- eq'd the snare and instead of inline compression, I used parrallel compression
- eq'd each tom separately, grouped them and compressed
- used Waves JJP for grouped overheads
- room had saturation, compression, and eq
- there's a drum parrallel channel
- there's a room and a plate for drums to use

BASS
- mv2 to bring up soft parts, saturation, hipass/lowpass, mb comp

2BUS
- compression, saturation, limiter

Hi all! here's my mix:

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


I aimed for a de-mudded mix, tried to get clarity in the whole mix. In the overall I tried to keep the balance as I think there's plenty hard rock there, so I've tried to potentiate that and not add much more dirt.



Vocals are leaved almost as they are, some dynamics processing and light eqing + some filtering.

Guitars are filtered and eqed to taste, individually.

Bass has some parallel processing including dynamics and saturation.

Drums are eqed, re gated, did some filtering and tried to tame the overheads as they were a bit harsh. Kick and snare have been parallel processed, the SN with a plate and compression; Kick with a compressed band pass filter in the fundamentals to get some extra lows. API 2500 for this bus.

One thing I do not normally do is to use a Tape plugin in each bus (vox, guitars, bass and drums) and I did with the Studer tape by UAD using 15' on everything and 7,5' in the drums, it sounded cool to me.

For the mix bus, there's only a Vari Mu compressor.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

ssl channel on everything and here we are now. didn't try to fix anything, a song is a song

Hi! Amazing song, here is my take - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nx22kb ... sp=sharing

Drumgroup - Glue Compressor, LittleRadiator, Spectre, Pro-Q 3
KICK - Unfiltered Audio Bass Mint, Bass Professor MK2.x64, Pro-Q 3, Spectre
OVERHEADS - S1 Imager Stereo, Pro-Q 3
Snare - Spectre, LittleRadiator, Pro-Q 3
TOMS - EQ, Unfiltered Audio Bass Mint
Room - Transient Shaper, DevilLocDeluxe, Pro-Q 3, soothe2_x64
Bass - CLA Bass Stereo, Bass Professor MK2.x64, Pro-MB, Spectre, Sidechain Compressor
All guitars - Spectre and Proq-3 low end cut
Amp special FX - Auto Pan, Spectre
Amp solo without delay - Pro-Q 3 Pro-MB
Vocals - Pro-MB, Essence, Pro-Q 3, Decapitator, Vocal Rider Waves, LittleRadiator
Reverb - Sunset Sound Studio Reverb
Master - Pro-Q 3, Pro-MB, Spectre,Satin
Youlean offline meter - Momentary Max = -13.55 LUFS, Short Term Max = -14.26 LUFS, Integrated = -16.20 LUFS

Hi

Here is the link to my version of the song
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ikqdzG ... sp=sharing

So my thoughts going in, based on @JeroenZuiderwijk saying "...about the energy not about the cleanest
polished mix." so my idea was "Everything louder than everything else!"
For the quieter sections I wanted them loud and then get even louder when everything kicks in
Went for quite a thick bass tone to help carry the song, guitars LCR panning.

So all the main instruments goto their own Instrument buss (even single synth track its just how I set my template).
All instrument busses have Waves NLS on from start
I started getting a rough mix together and trying to figure out how I wanted to arrange the guitar tracks.

Drums: All drum tracks have saturation on and all shells have Silencer on to reduce bleed.
There are also 5 parallel busses that have various elements of the drums tracks sent to in varying amounts.
Compression/3 verbs (plate/ambience and room)/Distortion

- Kick: transient designer pull out some attack and give a little more sustain, SSL channel strip for EQ/Compression/ further EQ pulling out a lot of lower mids/black box saturation/ (low only)/limiter then clipper.
- Snare: Duplicated it twice
SNR1 - strong saturation/SSL drums strip for more low and high enhancement/EQ boosting lows and around 4k/ compression/EQ and clipper
SNR2 - My crush track for the snare, used Kiive tape face/EQ/1176 (hitting hard)/transient designer to reduce attack and push sustain/clipper
SNR3 - Treated as a snare bottom, rolling away everything below 4k/Transient designer again to reduce attack and push sustain/Exciter and compression, lots of verb.
All snare tracks went on a VCA so I could automate later.
- TOMS: Little EQ slight push in lows, and pulling some lower mids and mild compression
- Room: 1176 compression and EQ rolling off some low below 100 and highs above 5k
- OH: put in folder and treated together with SSL channel strip little boost around 8k (shelf), compression and extra saturation
"- FAKE ROOM" - Created a fake room track from the overheads - rolled everything over 5k away, 1176 hitting it hard fairly fast attack and fast release, also used Soundtoys Sie-Q with drive on full, rolling lows and a little highs, the cut around 3.5

Drum Instrument Bus: compression and further saturation and clipper

Bass:duplicated twice so
1st: Used BassDude amp and removed the highend
2nd: Marshall JMP (think Lemmy) but rolled off low end
3rd: Distortion/compression/clipper and EQ rolling off below 1k and above 4k
All blended together, in the instrument buss with compression/EQ (shelving some low end as it had built up too much for the mix, sound great in solo though!) and clipper

Synth: Distortion/some room verb/EQ removing lows and highs and a widener

Vox:
Have a few fx here used in parallel which include Chorus/Widener/Slapback/1/6 note delay/1/4 note delay/long delay throw/plate verb and distortion. All 3 vocals sent to various fx's as I felt at the time.

I tried to remove some of the baked in verb/amience as when compressing it was getting in the way. Ended up using a plugin called Clear by Supertone did good job, I did not go extreme with it though, I just removed reverb/ambience a little so as not take away too much from the vocal tracks.

All vocals had similar chain though some EQ/compression setting did vary, the chain was:
De-esser/Compressor/EQ/Compressor and/Or Limiter/Maag EQ for high boost and another De-esser

Guitar:
Well this was the most time consuming part, I grouped the guitars into 4 folders folders which I called

GTR sFX: Guitar 8 - duplicated this as I wanted to process the end different with ADT2V and panning effects, main track just some EQ
GTR Main: DI track had overdrive pedal /Diezel Herbet, guitar track 3 & 5 just EQ (guitar02 tracks were used to boost/enchance during the song)
GTR Verse:guitar 4 tracks went here, balanced to taste then pushed them into a tubescreamer for a little more grit, some EQ to fit into the mix and LA3A.
GTR Extra:Just EQ on the remaining guitars with some verb and delay on the solo and outro.

Guitar Instrument bus had a C4 compressor to tame low end buildup, EQ to roll off below 100Hz and little push in the highs, also used Trackspacer which was side chained to the vocals, only doing a little around 15% max reduction (between 300 and 5k)

Master:
- Used Arturia Comp Diode 609 here in dual mono, ignored low end below 250Hz 1.5 ratio and 2db max reduction (was mixing into an SSL most of the way through but something was not sitting right so swapped out).
- Pultec trick at 30Hzm, then BX_Digital to sum mono below 150Hz and a little widening.
- MAAG EQ pushing some air
- Oxford Inflator to try and get a little more power
- Compressor to tame the transients, couple of DB reduction at most.

AUTOMATION: I do not think I have automated a track so much. Mainly volume as I really wanted to massage the performance for example bringing snare and vocals up and down a lot.

Overall spent way longer on this than I hoped, but enjoyed every minute!

Jules

My submission.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10Ov6l9 ... sp=sharing

Overall, since the tracks contained quite a lot of processing already, I was pretty light-handed with any compression, delay or verb. Mainly my time was spent with EQ and volume/panning automation.

Drums:
Gated the kick, and did some pretty extreme eq to try to get some punch and click.
Duplicated the snare and eq'd, adding distortion to create more snare rattle and blended in to try to overcome the abrupt gate on the track. Volume automated at the intro to try to hide that gate also. added a send for a little snare plate verb.
Added a comp on the room track even though it seems compressed already, trying to push drums harder.
Added saturation and limiter on the drum bus.

Bass:
pretty extreme eq, with saturation (FF Saturn) to give it some crunch.

Guitars:
Tried to narrow focus to most critical parts, and panned to get out of the way of vocals. Only added delay at ends of lead and fx tracks to over-ride the abrupt cuts at the ends of the tracks. Added a little verb on the octave tracks. Automated volume and pan to attempt to accentuate dynamics.

Vocals:
Verse vocals, I added a vocal rider to even out dynamics. Noticed 1 line at approx 1:27 that seems to fall off ("just way to go") so I treated it w/Narrow eq/saturation, and panned it left to create something with it. Easily removed if artist doesn't like it. Mainly just eq on rest of vocals. Minimal compression on the vocal bus. Vocals were already verbed, so I didn't want to add any further delay or verb on top of that to muck it up.

Nothing but a gain plugin on the mix bus to get it to -16 lufs