MIX CHALLENGE - MC051 February 2019 - Winners announced

[Photonic]

Hi MOA22,

Thank you so much for choosing my mix for round 2. I am very glad to achieved this in this strong field of contenders.
You did a tremendous job with the feedback list. It is very detailed and I can see how closely you listened to each entry, respect!

Your comments for my mix are very reasonable and purposeful. I followed them all.
- I lowered the hole mix below 150 Hz around 1 dB
- I reduced the low mids of the bass
- I boosted the snare around 250 Hz. It was realy a bit thinn.
- And I removed the telephone or megaphone kind of sound from the add vocals. The sound now more normal and got some reverb.

MP3: https://www.dropbox.com/s/67umqdy1t99ql ... 2.mp3?dl=0
WAV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9x438yem4yabu ... 2.wav?dl=1

[Emil Biscan]

Hey, Emil.

I was just listening to your entry and I noticed how good the drums are, I especially the kick and the hi-hat! Do you remember doing anything special on that hi-hat? Sounds really good!

HEY Koki21 thank you for your compliment.

Hihat track was allready clean and has a consistent dynamics so all I did was matched it with overheads then send OHs and Hihat to Group CYMBALS and did some EQ, that is all.

[Koki21]

Thanks for your response. The thing I really like about that hi hat, and your mix in general is that it really feels like a real place. It's just got a 3D feel to it, like everything is in one room. I really enjoyed listening to it!

Hey, Emil.

I was just listening to your entry and I noticed how good the drums are, I especially the kick and the hi-hat! Do you remember doing anything special on that hi-hat? Sounds really good!

HEY Koki21 thank you for your compliment.

Hihat track was allready clean and has a consistent dynamics so all I did was matched it with overheads then send OHs and Hihat to Group CYMBALS and did some EQ, that is all.

[FixInTheMix]

MP3: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1krq2j ... 3lKIo9iZbB

WAV: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Rd9OO ... KPjc2Pk34D

Thank you so much for choosing my mix for this next round and for taking the time to provide such detailed feedback, the chart format is quite nice, could become a standard in the future.

Since there wheren´t any glaring issues to try to fix I decided to keep my tweaks very subtle to avoid changing things for the worst, the main thing I got from your review was more presence, specially in guitars and vocals so I did just that, adding a +2.5dB high shelf on the vocal submix and a broad 2dB boost on 8Khz for the guitar bus, I raised a tiny bit the kick out mic which I used only for the low frequencies of the kick drum, finally I added a little bit of reverb to the overheads to give the high hat a little bit of space but not too much so I could keep the overall dryness of the drums.

That´s it, nothing fancy but hopefully an improvement!

[dobebon]

Hi David,

Thanks for inclusion into round 2 and the excellent feedback. The spreadsheet is a fantastic idea, great work!

Here is my submission for round 2

WAV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fpqy55mrej27n ... 2.wav?dl=0

MP3: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6jqla1rkfwfs8 ... 2.mp3?dl=0

Changes made include a reworking of the solo to make it fit better and (hopefully) improved the guitar tone.
Small boost at 2kHz for the drum buss and blend more parallel compression for more punch.
Push the ad lib vocals back further into the mix.
Rebalance mix after changes.

Good luck everyone!

[yoruhitp]

Thank you for choosing for the second stage.

wav: https://colabo-share.s3-ap-northeast-1. ... itp_R2.wav
mp3: https://colabo-share.s3-ap-northeast-1. ... itp_R2.mp3

• I reviewed the balance of the bass guitar (DI and Reamp), using FPGAFX on the drum bus, I am enhancing the bass.
  

• I added more guitar distortion. Especially GTR 1 is doing radical using CLA-Guitar's Reamp.

• The part of Ad-vocals is rebalancing.

• Distortion is added to Ad-vocal-ending using overdrive.

[Mister Fox]

A friendly reminder:
I'm late with this, but we're in the final 6 hours to submit your edit for Mix Round 2.

[Mork]

Hi,

thanks again for the additional day! I was so exhausted yesterday that I wouldn't have finished it.
David, your comments where basically what I had on my todo-list, so I hope you enjoy the new revision.

• I got rid of all the subsonic mayhem on the kick (bx_subsynth) and adressed phase issues in the low end that where introduced by the filter section of subsynth.

• I got rid of bass parallel sub (again sybsynth) and distortion (Decapitator). I then used the new process.audio Sugar to give it some salt (haha) and used the onboard drive for saturation. I also added Sonnox Envolution to lessen the sustain and give the bass gitar a little bit more definition. In these super saturated rock tracks it's always a fine line between groovin with atitude and loosing all the punch. The low end punch now is more how I wanted it to be in the first place.

• I added a Toms subgroup and processed it with DSM V2 (which I snacked for free yesterday during work, go vouchers!) on Irish rock setting and adjusted the parametric threshold at 2k-ish to give the toms more "bitey" click. I also added Waves J37 to slow dowm the transient a little bit. I still had to automate the subgroup as well as some individual tom hits. I admit they're not 100% there, but improved a lot!

• I adjusted the black rooster pultec that lives on the snare and lowered my 7k (I think) boost the slightest amount imaginable. I also added a pro-q and dipped 3k-ish and 1k-ish by about .4 db and added like .2 at 1.5k. It's always astounding how such "esoteric vodoo moves" can make all the difference. I think mainly the 3k part was causing the slight detachment to the rest.

• I tried to gel guitar 3 more into the mix. I used Vitamin to add some midrange and decapitated it to give it even more tone (with the tone control slightly to the dark side). After that I added Waves GTR Doubler and Spring to pull it into the background.

• Maybe I rendered the first revision after I tuned the 2bus eq and didn't save. Usually I save after rendering but I noticed that the cymbals sounded different when switching to my R1 mix. I adjusted the eq to match R1 and to my liking, so it's not exactly the same. But due to all the tweaks the overall tone changed anyways, so the new eq setting matches those tweaks (I like it a lot).

• Added a fade and therefore shortened the silence at the end. I left the beginning alone, so it's easier to align both revisions.

WAV: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1uNkpX ... r_2RPZW0Y2
MP3: https://drive.google.com/open?id=15GtUo ... 45_6N5Dqs5

I am glad I made it in time and again hope you enjoy the new revision!
Now that mixing is done, let the beering part of Saturday begin...

Cheers
Mork

[Drumwizard]

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1N9-r3 ... S_gQFs6kuU
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1JFeFk ... l2lV1kNizs

[cdj1000]

Hi my mix

daw: Studio One 4
Softube: Saturation Knob, TSAR 1R reverb
Waves: SSLGchanel, CLA 2A compressor, SSLGcompressor