Mix Challenge

Here's my mix. I use cubase 9 to mix this.

wav:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1CUOCq ... NbvYOF0O6A

I used an SSL Sigma to mix it.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1F1u4N ... jn3y9gML_m
I used uad plugs throughout. A few softube plugs here and there. And a few waves plugs.

wav:

-------------------------------------------------

The only automation I did was a vocal move for 2nd chorus onwards: an 1176 to bring it out more.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nb3Z1 ... uDAxHgvQGj
hope it sounds good



overview:
arrangement screen overview:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1f20rZ ... EFHzOq4xS2

mixer vet plug overview:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kb65E ... _66KBUgVs5


I started with the kick snare rooms OH's toms, trying to get them somewhere I liked. I did come back at the end and redo stuff though to get it in the mix.

The challenge was getting the backing vocals s to be audible but not too harsh or loud.
And the other challenge was those guitar embellishments which I struggled to get in the mix, so I left those until nearing the end of the mix. I ended up eqing them additively, then compressing heavily them then adding a phaser by softube.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=171L7n ... qgQtWunMqh

My strategy was to have any effects busses used on individuals or groups to be regrouped so as i always had group channels to feed ssl sigma. Sigma has a total of 16 stereo or mono channels, so my busses fed into those (well, i used 14/16 , because 15 and 16 is being used).
1: rooms + toms
2: Kick
3: snare + oh's
4: bass
5: Acous
6: trem guit
7: Powerchords
8:SOLO
9: extra guit L
10: extra guit R
11: bv's
12: Vox
13: pads
14:all fx/ some fx/or spare

After getting everything in the mix then i turned towards the main mix processing; here i added vet's to the 'input' channel on cubase so that my armed input record audio track would be recorded with these vsts. (im monitoring from the pot sigma sound i.e i hear my monitoring from the daw post sigma so when adding vsts to the input audio channel in cubase i am hearing the effect on my armed audio track (mono enabled and record enabled).

Thanks for the competition. It's really helpful at improvement doing mixing competitions.

Hello,

here is my mix and attached a pdf with some screenshots and a resume of my process of mixing. I think I had a good mix, I worked a lot to preserve the identity of the song and the tones, but of course, I put my magic over it!
Hope you enjoy and congratulations for Gary, it's a nice song, I really got the felling of the lyric and the good taste to make a simple arrangement match the point which which is the context expressed!

MP3 link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=163SVk ... QJny6woz4D
WAV link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kKHOS ... YqixChcsLJ

PDF whith mix review: https://drive.google.com/open?id=12NHP3 ... 79Yw01o1YL

Sorry if in any part of the text I did some mistake but I am Brazilian...please considerate it!

The mix of the provider is the best mix, so i think i can only make it worse.

guiZgui wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 11, 2018 09:55 CET

jorgeaferroj wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 11, 2018 02:28 CET

As soon as I started the mix the first thing to do was to choose which tracks work and which tracks make the mix dirty. After settled i started editing every single track on the interpretation, as we were told it has a rough 72 BPM. Of course I didn't fix every transient but in the melodic or harmonic tracks the target was to fix mainly the strong beats. I did some tuning work on the voice but not that rough so it still feels natural. On the rhythmic tracks I used the Logic Pro X quantize and then had to check if all beats were correctly quantized.

Hi Jorgeaferroj,

I'm sorry to say that but you should have check the artist mix as a reference, because you changed the whole song with your auto quantize tool, everything is playing late.. :/

Hi guiZgui,

I’m sorry to say that but I did check the reference and I didn’t auto quantize everything. Not everything is playing late, the tremolo is in maybe triplets and makes the mix have a sense of delayed interpretation.

Hi jorgeaferroj,

I just listen to your mix which is very criticize (the remarks of guiZguy are very relevant).
Indeed the title has a rhythm of wooden leg and it lacks a lot of instrument.
Really I do not understand this approach, the idea of starting could be good but the realization
is totally missed. By reference to the original mix, yours is in a completely different universe.
This has nothing to do but it can still please. Good luck!

Cheers

Franz

I think what he meant to say was that the vocals are late... VERY late. Other than that it sounds pretty good actually.

jorgeaferroj wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 11, 2018 17:41 CET

guiZgui wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 11, 2018 09:55 CET

jorgeaferroj wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 11, 2018 02:28 CET

As soon as I started the mix the first thing to do was to choose which tracks work and which tracks make the mix dirty. After settled i started editing every single track on the interpretation, as we were told it has a rough 72 BPM. Of course I didn't fix every transient but in the melodic or harmonic tracks the target was to fix mainly the strong beats. I did some tuning work on the voice but not that rough so it still feels natural. On the rhythmic tracks I used the Logic Pro X quantize and then had to check if all beats were correctly quantized.

Hi Jorgeaferroj,

I'm sorry to say that but you should have check the artist mix as a reference, because you changed the whole song with your auto quantize tool, everything is playing late.. :/

Hi guiZgui,

I’m sorry to say that but I did check the reference and I didn’t auto quantize everything. Not everything is playing late, the tremolo is in maybe triplets and makes the mix have a sense of delayed interpretation.

Thanks Bradlo84 and Franz, those are better reviews. I’ll be more accurate in the future.

Heyho,

i decided to join the the MC50, even though i said i wouldnt.

WAV
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cn4440hxm9ffh ... e.wav?dl=0

MP3
https://www.dropbox.com/s/dse4c17jmqo7n ... e.mp3?dl=0

Drums
The Glue / 4:1 - 10ms/600ms
Scheps 73 in ms ->hpass 160hz in mid signal

Kick - Radiator (for edginess) / RComp / Sie Q (more Bass)
Snare - Scheps 73 (massive highs) / RComp <-- maybe in wrong order?
OH - RComp / DeEsser from 6.500hz above /
Room / DevilLoc

Guitars

Acoustic Guitar
VMR F 401 Long Attack/ Long Release
SieQ - Low +6dB / Mid 3,5khz +5dB / Highs +7dB
DeEsser Only works on peaks
RComp Sidechained from vocals (Slow Attack/Slow Release)

EGT1/2
VST Amp / Highcut 2khz/F401/Radiator/Cla3a

Trmolo
F401 / Cla3a/ SieQ Los +2dB Mid 3,5khz +8dB-Highs 15bd

GainGuitar
Decapicatator / Echo Boy Jr for Spread/ Cla3a

Lead
Radiator / F401 / Sieq Highs +9dB

Bass (60hz and 200hz -6dB)
RComp Sidechained from Kick / Decapacitator / F401 for Attack / Cla2a / Sie Q for Bass / Radiator

Vox
Vocals Rider / Cla2A/ Sieq for more Highs / Decapacitator / DeEsser

On Bus Radiator for some Saturation and a Limiter 6 For HF Peaks only.

Used TrueVerb for Eary Reflections (i love it) and ValhallaVintage / LittlePlate and Crystallizer and Microshoft from Soundtoys

Mixed over AKG Headphones and Bose Soundlink II in my kitchen

Here is my entry, hope you enjoy it

WAV: https://drive.google.com/open?id=15jbXj ... LzQzvoQplT

MP3: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1uv1zo ... YeSfe7AeAz

Drums:

Time aligned some parts by ear, mainly the most noticeable ones but didn´t spend that much time on it to be frank
Right off the bat I knew I was going to be using drum samples but I didn´t want to completely replace the original takes so I enden up with a hibrid solution, for one part I did replace the toms completely mainly because they were scarcely used and I found to be too much trouble to try to get a decent sound for something that only happens 3 or 4 times in the song. For the kick drum I noticed that it sounded pretty good with the eq and compression settings I used, but only on some specific loud hits while the softer ones sounded really dull so I ended up sampling those loud hits an triggered them by the original track so in a way I did replace the kick drum but only by the best ones of the original recording, sounds fair to me surprisingly I didn´t add any sample to the snare drum, I managed to get a decent sound out of it.
I didn´t like the room microphone sound so I ended up creating a "fake room" channel by sending the individual tracks to a convolution reverb, I also added a different reverb send for the snare drum.

BASS:
I used the BOD overdrive blended with the dry signal, reduced some of the sub-low frequencies, boosted around the 150hz area and made a -10dB cut on 400hz to reduce boxiness.

PAD 1 and 2:
For the most part these were kept untouched, only added a hpf at around 200Hz to prevent really low frequencies from sticking out on the mix, also added a pitch shifter to pad 2 and automated the pitch slowly to fit better with the rest of the harmony.

Electric guitars:
For the tremolo track I added Hysteresis (glitch delay) and an auto panner to give the track he stereo width it should´ve had in the first place imo.

EGT 1 and 2:
Besides simple eq and compression I added a phaser to each track and panned them hard left and right.

EGT GAIN:
-3.5dB cut at 500hz and 2dB boost at 2Khz

EGT Lead:
same as EGT gain but also added a -4.4dB cut at 7Khz to tame some harshness.

Acoustic guitar:
Kept the body mic in mono and panned the neck mic 30% to the left, each track was compressed and eq´d separately and then sent to a bus that was processed with a chorus and some extra eq adjustments, the fx was automated to be turned off during the first verse, at 50% dry/wet during the chorus and at 25% during the second verse.

Lead Vocal:
Fast compression, de esser, -3dB cuts on 2Khz and 5Khz, a +2dB high shelf on 5kHZ and a broad bandwidth boost of 4dB at 170hz to bring back some of the body that was missing.

Chorus vocals:
all of the vocal tracks that appear during the chorus where sent to a submaster to be processed by a de-esser and two instances of compression, one in parallel and other in series, I wanted to glue everything together as much as possible.

duplicate vox:
I copied the audio from the lead vocal track and pasted on a new track with identical settings to the duplicate track, same fast compression and a -5dB cut at 3Khz to make it less upfront, both channels panned 30% right and left respectively.

Bg vocals:
Same compression settings, both tracks sent into a bus where I added a chorus, some extra compression and an eq with a 3dB boost at 3Khz.

FX:
I only used two reverb sends for all the tracks (excluding the snare mic and fake room send), one for the instruments and one for vocals, the instrument reverb was DX Reverb Light by ANWIDA soft: 23ms pre-delay, 3.6s of decay, LP cut 6.5Khz with some extra high frequency roll of with and eq starting at 4Khz.
For the the vocal reverb I used epicVerb 21ms pre-delay, 3.3s of decay, reflex early reflections, medium high freq dampening HP filter at 100hz and LP filter at 6Khz.

Added Ozone 8 on the master bus to bring up the level since the mix was pretty quiet, ended up using 9dB of gain to get the track at -16LUFS with -1dB true peak, at this setting the signal almost never reached the limiter´s threshold so I didn´t compromised the dynamics.

Nice track btw, even after hearing it so many times I still like it a lot, good job Gary!

A friendly reminder:
Including today, 7 days left to submit your edit


Additionally:
Due to the winter holidays, we might see delays with the challenge thread handling. Most notably for the evaluation period for the Mix Challenge 050 (after 21st December). MC 050's Mix Round 2 might not start prior to January 2019 (due to the client not being available during the Christmas Holiday).