Re: MIX CHALLENGE - MC39 December 2017 - Mix Round 2 until 14-01-2018 11:59pm GMT+1/CET
Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2018 21:49 CET
Here is my submission for round 2.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QNpkd ... _PmiEc5rCV
This is my commentary on my mix...
TL;DR too bad... you guys asked for it.
First I want to thank everyone involved in allowing me the opportunity to be a part of this, both the song and the contest. But I do wish I could thank Mr. Roan personally for bringing such beauty into people's lives.
So the first thing I do is form a strategy. Usually the goal of a song is rocking, or punchy, or funky, etc. But with this song it's beauty. So try and refine and increase the beauty of the song, luckily between the artistry and the composition it was easy: just get out of the way of the song. The trick would be to control two things: dynamics and density. That is, the song goes from zero to sixty and back many times, density-wise. Just a voice and piano have to stand on their own then cut through strings and choirs and children, oh my.
So I started with the lead vocal – it is the core of the song, the emotional centre. I wanted to get them to shine on their own and build everything around it.
Technically, I mix top down so I actually started with setting a master buss compressor – very shallow, very low ratio, barely taking anything off. Just to make it “whole”.
Back to the vocal – edited out the breaths, they were just too prominent and I was trying to keep things sparse, it was gonna get pretty packed. Plus I wanted to put some parallel compression on it and the breaths would of spoiled that. So for the parallel compression I just duplicated the track – makes things easier later than busing or finding wet/dry plugins. I labeled one “guts” and the other one “glory”. Guts was my crushed channel – a tape saturator into a bit of a notch at 530 Hz into a compressor to really smack it and then a transient shaper to take down the attack a bit. On it's own it's too beefy, but I believe I had it mixed low compared to the “glory” track. Didn't have to do too much to glory – best not to muck with it frankly, I could only spoil it. A little bit of compression to stabilize it, an eq to take out some muck, that's it.
My trick was going to be my send effects: to make them as stealthy as possible. I'm a big fan of plate reverb – it is hyperreal because in making an attempt to model a artificial analog device that's trying to model a room it somehow fools the ear into giving a sound a stage rather than a effect. In the translation it becomes invisible, especially the Soundtoys Little Plate I had just got, quite fortunate. I made two reverb sends: one short (2/3 sec.), the other medium (3 sec.) with a predelay and a band pass to “move it back” a bit. A two-beat delay and a stereo slap finished the sends.
Back to the leads again – with my sends setting the stage the lead (now summed to a buss) get rev1 to place it on stage, and a bit of rev2 to soften it and spread it out. Another great thing about plate reverb, you can combine them quite naturally whereas room simulations (or even real rooms) when you combine them it's a little odd and disorienting, but with plate you don't get that. A bit of delay (I love two-beat delay, I'd put it on everything if I could get away with it) and some slap to make it wider.
This setup for the lead allowed me really move dynamically – I could change the ration of guts to glory using automation. With a boost to the guts on the choruses and the ahmens as well as a reversal of the ratio of the sends to the reverbs the lead gets bigger or smaller without losing focus or emotion. Making sure to wrench every bit of emotion out of the lead was the goal so it had to seem very naked, the effects had to be subtle.
Once I was happy with a starting point of the lead, my strategy was to get the main instruments, the melody and song structure, together. So I started with the piano – a little tube saturation, and some eq so it would sit with the vocal. I put some compression but more to bring out the attack of the piano. Next was getting the strings to play nice with piano and vocal – the ensemble was the only real “bass” track in the mix so I reinforced this with some sub bass resonance and some eq to pull out the voice frequency range. I put a dynamic eq on the bass end to give it even more punch, but only when it needed it. The strings were all excellently recorded – nice and clear, singing with lots of emotion. The staccato strings had really nice resin to support the rhythm so I just had to tweek that a little with a bit of eq and some more of that slow attack compression. The organ sat nicely with a bit of saturation and some phasing to widen it.
Once I had the main song instruments sitting well with the lead, I wanted to get the rhythm elements going, of which there were few - just the bells and the glock. Both got the slow attack compression treatment with the bells getting a little sub bass and a boost around 200 Hz.
The rest was all vocals: the kids, the choir. Didnt have to do much with the kids due to, once again, a very nice job of tracking them. Summed them to an alto and an soprano buss, with each group spread over stereo. The choir got summed to busses for alto, soprano1, soprano1x, soprano2, and tenor. Some of these busses had a bit of eq to get rid of some build up but mostly to clear room for the lead. The kids busses were fed to a master kid buss and same for the choir.
Mixing in sections, the beginning set the tone so I listen to a bunch of Christmas music to get a feel for it. The tough part was getting the bells to sit properly, still provide a stable “beat” but not jump at you. The verses were a case of focusing the vocals and getting the piano and strings to sit nicely. The rest of the song was basically trying to reign in everything – quite a wild ride. I'm a big fan of lush density so this song was a real treat to mix.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QNpkd ... _PmiEc5rCV
This is my commentary on my mix...
TL;DR too bad... you guys asked for it.
First I want to thank everyone involved in allowing me the opportunity to be a part of this, both the song and the contest. But I do wish I could thank Mr. Roan personally for bringing such beauty into people's lives.
So the first thing I do is form a strategy. Usually the goal of a song is rocking, or punchy, or funky, etc. But with this song it's beauty. So try and refine and increase the beauty of the song, luckily between the artistry and the composition it was easy: just get out of the way of the song. The trick would be to control two things: dynamics and density. That is, the song goes from zero to sixty and back many times, density-wise. Just a voice and piano have to stand on their own then cut through strings and choirs and children, oh my.
So I started with the lead vocal – it is the core of the song, the emotional centre. I wanted to get them to shine on their own and build everything around it.
Technically, I mix top down so I actually started with setting a master buss compressor – very shallow, very low ratio, barely taking anything off. Just to make it “whole”.
Back to the vocal – edited out the breaths, they were just too prominent and I was trying to keep things sparse, it was gonna get pretty packed. Plus I wanted to put some parallel compression on it and the breaths would of spoiled that. So for the parallel compression I just duplicated the track – makes things easier later than busing or finding wet/dry plugins. I labeled one “guts” and the other one “glory”. Guts was my crushed channel – a tape saturator into a bit of a notch at 530 Hz into a compressor to really smack it and then a transient shaper to take down the attack a bit. On it's own it's too beefy, but I believe I had it mixed low compared to the “glory” track. Didn't have to do too much to glory – best not to muck with it frankly, I could only spoil it. A little bit of compression to stabilize it, an eq to take out some muck, that's it.
My trick was going to be my send effects: to make them as stealthy as possible. I'm a big fan of plate reverb – it is hyperreal because in making an attempt to model a artificial analog device that's trying to model a room it somehow fools the ear into giving a sound a stage rather than a effect. In the translation it becomes invisible, especially the Soundtoys Little Plate I had just got, quite fortunate. I made two reverb sends: one short (2/3 sec.), the other medium (3 sec.) with a predelay and a band pass to “move it back” a bit. A two-beat delay and a stereo slap finished the sends.
Back to the leads again – with my sends setting the stage the lead (now summed to a buss) get rev1 to place it on stage, and a bit of rev2 to soften it and spread it out. Another great thing about plate reverb, you can combine them quite naturally whereas room simulations (or even real rooms) when you combine them it's a little odd and disorienting, but with plate you don't get that. A bit of delay (I love two-beat delay, I'd put it on everything if I could get away with it) and some slap to make it wider.
This setup for the lead allowed me really move dynamically – I could change the ration of guts to glory using automation. With a boost to the guts on the choruses and the ahmens as well as a reversal of the ratio of the sends to the reverbs the lead gets bigger or smaller without losing focus or emotion. Making sure to wrench every bit of emotion out of the lead was the goal so it had to seem very naked, the effects had to be subtle.
Once I was happy with a starting point of the lead, my strategy was to get the main instruments, the melody and song structure, together. So I started with the piano – a little tube saturation, and some eq so it would sit with the vocal. I put some compression but more to bring out the attack of the piano. Next was getting the strings to play nice with piano and vocal – the ensemble was the only real “bass” track in the mix so I reinforced this with some sub bass resonance and some eq to pull out the voice frequency range. I put a dynamic eq on the bass end to give it even more punch, but only when it needed it. The strings were all excellently recorded – nice and clear, singing with lots of emotion. The staccato strings had really nice resin to support the rhythm so I just had to tweek that a little with a bit of eq and some more of that slow attack compression. The organ sat nicely with a bit of saturation and some phasing to widen it.
Once I had the main song instruments sitting well with the lead, I wanted to get the rhythm elements going, of which there were few - just the bells and the glock. Both got the slow attack compression treatment with the bells getting a little sub bass and a boost around 200 Hz.
The rest was all vocals: the kids, the choir. Didnt have to do much with the kids due to, once again, a very nice job of tracking them. Summed them to an alto and an soprano buss, with each group spread over stereo. The choir got summed to busses for alto, soprano1, soprano1x, soprano2, and tenor. Some of these busses had a bit of eq to get rid of some build up but mostly to clear room for the lead. The kids busses were fed to a master kid buss and same for the choir.
Mixing in sections, the beginning set the tone so I listen to a bunch of Christmas music to get a feel for it. The tough part was getting the bells to sit properly, still provide a stable “beat” but not jump at you. The verses were a case of focusing the vocals and getting the piano and strings to sit nicely. The rest of the song was basically trying to reign in everything – quite a wild ride. I'm a big fan of lush density so this song was a real treat to mix.
