Re: MIX CHALLENGE - MC095 December 2023 - Submissions until 21-DEC-2023 23:59 UTC+1/CET
Posted: Tue Dec 19, 2023 21:03 CET
Thanks @Christoph_K for supplying such a well recorded and well arranged song for us this month. I tried to tread fairly lightly as I felt there was rarely any need for surgical eq moves but more like steering each section where it needed to go in terms of size, impact and ambience.
Here is my mix: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/p7cxsru3 ... b6iww&dl=0
My main aim for this mix was to exaggerate the size of the arrangement and be as dynamic as possible without it feeling uncomfortable. Delicate guitars with expressive vocals. Mellow and swelling electronics with sparkling hi hats. Punchy drums with spacious distorted guitars. Most important in my vision was to have the feeling of a cohesive journey that builds to the end.
I started by having a good listen to the original mix provided so that I could get a sense of how to balance each section and what parts were to be considered foreground and background. This was actually made even easier because on importing the audio files and bringing the faders up most of the tracks already sat in a very good place.
Because of the tracks all sounding good to my ears I went for a mainly top down approach. Once I had a good rough mix of levels from gain staging and initial balancing of background and foreground elements I applied a low ratio compressor with fast attack and release to the mix buss to help bring out some extra detail in the delicate sections, I also found that the low ratio helped things not to get too squashed in the louder sections, I did dial back the mix dial a touch to make sure not to over do it though.
It did seem odd in the instance to start with the drum kit but I did anyway because I had to start somewhere and who doesn't love mixing drums. I really liked the drum room sound and as I mentioned earlier all the parts fit nicely together more or less straight away so I gently shaped the parts around each other with some eq. I found that the Hi Hats, both live and the not live ones, needed a touch more sizzle so I brought out the top end a bit so they could sit nicely all the way through the arrangement. I decided to sort out the snare reverb fairly quickly as I wanted it to do some of the heavy lifting in terms of the top end of the track. I used one reverb to concentrate on the high sustain and another to focus more of the body and blended them together to get the right sense of depth and tone.
Once I had started dialing in the snare reverb I thought it would be a good idea to set up a warm long verb for the vocals and followed that with a shorter brighter verb that I could blend together to get a sort of Jeff Buckley inspired vocal tone. These reverbs were also very useful for the live recorded instruments to get them to sit in a similar space to the ambient sounds and swells. I felt like getting the reverbs set up earlier than I normally would have done helped me to balance the background and foreground elements without leaning on eq and compression as a first port of call. The automation of these reverbs were crucial to the sound to get a feeling of familiarity between sections but also a sense of progression and growth.
The vocals sound great to start and I mixed most of the song without touching them with eq or compression. I did send them to a parallel channel for compression and a high end boost to bring out the articulation for the delicate sections and to cut through in the denser parts. I also added a parallel channel of sides only microshift for width when needed. Blending these together and automating them took some time to get right but was key to getting the performance to shine through. For the backing vocal parts I used a similar approach leaning more on automation than plugins.
One of the main challenges I found was to get the acoustic guitar to sit nicely with the ambient sounds and the vocals. I wanted a delicate sound but not something brittle that would stick out too much. I think this was just a matter of automation and some slight compression and I hope I got it to sit right.
Most other elements I wanted to add excitement when they were there as that seemed to be their purpose so I used automation to get things to drift in and out but not stick out too much.
For the bass parts I tried to keep the sub 100hz region constant with some multiband compression and also to cut through in the mids around 700-1.2k with some upwards compression so it would only kick in when needed.
It took me a few listens between different speaker systems to get a balance I was happy with but I got there in the end and I hope you like it too.
As a note I did try to match the song length to the original mix provided as that was used as the benchmark last month,
Matt
Here is my mix: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/p7cxsru3 ... b6iww&dl=0
My main aim for this mix was to exaggerate the size of the arrangement and be as dynamic as possible without it feeling uncomfortable. Delicate guitars with expressive vocals. Mellow and swelling electronics with sparkling hi hats. Punchy drums with spacious distorted guitars. Most important in my vision was to have the feeling of a cohesive journey that builds to the end.
I started by having a good listen to the original mix provided so that I could get a sense of how to balance each section and what parts were to be considered foreground and background. This was actually made even easier because on importing the audio files and bringing the faders up most of the tracks already sat in a very good place.
Because of the tracks all sounding good to my ears I went for a mainly top down approach. Once I had a good rough mix of levels from gain staging and initial balancing of background and foreground elements I applied a low ratio compressor with fast attack and release to the mix buss to help bring out some extra detail in the delicate sections, I also found that the low ratio helped things not to get too squashed in the louder sections, I did dial back the mix dial a touch to make sure not to over do it though.
It did seem odd in the instance to start with the drum kit but I did anyway because I had to start somewhere and who doesn't love mixing drums. I really liked the drum room sound and as I mentioned earlier all the parts fit nicely together more or less straight away so I gently shaped the parts around each other with some eq. I found that the Hi Hats, both live and the not live ones, needed a touch more sizzle so I brought out the top end a bit so they could sit nicely all the way through the arrangement. I decided to sort out the snare reverb fairly quickly as I wanted it to do some of the heavy lifting in terms of the top end of the track. I used one reverb to concentrate on the high sustain and another to focus more of the body and blended them together to get the right sense of depth and tone.
Once I had started dialing in the snare reverb I thought it would be a good idea to set up a warm long verb for the vocals and followed that with a shorter brighter verb that I could blend together to get a sort of Jeff Buckley inspired vocal tone. These reverbs were also very useful for the live recorded instruments to get them to sit in a similar space to the ambient sounds and swells. I felt like getting the reverbs set up earlier than I normally would have done helped me to balance the background and foreground elements without leaning on eq and compression as a first port of call. The automation of these reverbs were crucial to the sound to get a feeling of familiarity between sections but also a sense of progression and growth.
The vocals sound great to start and I mixed most of the song without touching them with eq or compression. I did send them to a parallel channel for compression and a high end boost to bring out the articulation for the delicate sections and to cut through in the denser parts. I also added a parallel channel of sides only microshift for width when needed. Blending these together and automating them took some time to get right but was key to getting the performance to shine through. For the backing vocal parts I used a similar approach leaning more on automation than plugins.
One of the main challenges I found was to get the acoustic guitar to sit nicely with the ambient sounds and the vocals. I wanted a delicate sound but not something brittle that would stick out too much. I think this was just a matter of automation and some slight compression and I hope I got it to sit right.
Most other elements I wanted to add excitement when they were there as that seemed to be their purpose so I used automation to get things to drift in and out but not stick out too much.
For the bass parts I tried to keep the sub 100hz region constant with some multiband compression and also to cut through in the mids around 700-1.2k with some upwards compression so it would only kick in when needed.
It took me a few listens between different speaker systems to get a balance I was happy with but I got there in the end and I hope you like it too.
As a note I did try to match the song length to the original mix provided as that was used as the benchmark last month,
Matt
All mixed 'in the box'