Loudness_Value;-16.40 LUFS
Sample Rate;44.100 kHz
Average RMS (AES-17) Left;-16.32 dB
Average RMS (AES-17) Right;-16.46 dB
Max. RMS;-12.47 dB
Peak Amplitude Left;-1.28 dB
Peak Amplitude Right;-1.56 dB
True Peak Left;-1.25 dB
True Peak Right;-1.56 dB
Bit Depth Left;24 bit
Bit Depth Right;24 bit
Monthly Mix Contest Entry Link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1995uMC ... sp=sharing
General Comments:
This months song was really fun to mix, yet very challenging. I really enjoyed this song, both mixing and listening. Thank you to the song provider @Edling for providing a great song to the contest and to @misterfox for hosting this forum and contest.
I imported the tracks, typical session setup/maintenance and brought each track to a nice starting volume by using pink noise at -15 to gain stage. Usually I find the pink noise helps me get everything quickly to a good starting blend. I listened a few times to the provided mixed version. Most notable to me was the drums almost were too loud in my opinion in the original, and there seemed to be almost too much mix bus compression or some kind of filter sound over the track. My goals were to open up the mix instrument spacing, bringing clarity and movement to the mix. I wanted to clean up the hooks/chorus as they seemed cluttered with so many instruments playing at the same time, and wanted to keep the drums sharp and bright but also wanted some of the keys, synths and strings to come through more.
The original mix was kind of flat in terms of movement/motion in the mix, so I focused a lot on ducking, automation (real time and plugin based), panning, phasers, and used GEM MOD which is a motion plugin that doesn't add a reverb effect but really pushes instruments in and out of the mix. I really tried to let the main "focus" instruments shine when they were supposed to and tried my best to create a nice journey through the song transitions.
I did an entire mix, and it sounded amazing, but after comparing it to the original mix, I noticed I focused on too much of the totality of instruments and not really keeping the guitar energy. I scrapped that mix, did a completely new mix, which I hated, so I went back to the original since it was so good, and fixed all my "mix notes" after listening for a good week at work, driving and at home. In total I did 5 versions of the mix and I think the final mix sounds really good. I probably could even find more to fix, but I think I did it justice and hope the song provider agrees.
Mixing Setup:
Mainly mixed on Sennheiser HD650 cans, and occasionally checking on my 20 year old fostex PM5 monitors in a bedroom studio. I have full spectrum sound blankets on the walls but currently I am not using any correction software and currently don't have my 31band 2 channel EQ hooked up. In the past I used to manually EQ and treat my rooms which was amazing, but now its a hobby and I will be getting a new interface soon, so hopefully I can re-wire the entire studio and incorporate a EQ correction signal flow to my monitor selector.
Computer (Ryzen 7, 8 core, 32gb ram, Steinberg ur-22 cheap interface.)
Plugins (thousands of dollars of waves, plugin alliance, soundtoys, and other plugins).
Cubase 10.5 Pro
Mix was checked on Bluetooth sony headphones (cheap), car stereo, Fostex PM5 monitors (briefly so I didn't piss off my neighbors, used in both mono and stereo), Sennheiser HD280s, Sennheiser HD650, mono smartphone speaker
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Mixing Session and Layout:
As usual, my sessions are set up with mostly parallel processing for each instrument group using FX sends:
Some tracks get additional direct processing. The FX Send tracks are labeled by instrument group which they primarily went to, however some tracks got multiple FX sends to create thickness, or phantom placement/reverbs..etc.
Almost all channels at least had a Channel Strip directly inserted: Used were " BX AMEK 200, Scheps Omnichannel (love this one!), Lindell 50 (mostly keys and some guitars), Lindel 80, AMEK 9099, Lindel 69.
FX Sends:
FX KEYS TAPE - Waves J37 tape *all keys
FX Vox Saturation - Devil Loc Deluxe, Vocal Rider, Platone Studio Reverb
FX VOX reverb - Little Plate (sountoys), REQ 6, Pulsar w495 EQ,
FX VOX tube - Black Box HG2, Vocal Rider
FX VOX COMP - CLA - 76 (love this comp on vocals)
FX Bass Distortion - Decapitator, S1 stereo imager, Bass Rider
FX Drums Snare Comp- DBX - 160, Gate
FX Drums Distoration - Devil Loc Deluxe, Gate
FX Guitar Distortion - Devil Loc Delus, The Oven
I'm not going to get into every track and plugin used, but Most tracks used just a channel strip and plugins like Reverb, GemMOD, Delays and EQ to mainly work on instrument frequency clashes and position. I took screenshots if you would like to see, links below.
Since the original files were really good sounding, most of my direct processing wasn't about improving any of the sounds, but more cutting out frequencies to help competing sounds blend well, using sidechain processing to create motion and space (bass sidechained to kick), Guitar Crunch sidechained to snare and guitar solo, guitar distortion sidechained to vocals and snare...etc (quite a bid of sidechain ducking was used on this mix as there were A LOT of instruments that shared that 500hz to 4k region.
I also used A LOT of reverbs, delays, stereo panning and compression and EQ to help the instruments sit well in the mix and not compete for space/time.
Lastly the drums. I noticed the snare was very snappy and sharp in the original mix, so I tried to keep that element of the snare, and brought the kick out a lot to really hit hard, but I also tried to keep them slightly buried in the mix so they weren't the main focus, but were still impactful. Hopefully I did a good job with them. I autoaligned all the drums (before I read the notes and realized they weren't live) lol, and was already far into the mix when I read the mix notes, so I left the autoalign on, since its just habit. I also did use autoalign on some of the bass, and guitars just to make sure they didn't have any phase issues with all the instruments playing during hooks/chorus. I used SPL De-Verb on the Ambient tracks to help take away some of the bleed and reverb, so I could add my own and keep the sharp transients.
Drums:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14xcU-y ... sp=sharing
Keys
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X3KfAg ... sp=sharing
Vox
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w2M8Td ... sp=sharing
Guitars
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SCD09N ... sp=sharing
Bass
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12Ry4Hv ... sp=sharing
Mixbus I kind of went nuts on this run, as I recently bought a bunch of plugins I wanted to try. I mixed the song without the mixbus plugins, then added them to help with EQ, Glue, stereo separation and some saturation and tone, then I turned off the mixbus plugs and went deeper into mixing each channel without mix bus processing, and in my final adjustments turned the mixbus processing on and made minor tweaks to finish the track.
Mixbus:
Amek Mastering Compressor
BX Glue
Abby Road Mastering suite (tape, eq, compression, stereo)
Basslane (bass harmonics)
Black Box HG-Q (this thing is new and very interesting, its a multiband tube saturator/eq.
SPL Big (stereo imaging plugin).
The Stereo Bus/Main Out I just have a brickwall limiter at -1.3db and my analytical plugins (SPL hawkeye, ISOL8, Waves VU meter, Waves WLM Plus stereo.
I really enjoyed mixing this song, and really like the song a lot! I hope I did it justice.
Best wishes to all.