MIX CHALLENGE - MC34 July 2017 - Winners announced

[HerbFelho]

Very happy to be on #2! Congrats to Kim Kennedy, you did an awesome job, and to Mork as well, great mix as always!

It´s been a tough challenge and I´m not really familiar with this genre so this gives me a lot of confidence, thanks DT!
And also thanks for your equally competent and entertaining mix critiques!

As always thanks to Mister Fox for putting in the hard work and keep things ticking over!
I take the two notes torpedo plugin.

Cheers
Herb

[HerbFelho]

This... is what the challenge is about!

Things like this will continue to happen in the future where you have to listen closely in order to understand what's going on with the signal in the mix (or the guide track), and then recreate it as close as possible while adding your own fairy dust on top.

I like the idea of little challenges inside the challenge...
Thanks for clearing up the "Celeste problem"!

[Photonic]

Donkey Tugger,

Great to see that I reached the 4th place in this strong field of contenders! Thanx again for your reply and comments for the second round.
And my congratulations to the winners Jim, Herb and Mork.

[Mister Fox]

Acon Digital and TwoNotes are already taken for this month.

jhkennedy5, please throw me a PM.
Mork, you can still pick up something from the Sponsor Pool if you like



Also, thank you for the kind words, Herb

[Mork]

Meeh... third again

Congratulations to Mr Kennedy and Herb and basically everyone who could get something useful out of this piece of work!

Like Herb's mix, quite a 'master-blaster' in terms of compression. Again, perhaps a bit over the top, but given my commetns in the first round, I may have invited this just a bit! I liked the incidental effects in this one too, gave it a quite (ahem) contemporary feel.

Yep, I thought you we're exactly going for this, a "more modern, fat and pumped up" character with the lead vocal cutting into your forehead. I really like the energy in my mix especially of the last part, where you couldn't fit another hair in but still everything is there *pets his own back*. Had me rocking in the subway
So contemporary is exactly the right word to describe it.
Kennedy created a more "casual" feel (in a good way) with a lot of brightness. It's funny because I dialed back a good amount of high end towards the end referencing Moby and a german rapper (Marteria) and still felt a little on the bright side. It's odd sometimes how your ears shift sonic proportions based on mood, music your listening to, if you're in "mixing mode" and so on.

Regarding the special rules:
I have to say, personally I'm not that big of a fan of the "sound design" special rules. If you already have the sound you're after why bother to let someone else recreate it on his computer? It feels like a waste of time which could be better spend on adding to that sound. Especially if you have to download and install the exact same plugin and use the provided preset. I don't see the point. I think it's nice to do all that as a learning experience if you have the time and all, but to make it (semi-)mandatory is just a pita to those with time constraints...
Maybe it should be something like a "side-challenge" or something.

Enough of my rambling already!

I take the MH Dirty Delay, thanks!

Last but not least the most important thing: DT, please send regards from Mork to your nutter, he is not alone!

Cheers
Mork

[Mister Fox]

Meeh... third again

Third out of 16!

Regarding the special rules:
I have to say, personally I'm not that big of a fan of the "sound design" special rules. If you already have the sound you're after why bother to let someone else recreate it on his computer? It feels like a waste of time which could be better spend on adding to that sound. Especially if you have to download and install the exact same plugin and use the provided preset. I don't see the point. I think it's nice to do all that as a learning experience if you have the time and all, but to make it (semi-)mandatory is just a pita to those with time constraints...
Maybe it should be something like a "side-challenge" or something.

Point taken.

Though in this case, the blame is completely on me again. I was talking to DT about the possibility of having more control over the sound. Like different delay times, slightly altered strength of the gated sounds, etc. Maybe we should have documented that certain sounds are mandatory to be recreated as close as possible (see Celeste), as these are the driving factors of the production, yet you still have enough creative control over the overall sound (your "fairy dust").

The Gated Bass would have been such an example: you really needed a lot of EQ to shape it's sound first before hitting the gate. As mentioned erlier, I invested several hours to recreate the modulated clap sound and the delay preset - because FLStudio's Delay Bank has such a unique feature set that was not easy to recreate otherwise, and there is currently no substitute for Classic AutoFilter (the original file was "printed", not clean as present in this bundle!).

There was also still the request from the old days to be forced to use special tools (e.g. only freeware plugins, only host stock plugins, etc). I found this to be a bit overkill. But I wanted a twist regardless, to shake things up a little. In fact, there was also the idea tossed around to create Binaural Mixes(!) (this track would have been great for that purpose). However due to lack of time for testing tools, we ultimately decided against that idea. Doesn't mean that this might not happen in the future of course.



I do hope that MC34 was fun and challenging regardless.

[donkey tugger]

Yep, I thought you we're exactly going for this, a "more modern, fat and pumped up" character with the lead vocal cutting into your forehead. I really like the energy in my mix especially of the last part, where you couldn't fit another hair in but still everything is there *pets his own back*. Had me rocking in the subway
So contemporary is exactly the right word to describe it.
Kennedy created a more "casual" feel (in a good way) with a lot of brightness. It's funny because I dialed back a good amount of high end towards the end referencing Moby and a german rapper (Marteria) and still felt a little on the bright side. It's odd sometimes how your ears shift sonic proportions based on mood, music your listening to, if you're in "mixing mode" and so on.



Last but not least the most important thing: DT, please send regards from Mork to your nutter, he is not alone!

Cheers
Mork

To be honest, I did find it a bit weird and difficulttrying to describe how I wanted something to sound. I've been on the other side of the counter so to speak many times; "what do you mean, you want it to sound 'bigger and more zingy?!?" and have therefore possibly learnt another important thing - have a bit more patience with other people when they come out with ludicrous generalised mixing requests. Except of course with my boss and his utterly crap acoustic whiney stuff I'm allegedly helping him with at present.