Re: MIX CHALLENGE - MC100 October 2024 - Submissions until 21-OCT-2024 23:59 UTC+2/CEST
Posted: Sat Oct 12, 2024 15:29 CEST
I like your mix! Its clean and I feel like you have done just enough to make all the tracks work. Nothing crazy, in a good way! One thing I would prefer is more low end on the kick, I think the bass sounds great. The boosts on the vocals also work great! good jobscottfitz wrote: ↑Sat Oct 12, 2024 04:57 CESTHi there rock fans. Thanks to JeroenZuiderwijk for your awesome track. If there ever was a genre for me it would be this one, a perfect track to mark the 100th Mix Challenge! Also thanks to Mister Fox for your continued generosity with your time and for your quality.
Here’s the link for my entry. Again I wanted to try to force myself to mix quicker so I’m calling it quits here at a point I’m pretty happy with. While I know it could be improved, I feel it’s diminishing returns territory.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W8lDFu ... sp=sharing
Specific notes on my approach and individual moves
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Bass
I felt that the track in it’s unmixed form was quite muddy so I cut a lot of low mids from the bass - up to 6dBs around 300Hz. I also felt it was short on that 900Hz growl/attack area so I boosted this right up. I also gave the bass plenty of tape saturation.
Drums
I thought the snare transients were huge and the kick transients virtually non-existent so I worked to even the score here. I used the plugin “Knock” on that kick with quite a bit of punch selected and some saturation. After this I did some huge cuts to the kick in that same muddy area. I was also finding the kick was too strong in the 170Hz area and not enough in it’s fundamental, so I did about a 4dB boost to 60Hz area. There was no click to the kick either, so I used about 8dB boost to the 5k+ area.
The snare transients I reduced using SplitEQ, taking them down by about 4dB. I also added a small room reverb to the snare which I felt was a bit choked by this gating.
The overheads I did some side chained multiband compression so that when the snare hits with all it’s extra cymbal sounds, those cymbals get reduced a bit. This was never going to be perfect but I gave it a go.
The drum bus I made sure to use a fairly fast release time due to the high tempo, although it was still just only a shade under 100ms in the end.
Guitars
These were very tricky partly because there were so many tracks to consider. I don’t really have time to go through everything. The main thing was that I wanted the guitars to be big and to not be afraid to mask the vox a little. I added plenty of saturation to those main rhythm guitars and used automation to make sure that in the break they fully occupied the space.
Vox
I experimented with various EQ moves but in the end opted for a little boost around 200Hz and a boost to the air range and felt this was enough. Using the Brauerize method, the saturation comes for many different compressors in parallel.
Mixbus
I used the API2500 with attack 10ms, release 50ms, ratio 1.5:1. I also used the Hitsville EQ with a 1dB boost to the top (12.5kHz) and bottom (50Hz) bands.
Cheers all and feedback is very welcome.