MIX CHALLENGE - MC089 December 2022 - Winners announced

[Mastemoth]

Sorry I don’t think I’m following your question. The two versions are just a clean take so you can add your own guitar tone.

Maybe I was unclear. Guitar 1, 1 Dub and 2 are all identical. Also Guitar 1 DI, 1 DUB DI and 2 DI are identical. If you take Guitar 1 and 2 and pan them left and right you're basically just hearing the same guitar louder, with no stereo width. What I asked about was if this was intentional or by mistake.

[ManuC]

Hello everyone

Here is my contribution.

Thanks to the organizer and the group for this title.

Basically, eq and comp in all track, nothing fancy, just make room for each and give some tracks another color.

It lacks a bit of automation but I didn't have more time.

Good mix to all

Mix wave : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n0Lkme ... share_link

[Mister Fox]

I have to step in on this one.

Sorry I don’t think I’m following your question. The two versions are just a clean take so you can add your own guitar tone.

Maybe I was unclear. Guitar 1, 1 Dub and 2 are all identical. Also Guitar 1 DI, 1 DUB DI and 2 DI are identical. If you take Guitar 1 and 2 and pan them left and right you're basically just hearing the same guitar louder, with no stereo width. What I asked about was if this was intentional or by mistake.

I have been checking the material over and over for the last several hours now, going through the various iterations I got during the weeks leading up to MC089. Unfortunately, I can not(!) give you the comfort of "perfectly double tracked" main guitar takes this month. Sometimes it is not "just add some EQ, compression and reverb", then call it a day. You have to work with what has been given to you.

There are a couple of workarounds that you could try. It can be simple things like modulation, slightly different transients, maybe introduce some (dynamic) saturation, different amp setups, etc. (hint!)


There are many possibilities to still "salvage" the material and create an outstanding mix. You just have to be creative!
And this is what this month is about. Build upon what has been given to you, invest the time, push your skills, elevate the material.

[scottfitz]

Hi all,
Great song, love the style, I'm going to really enjoy this one!
Cheers

[Mastemoth]

I have to step in on this one.

Sorry I don’t think I’m following your question. The two versions are just a clean take so you can add your own guitar tone.

Maybe I was unclear. Guitar 1, 1 Dub and 2 are all identical. Also Guitar 1 DI, 1 DUB DI and 2 DI are identical. If you take Guitar 1 and 2 and pan them left and right you're basically just hearing the same guitar louder, with no stereo width. What I asked about was if this was intentional or by mistake.

I have been checking the material over and over for the last several hours now, going through the various iterations I got during the weeks leading up to MC089. Unfortunately, I can not(!) give you the comfort of "perfectly double tracked" main guitar takes this month. Sometimes it is not "just add some EQ, compression and reverb", then call it a day. You have to work with what has been given to you.

There are a couple of workarounds that you could try. It can be simple things like modulation, slightly different transients, maybe introduce some (dynamic) saturation, different amp setups, etc. (hint!)


There are many possibilities to still "salvage" the material and create an outstanding mix. You just have to be creative!
And this is what this month is about. Build upon what has been given to you, invest the time, push your skills, elevate the material.

To be clear, this is not a complaint. I just wanted to be sure this wasn't a mistake at rendering the files or anything similar. And also I felt that I should bring this up as early as possible so people didn't start turning in mixes before this was settled. Also, I would've asked this from a provider in a professional situation too since just having three files for guitar seems to suggest it's "actual" dubs or at least intended to be. I have the utmost respect and gratitude for you, Mister Fox, for the work you put into this. You're doing a fantastic job.

An anecdote. Around 8 years ago I worked together with a hip hop label /collective. First I helped with technology issues and studio building. But then they felt they were too new to make good mixes. So they sent me the files. I think I got around 70 tracks. First I realised they sent me only stereo files with rendered after panning. So I asked them to just remove panning and then render the files. Then I realised a lot of the files were dual mono and also rendered after fader. So I decided I was going to go to the studio and render them myself. There I saw how they worked. If the bass wasn't phat enough they duplicated the tracks. If they needed more backing vocals they duplicated them. I think they had 4 of the same bass track which is why I got some bass tracks with very low levels, when rendered after fader.

When I started mixing I had 27 tracks coming from around 70. This is why I always ask if I think there's a problem. It has nothing to do with complaining or saying something sucks. These things happen. I have also sent away wrong files for mixing.

Anyway, now I know what I have to work with and I'm no stranger to solving things with creative measures. Thanks for clearing it up!

[scottfitz]

.. ditto for how great a job Mister Fox does.
Other mix competition sites are not nearly as good. Keep up the amazing work, we all appreciate it.

[cpsmusic]

Hi All,

Just having a look at the raw files for the challenge today. Thanks to @Mastemoth and Mister Fox for looking into the guitar issue. However I'm still unclear as to what the GUITAR 2/DI files are with respect to GUITAR 1/DI. Would it be possible to explain how the files were recorded/created?

Cheers!

[JamesMusic]

Great track!
Here is my mix - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_f6loB ... sp=sharing

A few things to mention about my mix -

- Nothing much on drums, great sounds already. Added some compression and verb to the Fills track as these were very dry compared to the other elements, OHs and rooms had a bit of top end added. All drums were sent to a room reverb.

- Bass DI and amp were time aligned and compressed pretty heavily. Bass DI is low passed and is there for sub weight only. The amp signal is distorted and high passed at the crossover with the DI.

- The main rhythm guitar - I used the amp signal and sent that left, the DI I put through an amp sim and panned right, with a preset that minimised phase cancelation and gave width.

- For the other verse guitar part. The amped version went 50% left and went through some extra distorion. The DI went 50% right with an octave pedal effect and went through and amp sim.

- The chorus guitars went full left and right, with high and low pass filters to occupy less space. The had delays and saturation added. The stereo width was expanded on the effects.

- Vocals - The screams and main vox were separated so that the screams could have extra distorion. Some de-essing, saturation, upfront compression. Some tuning here and there. Ambient during choruses, dry during verses.
- Vocal effects, they vary throughout the song, some long hall, some small room ambience, some automated long delays, delay throws on certain words.

- Backing vocals - panned around depending of number of simultaneous parts. They were saturated, sent largely to the same effects as main vox

- I have added some interest to certain parts of the song with automated effects, things like rhythmic stutters on the guitars. Telephone effects, reverse guitar swells, distorted drums etc.


Looking forward to hearing some of the other mixes.
Cheers,

James

[Christoph_K]

Very, very cool track! Thanks to Ron for providing it and going through this!

First of all I must admit that I don’t feel „at home“ in this genre - at all. The last time I mixed a song in this realm (it was also a mixing contest with Warren Huart and Christian Kohle) I got lost pretty quickly. So here we go again

The last month or so I played around with the Michael Brauer Template which recently was released by the puremix people. And man, that thing is awesome. This template and the hours of videos explaining it only are worth the membership fee - for sure. But that makes it difficult for the documentation in this game. I really can’t go through that whole thing in detail, it would take me hours to write.

What it basically is (for those who don’t already know): You are running your mix through five parallel bus processes (A to E) and there is a ton of stuff going on on each bus. Even on the Mixbus is quite an amount of processing (SSL Comp, Germanium Comp, ShadowHills, Chandler CurveBender, Studer 800).

All the tracks run through either SSL 4k oder 9000J channel strips. There are a lot of parallel processes for drums, guitars and vocals (five different compressors in parallel only for vocals) plus reverbs and delays. I will do explain what I did besides of the Brauerize things though.

To get punch, depth and size on the drum tracks I used the parallel processes (compression, saturation) plus different rooms, plates and gated reverbs. I used the new Waves BB Tube plugin on Kick and Snare (yes, it’s great). I sent Kick, Snare, Tom and fill though a sans amp (which is not part of the template by default) plus some tape echo to fill the kit out in the midrange. When I was done mixing I bounced the intro and sent it through the McDSP Futzbox and Waves Kaleidoscope. I also used the a snare snippet from the end, reversed it and put that in the transition to the Chorus (for whooping it, you. know).

I used both bass tracks and spiced up the already amped signal with BB Tube. The DI track has a SansAmp for tone and 1176 RevE for evening out the dynamics.

Some guitar tracks seemed to be redundant so I tried to find those with differences and spread them out (I already was working on the mix after the mistake was reported, so I sticked with what I had so far). I took one of the main DI tracks and sent it through Softubes AMP room to get more impact. The SSL EQ was for overall shaping and the Sonible SmartEQ to tame some harsh resonances (I used the learn function and chose to like it).

When I looked at the vocals I found them quite uneven so I did a lot of clip gaining before doing anything else. I also tried to find groups that made sense to me for an easier mixing process. The de-essing was an ongoing issue and I ended up with the Softube Weiss Deess and the SPL Deesser to get results that I liked. I used 1176AE, LA2, El Rey, Devil-Loc, Autotune for two tracks and - again - BB Tubes. Pro-Q3 to tame harshness.

The rest was automation.

This is it. Good luck everyone!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xv3vp4yfg9mmh ... K.wav?dl=0

[PauPeu]

Hi everyone, here's my mix.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JAuh6R ... sp=sharing

Drums: I heavly processed the snare, for the rest just subtle changes.

Drum Buss: Parallel "Loc-ness" distortion a little eq and compression

Guitars: I took the clean ones and reprocessed with a preset from guitar rig 6 (metalcore) hahaa, It seems to work!

Guitars chorus: I used the clean ones heavy panned, with a little amp effect and a delay, It makes contrast with the rest of the song

Main vocals: I had to change (automate) volumes a lot, and then the usual comp, saturation, eq process.

scream vocals: i used the Skreamer on this (a little redundant but again, it adds agresion, and I like it), maybe it lacks a little definition, but I like the contrast with the main and chorus vocals.

Chorus vocals: A little stereo spread, quite editing (volume) work, and a long lush reverb (Raum).

A bunch of parallel delays,a room rev, and long rev, nothing unusual.


I think that's all, this genre is not my cup of tea but it was fun to mix, I'm quite happy with the mix also.

Good luck to everyone!