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Mixing Competition/Learning Resource - February POLL ADDED


51m0n
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[quote name='OldG' timestamp='1360580853' post='1972513']


Powerful sounding mix there.. Are you slamming it with a limiter,by any chance?
[/quote]

Yup, busted! Sorry, I'm aware it's not in the ethos of the mixing competition, but I was keen to try out a mix bus tutorial I'd seen on YouTube... And I was referencing with an Audioslave track!

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[quote name='OldG' timestamp='1360580853' post='1972513']
Powerful sounding mix there.. Are you slamming it with a limiter,by any chance?
[/quote]
[quote name='moonbass' timestamp='1360612651' post='1973462']
Yup, busted! Sorry, I'm aware it's not in the ethos of the mixing competition, but I was keen to try out a mix bus tutorial I'd seen on YouTube... And I was referencing with an Audioslave track!
[/quote]

Yeah this almost counts as disqualifying the mix IMO, thats how much you can gain from hitting the 2budss hard with limiting, it drastically changes the apparent volume of the track, which is very hard for people to take into account when judging between tracks. This is the mixing competition, by all means use some compression on the mix buss to glue it together, but slamming a limiter is definite no-no territory.

How about you put up a mix without the heavy 2 buss processing and we vote on that, but leave this one availalbe so people can hear the difference, then explain exactly what the difference is in terms of precisely what you did, what you used and how you went about judging that it was 'right'??

I am so busy working on an upcoming gig that I still havent heard the stems yet (which is a definite worry at this point). WIll hopefully get an evening at it tonight :()

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[quote name='OldG' timestamp='1360657767' post='1973970']
No worries to me - I like the energy of your track. :)

I'm struggling to get that sort of power into my attempt, without turning it into a mushy,garbled mess - How are you doing it?
[/quote]

'Power' is gained from good transient control (and the control of the 30 to 80ms after the transient), great seperation and a deep understanding of what is providing energy in the low mids and when IME.

It can be exaggerated greatly with parallel compression techniques (particularly on drums) and ducking techniques (kick and bass guitar, snare and guitars in a dense mix as well). In some genres you can increase the sense of power by getting some pumping going off the kick drum on a group (say of the rhythm guitars).

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Thanks 51m0n,

I have the vox,bass and guitars pretty well sorted (I think...) . I'll use your suggestions to try and get the drums up to par.
If I'm somewhere near successful, I could post a before and after of just the drum buss to highlight the difference.
TBH, I'm having trouble with the room ambience on these track... It's the first time I've worked on live drums as opposed to EZdrummer....

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Embrace the ambience, some of the biggest drums ever are hugely ambient.

However you can also get into trouble with compression bring the ambience up too high, in this case an expander set to pull the ambience down before the compressor can help, by allowing you to use the compressor on the drum to gain oomph, and have the expander already diminished the ambient level that reaches the compressor, the result is a more powerful drum sound with the same amount of ambience as before...

Bit of a tricky one to set up, sounds great when its working for you though.

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Right made a start tonight - my goodness the drum tracking is to cock isn't it! Really terrible effort there, the guy who mixed this for you deserves a bleedin' medal matey :D

Still on the other hand the guitars and bass are pretty good, and the vocals aren't bad at all either, so its just down to how well I can rescue the drums....

As a pointed lesson to all here who want to record their bands, we've now had two sets of drum stems for two different songs, in completely different genres recorded by totally different people really badly.

Lesson 1: New skins on the batter heads at least!

Lesson 2: Get the drums sounding utterly awesome before you put a mic near them...

Lesson 3: Get the mics in the the best possible place to capture the drums as perfectly as possible, if you are in the same room as the drums record a bit, listen back on really nice headphones, move the mic, rinse and repeat unti leach mic sounds great, and isnt out of phase with anything else on the kit

Lesson 4: And this is the most important thing of all IMO for a good guerrilla recording of a drumkit. [b][i]No fx, no eq and absolutely no gates ever, ever ever, when tracking drums, [/i][/b]unless you are in a killer studio, with superb seperation, and great gear, and superb monitoring, [i]and tonnes of experience tracking drums[/i]. Because otherwise you absolutely will make things worse than they are, and far harder to mix....

Onwards and upwards eh :D

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[quote name='51m0n' timestamp='1360661720' post='1974025']
How about you put up a mix without the heavy 2 buss processing and we vote on that, but leave this one availalbe so people can hear the difference, then explain exactly what the difference is in terms of precisely what you did, what you used and how you went about judging that it was 'right'??
[/quote]

Okey-dokey, here's my less squished version (with a little bit of other tinkering also):
https://soundcloud.com/makossaband/mission-ray-2-master

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Just a heads up for Nebula 3 from Acustica-Audio.
I am not usually one for Gassing for FX, i usually just go with the Native DAW plugs,
and freebies. But the free version of this is worth a try. There are two paid for versions and
in the end i went for the 79 Euros version - The full server version is about 150 Euros i think.

Company
http://www.acustica-audio.com/

The Nebula 3 free bundle. [worth a go i think]
http://www.acustica-audio.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=20&Itemid=101


Garry

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wow... rec specs are scary for one plug!

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS: SSE2 for optimizations 2 & 5
A Minimum Dual Core Processor with 2 Gig Ram is recommended. Quad Core and 4 Gig Ram and greater are highly recommended. Nebula will work on a PC with 1 Gig Ram and a single 2.4 GHz processor, but will be limited in number of instances and processing speed.
CUDA-compliant video card for optimization 12,13,14 and 15 (optional).

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[quote name='OldG' timestamp='1361100594' post='1980952']
wow... rec specs are scary for one plug!
[/quote]

Not really - high PC specs are the normal these days in Audio recording.
i7 Quad Cores machines are reasonably priced, and quality RAM running in pretty cheap as well.
Most DAW and plug in vendors would use the spec you quoted for their software, just to cover thier arse.

Garry

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What's the deadline for entries this month?

I'm asking 'cos at present I haven't even started... it's been a busy month at work and I've only barely got time to put something together for the composition challenge. Hence I might not be able to fit this in as well :(

No matter. Rest assured I'll be listening to the entries and folllowing keenly regardless.

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Well I've finally sorted the drums out - what a mission that was ;) Once again no samples were used to make the drums sound utterly epic (well they sound epic to me now anyway). I hate using someone elses kit :D

Guitars and vocals left to fineese (bass was already there before I slunk back into the land of the drum).

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yeh late night mix started on headphones should be fixed now also for that opening fill the snares doubled up

heres the most recent incarnation

[url="https://soundcloud.com/chris-hallam-1/mission-ray-6"]https://soundcloud.c...1/mission-ray-6[/url]


and heres the final mix

[url="https://soundcloud.com/chris-hallam-1/mission-ray-final"]https://soundcloud.com/chris-hallam-1/mission-ray-final[/url]

i've left all the links active so you can hopefully hear some progression

imo this final mix is a lot wider than the other two and also there a few problems which i've ironed out

Edited by Chrismanbass
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