Mixoff Contest with Barry Wood - Win Barry's New Book!

http://soundcloud.com/vvv-4/ambitions-vvvmix-320kps

Aiight, now that my ears are a bit rested I listened to the other mixes so far:

J.S.: about "faders-up", as you said, but hooked me on the song!

Spede: Sounds like you did some EQ on the drums; I hear what yer goin for, altho' I personally like more of a integrated kit sound, but yer frequency-separation and highlight of the snare is impressive.  Nice job on cleaning up the vox, and the bass - I found the bass in particular a bit muddy, and still, in my mix.

I agree with the above comment, BTW, that the guitars are a bit "tight" vs. the "looser" drums, not really sync'd to the "late" snare, but I rather like that tension!

This is my kind of tune, will definitely take a stab at it.

Edit: Have started working on the mix and I gotta give props to the recording engineer; These are great tracks to work with compared to a lot of what I get to tinker with 

Two questions before I dive into this wonderful tune:

* Was it recorded to a click and if so: What's the tempo?
* Any chance I could have a glance at the lyrics?

I've forwarded these to the band, should have that stuff soon, I hope!

Listening to the tracks, I heard a couple of spots where some timing edits might help add a little punch, but overall nothing too severe. Also, the vocals are pretty much on pitch, I remember hearing one note that I might tune, but overall it's right on!

The hardest thing from my perspective is probably the guitars. I think they sound good, but just a touch more distortion than I'd like, maybe a touch fizzy.

I'll try to post a proper mix myself if I can, I have a super busy week of tracking this week!

These drums really need to be recut. The timing is shaky. What's with the wimpy snare hits and loud cymbal smashing in the chorus? Unusable.

Great vocals, like everyone said! Reminds me so much of Tool. This guy needs to find another band IMO!

One of the guitars is very fizzy, possibly from clipping, or just too overdriven.

The bass timing is really off.

Two questions before I dive into this wonderful tune:

* Was it recorded to a click and if so: What's the tempo?
* Any chance I could have a glance at the lyrics?

I've forwarded these to the band, should have that stuff soon, I hope!

Listening to the tracks, I heard a couple of spots where some timing edits might help add a little punch, but overall nothing too severe. Also, the vocals are pretty much on pitch, I remember hearing one note that I might tune, but overall it's right on!

The hardest thing from my perspective is probably the guitars. I think they sound good, but just a touch more distortion than I'd like, maybe a touch fizzy.

I'll try to post a proper mix myself if I can, I have a super busy week of tracking this week!

Did you track this by the way John?

I agree that the sound of the vocalist is great and the pitch is fine, but in all fairness: there are some timing issues with all the tracks. Drums, bass, guitars, vocals. They all have a few moments where they disturb the tightness of the song imo. I'd fix some stuff here and there if I could put it on a grid, but without, I won't bother. Guitars will be hard to edit anyway without DI tracks

That being said: Very cool band, I like the stuff on Reverbnation as well!

I didn't track this, they did it themselves, I have mixed one song for them previously, though!

I agree DI tracks for guitars would be nice, I usually ask for them if a band hasn't started tracking yet, but in this case, they didn't have them.

I'm sure there are lots of little timing things, which you're welcome to fix, if you feel it necessary! You should be able to find the tempo using something like Music Math, or build a tempo map, if you want. I don't personally ever grid things out, I just tweak timing issues by ear.

Looking forward to hearing some more mixes!

Spede: Sounds like you did some EQ on the drums; I hear what yer goin for, altho' I personally like more of a integrated kit sound, but yer frequency-separation and highlight of the snare is impressive.  Nice job on cleaning up the vox, and the bass - I found the bass in particular a bit muddy, and still, in my mix.

Thanks. I added some of my own amp sims to the bass, since I couldn't get the original amp signal to work with the DI (No matter what I did, they
always seemed to eat each others lowest octave away). I've also added exciter great deal, actually so much that it's contributing to the bass distortion
To be precise I didn't do almost anything to the vocals, apart from little compression and cleaning EQ; everything else has been trimmed quite a lot to
pave way for those incredible vocals.

http://soundcloud.com/vvv-4/ambitions-vvvmix-320kps

Yeah, the bass is pretty "heavy" on the low end but in this kind of genre it's okay to have little extra oomph in there. IMO problems rise when you pan
them to the edges occasionally. That's where the muddiness starts to show it's ugly rear IMO.
Using lots of pannigs in the guitars is pretty neat feat here to get some dynamics out of this song. But it feels, that when they center, they drop in volume.
So I guess you should pay more attention to the guitar volumes when panning them back and forth.     
Those vocal delays are working very well in the middle eight! Good job there!

These drums really need to be recut. The timing is shaky. What's with the wimpy snare hits and loud cymbal smashing in the chorus? Unusable.

Great vocals, like everyone said! Reminds me so much of Tool. This guy needs to find another band IMO!

One of the guitars is very fizzy, possibly from clipping, or just too overdriven.

The bass timing is really off.

Well, I guess since this is what we get, this is what the band is happy for. I tightened the band just a little bit with moving guitars and snare hits here and
there to get rid of most dramatic flamming effects. Snare can always be augmented with a touch of sample if necessary. Fizzyness can always be eased
with little dipping eq in the 4kHz (eased for me )


We can't do everything, but we can do something.   

These drums really need to be recut. The timing is shaky. What's with the wimpy snare hits and loud cymbal smashing in the chorus? Unusable.

Great vocals, like everyone said! Reminds me so much of Tool. This guy needs to find another band IMO!

One of the guitars is very fizzy, possibly from clipping, or just too overdriven.

The bass timing is really off.

I appreciate your comments, but let's try to focus on working with what we have. If you do any mixing for projects recorded in home studios, you've surely come across much worse than this. These guys record themselves, and I think they do a good job of it. Let's do our best, and try to minimize the criticism of the recorded tracks. Critiquing one another's mixes, is, of course, great!

I appreciate your comments, but let's try to focus on working with what we have. If you do any mixing for projects recorded in home studios, you've surely come across much worse than this. These guys record themselves, and I think they do a good job of it. Let's do our best, and try to minimize the criticism of the recorded tracks. Critiquing one another's mixes, is, of course, great!

I agree.

I'm not a recording engineer or whatever else in music business but come on : the band gives us tracks for a contest, I'm sure we could do better than saying "the singer needs to find another band"...