Mixoff Contest with Mike Senior - Win Mike's New Book!

[triviul]

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22196972/BloodToBone_mixerJB.wav

I do like the jangly tone you've opened the tune with, and it immediately demanded my attention. However, I wonder if it's just a little too bright, because it does make the drums and guitar sound a little underwhelming when they arrive, which would be self-defeating in the long-run.

Overall, this mix has some similarity with huntermusic's inasmuch as it has a good deal of super-low kick energy, but with something of a spectral 'gulf' between that and the low end of the bass/guitar conglomeration. First things first, I would personally be reluctant to put that much sub on a kick in a track as fast as this, simply because it will tend to lengthen the hits and blur the part's details. Depending on your monitoring situation, it's very possible that the sub levels could also impact on your ability to balance the rest of the track reliably, and it does seem to me as if the whole rest of the spectrum has been tilted treble-wards a certain amount to counterbalance the low end. I'd reset whatever low-end enhancement you've dialled in, and try investigating what the 80-90Hz zone has to offer instead. It might not cause your lava lamp to walk along the meterbridge anymore, but I suspect it'll give you more subjective bounce on big speakers, while translating more of the power of the drum onto smaller systems. (It's not that you can't hear the kick on small speakers at the moment, though, because the part's coming through very well in the higher midrange, it's just that it feels a bit lightweight in those circumstances.)

If you approach the kick-drum more along those lines, I think it'll quickly become more obvious that the low end of the bass and guitars need nudging up below 200Hz or so to warm them up. That said, the bass is really nicely controlled and it cuts through wonderfully on the small speakers, while the guitars are kept out of each other's way so that the texture remains pretty clear throughout, and nothing starts sand-papering my ear canals come the mid-section either. (That said, maybe the cymbals could be softened slightly in the 10kHz region during the outro, when the solo guitar hits.) I'd like a bit more of that secondary guitar part in the choruses still, though.

I like the way you've dealt with the lead vocals a lot. They feel chunky enough to command the track, but not so big that they upset the well-judged balances. There is a little too much sibilance for me, though, so it'd be worth putting a de-esser into action. I also like the way you've flown in the BVs in the reintro, and the harmonies in the chorus are interesting, even though they perhaps draw undue attention away from the lead in the grand scheme of things -- although that might just be me having heard the track hundreds of times now without them. The vocal tuning and timing does still need work.

By choosing to keep a fairly compact stereo picture, you've managed to maintain decent mono compatibility, which is great. However, although you do paint out to the edges of the picture in stereo, it does nonetheless feel a little bit too constricted for me, and I'd probably try to introduce more non-essential stereo widening tactics -- some wide stereo background hiss might be a worthwhile thing to try, for example, although be careful not to overemphasise the 10kHz cymbal danger zone.

Thanks for getting involved with the competition. This mix already works very well on an Auratone, which says a lot about your balancing skills, and you've made the long-term dynamics work pretty well too. Your job now is to try to retain those advantageous characteristics while fattening up the stereo presentation, I think.

[studioIMP]

Hi guys

My name is Manuel and I just got here in this forum, saw this post and here is my mix. I hope you enjoy it and post some comments. 

http://soundcloud.com/manuelbernal   

Thanks

Hi Manuel, I've not reviewed many mixes so I hope this helps you.

Bass sounds really nice, you managed to get a heavy sounding bass without it being too over powering and muddy. I thought the drums had a bit too much reverb for my taste at the start but sounded better when the main riff comes in.  The vocals come through nicely and the delay works really well.  Overall I think this is a good attempt. Keep it up.

[studioIMP]

Here is my mix: http://soundcloud.com/studioimp/studioimp-younggriff

Is this link active? Soundcloud is giving me an error message.

Sorry not sure why this isnt working.  i've just got my mail now so this should work.

http://soundcloud.com/studioimp/studioimp-younggriff

[triviul]

Can you reference or describe a snare sound that you think would work better and explain how you would intergrate it further with the kit?

There have been some nice ones already on this thread, but you'll have to flick back through a few of the critiques to find them, because all these mixes are beginning to become one big blur to me now! As far as blending is concerned, I'd try to do this by first switching the snare on and off while the mix is playing. When it's not there, imagine what its tone should be, then pop it back in and see if the odd narrow EQ notch might make it sit more naturally. Then I'd look at the possibilities offered by short ambience reverb, but trying to match the acoustic signature of the ambience to the overheads if you can. It can sometimes take me 10 minutes or more to find the right raw reverb preset to start work from in situations like this, so don't hurry that bit of the process.

Well I had it beefier to start with , then I went and listened to a few of their references and came away with the impression ( rightly or wrongly ) that it wasn't that prominent in some of the songs they liked, so I tried to sit it above the bass and try to make the bass driver the track along instead. I also ended up rolling some bottom off the whole mix when I heard it the next morning just before I posted it.

It's always tricky to judge the bottom octaves, and engineers do differ quite a bit in their approaches here. I've personally prefered to err on the side of more rather than less, more in line with the Cog and Death Cab mixes, but it's always going to be a moot point. The advantage of less low end, of course, is that you can usually get more loudness out of the end result.

Now this is one of my bone of contentions - I actually like to hear little things like fret squeeks and a little breath noise, I think it adds character...after all it's Rock N Roll not the Royal Philhamonic   alot of my favourite recordings have little bits of noise on that could be taken out ( think Beatles/ Oasis etc )  but I think are best left in and not oversanitised

It might perhaps surprise you to hear that I actually agree with you, but it's not the presence of these things in the mix that bugs me, it's the balance. Tuck it into the mix a bit more and I'm all for it.

I think I know why that is now, I used Brainworx Shredspread set fairly wide to give the chorus guitars a lift and I I forgot to check the mix as a whole in mono until it was too late. I have the guitars opposite panned, so do I try inverting the phase of one of them or is there a more elegant solution ? Or is it just the plugin that needs it's mono gain turning up ? I will try it.

The plug-in is probably responsible for a lot of the problem, but if you pan the multi-mics to opposite sides, then any phase mismatch between them can also compromise the mono-compatibility. Simple polarity inversion is unlikely to help, because its a timing-related phase mismatch that's at issue, so I'd investigate small timing shifts and/or phase-rotation devices. (You can find some affordable ones here.)

I actually did some just to nudge it into shape, again not a huge fan of overdoing it - I find the overuse/abuse of Autotune etc. really puts me off alot of modern songs

I agree with you, but in my experience you can do a massive amount to correct and tighten vocal tuning without actually killing the emotion (if you're careful), and like it or not we do now live in an age where the listening public have grown accustomed to unnaturally tight tuning.

I usually end up with 10 or 12 subgroups that I do alot of automation on so on this one for instance when the chorus hits I rode up room mics, brought in a much more distorted bass track that I'd multed, rode up the kit global ambience return, the vocal FX send and the Shredspread fader and then pulled them some ( or all for the bass ) of the way back for the next verse.

I use a Presonus Faderport to do alot of the rides and then tidy them up afterwards. The automation lines in Sonar's buss view often end up looking like some crazy Undergound Tube Train Map but I remember reading somewhere once that if your faders are static your mix will be too

Is everyone listening...?

[triviul]

Sorry not sure why this isnt working.  i've just got my mail now so this should work.
http://soundcloud.com/studioimp/studioimp-younggriff

Ah. I'm getting it now, but I still need the download option to be active to listen to it in the studio. It should be in the options somewhere.

[Robin]

http://soundcloud.com/robinmarder/blood-to-bone-young-griffo

Please can you enable the download link so that I can get it onto my studio system? Thanks!

Done

[Martin Olsson]

Mike -
Here's my revised mix:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24660599/blood_to_bone_MIX_040411.mp3

Thanks again for all your time & effort.

Cheers
Malcolm

Wow! Great mix!

[javy_a]

woops download was disabled-__-

[triviul]

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12785429/Mixes/Blood_to_Bone_XM_v1.mp3

This mix has nice atmospheric opening that sets the stage well for the overall level of effects usage. Nice transition effects into the first chorus and outro too, and I like the 'feel like a failure' fly-in as well -- you've correctly identified a potential lull in vocal proceedings and filled that gap imaginatively.

The kick here has similar issues as in mixerMB's version, but less severe on account of a greater relative 60-70Hz contribution. A fairly aggressive click to the sound gives it more than adequate small-speaker translation (I'd tone that down a bit, in fact -- perhaps move the current HF emphasis more into the midrange around 800Hz), but I did find myself hankering after more 80-100Hz in the sound. The bass feels, on the other hand, like it has a bit too much information in that area, and that its fundamental frequency could be pulled back a bit in the mix to allow you to feature more of the harmonics above it, especially in the light of the current balance change when switching to small speakers. I'd also try to give the guitars some more body in the lower midrange, simply because they're feeling slightly scratchy at the moment, and seem to be contributing to an excessive mid-scoop in the overall mix tonality. I'd also look at the relationship between the 1-2kHz, 2-4kHz, and 4-8kHz octaves, because it feels to me as if the second of these is a bit proud of the others, making things sound a touch nasal.

I like the snare sound a lot, and the cymbals appear to be fairly well balanced against it. I do wonder, however, whether there's a fraction too much going on in the overheads in the top couple of octaves by comparison with the other parts, so I'd probably shelve a couple of decibels of them, even if that means you end up lifting the high end of the whole mix to return to your original level of 'air' overall. The vocals feel a bit low in the 1kHz region, but otherwise very well controlled and without any trace of sibilance issues. I like the balance of these parts too, in relation to the rest of the arrangement.

Mono summing affects the balance quite a lot, given the hard-panned guitars, but you've sensibly (in my view) chosen to favour the mono balance over the stereo, which means that the dynamics still work just fine on an Auratone. The cymbals are still losing quite a bit of HF, though, and the vocal effects seem to add a degree of murkiness to the vocal tone when they're collapsed down to the single channel, so those might warrant some further attention.

In total, though, this is another great Auratone balance, which surely only needs a few tweaks to make the best of its qualities in full-range stereo. Thanks for submitting it!

[vvv]

Is there a good/better/best time for submitting our "final" contest mixes?

(I feel like I've engaged enough on this one, and am ready for the wedding date.)

[JohnSuitcase]

OK, We're done with submissions for critique, but you can still submit your final mix until the 18th. Just post it here, as usual.

I'd recommend submitting your mix whenever it's done, but do wait for Mike's critique on your mix, if you haven't received it yet. There's gold in those critiques!

Great mixes so far, there some real talent here, and I think everyone is going to learn a ton from their critiques, as well as going through the other mixes and critiques.

Thanks again to Mike, and to Young Griffo, and to everyone who has submitted mixes thus far!

[triviul]

http://soundcloud.com/stu-brown/sos-mix-comp

Whoa! That's an awful lot of bass you've got going on there! I'm not sure what you're monitoring on, but whatever it is, I'm afraid that I don't think it's telling you anything useful below about 100Hz. The difference between the low end of your mix and the low end of any of the reference mixes is as clear as day, but only if your monitoring is actually telling you what's going on. Given that it appears you're faced with a situation where you can't really rely on what you're hearing down there, then, what can you actually do to improve the situation? Well, in the first instance, you could have a look at the 'Low-end Damage Limitation' chapter of my book, where I go into this in detail -- it's one of the free-to-view sample chapters available here. That gives lots of workarounds catering for exactly this kind of situation.

Further to that, I'd suggest removing any EQ or bass-enhancement plug-ins from the kick, bass, and tom tracks straight away, and taking those back to basics. In rebuilding their balance, try not to do any EQ boosting at the low end, because this is I think one of the reasons for your LF problems -- the low frequencies appear to be ringing in an uncontrolled manner, and this just leaves you with a muddy swamp without providing any real subjective power or punch. If you have to EQ to keep the instruments sounding clear and defined when they're together, try to use EQ cuts (rather than boosts) wherever possible. Keep any effects returns which are fed from the drums or bass high-pass filtered to stop them adding undesirable rumble, and also high-pass filter any non-bass parts as high as you can without changing their useful tone (or the weight of their attack) in the mix.

The bass issue puts the whole mix tonality out of alignment, and makes it very difficult to make meaningful judgements about things like relative balance and tone of the instruments. On top of this, though, I'm suspicious that the whole mix is going through some kind of extremely aggressive multi-band dynamics setup, presumable to increase loudness and aid mix cohesion, but this is a sticking plaster that won't solve any underlying mix problems, irrespective of how much the processing tries to smoosh the frequency response of your mix into an static profile. It also doesn't help that it sounds like it's introducing a bunch of very strange pumping and distortion artefacts -- I wonder whether it's set rather too fast. This is the kind of mix processing that's too complicated, powerful, and delicate to start using during the cut and thrust of the mixing process, so if you're using it while mixing, then ditch it -- you'll be able to hear much better what you're doing and the fact that you'll have to work harder to get a consistent tone in your mix will mean that your mix will respond much better to this kind of processing if you choose to add it at the mastering stage. (On the other hand, slower-acting full-band buss-compression is fine at mixdown in rock styles like this, but the reason for doing it is not primarily to increase the loudness or homogenise the frequency contour; it's to 'glue' the mix together, create pumping effects, and/or colour the mix tone. It can be tricky, in fact, to get a rock mix to balance right without hearing the mix in the context of the buss compression, so I usually recommend mixing through it. Mastering processing it isn't, though.)

In the light of these two overriding issues, I'm not sure I can actually provide any more detailed advice about the inner workings of the mix itself with any confidence, because it's very much like trying to hit a moving target. Sorry! Can you maybe upload a version with any of the buss/mastering processing and maybe then I can give some pointers?

[Daunt]

http://www.arthor.fi/demo/YoungGriffo_V1.mp3

Many thanks for taking the time to put this mix together. It's truly been a pleasure to listen to, and I hope that it will be an inspiration to anyone following this thread.

Wow, thanks a lot for the critique! I agree with everything you said about the production side of things. I have to say that I really don't see myself as a producer at this point of "career". I'm slowly getting there but it's a long road

[triviul]

Just to let everyone know that I'm off to the Frankfurt Musikmesse tomorrow, so I'm afraid there'll be no new critiques until I get back on Friday.

Feel free to critique amongst yourselves, though till then. 

[fixated7]

Quote from: mrtuesday on Today at 01:44:03 AM
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24660599/blood_to_bone_MIX_040411.mp3


What a drop! I just wish I hadn't been taking a sip of my tea at the end of mid-section 2. It wasn't pretty. 


Quote
Thanks again for all your time & effort.


My pleasure. More than worth it for a drop like that. I had to listen to it again three times straight away. That's a serious stunt you've pulled there. Love it!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
brilliant mix i'm loving some of the effects added! how did you manage to create that drop effect by the way it sounds really slick! :-)

I copied a bigger drum "hit" from another section of the song & applied a short "tape stop" effect to make it sound like it's being sort of "sucked in".
Then added some reverse reverb (that i eq'd heavily) & aligned to match when everything comes back in (so it feels like everything jumps out again).
Plus lots of edits & automation of tracks & sends etc.

Wasn't sure how it would translate from my head to reality but pretty happy with how it came out.

Mike - hope the tea wasn't too hot 
you said it needed something to highlight the last chorus.

Cheers
Malcolm

Yeah came out very well! thanks for sharing :-)

cheers,
David

[studioIMP]

Sorry not sure why this isnt working.  i've just got my mail now so this should work.
http://soundcloud.com/studioimp/studioimp-younggriff

Ah. I'm getting it now, but I still need the download option to be active to listen to it in the studio. It should be in the options somewhere.

I swear one day I'll manage to get things done in one go.  Sorry again, hope you enjoy.

[nanda_sfx83]

here is my mix,hope you enjoy it...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23072765/Blood%20to%20the%20bone_nandamix.mp3

[DirkZuber]

Hi there,
my name is Dirk, I´m from germany

Well I´m a bit late I guess :-(

After 3 hours mixing I stopped finishing it, cause i read that april 4th was the last date for uploading...
Its not finish yet but I post it anyways :-)

"deleted the last mix ... final version on next page :-)"


Dirk

[JohnSuitcase]

Hi Dirk,

You can still upload a mix, but Mike isn't accepting any more for critique, as he has a pretty good backlog. But your mix will be considered for the contest, of course!

[Studio Cat]

Hi there

Ouups, missed the deadline too.  
Anyway, this track was fun too mix.  

Here is my mix:

http://snd.sc/eyxZRK


Feedback is very welcome
Juerg

[stickfigure]

Hi, Mike,

thanks once again for your great advice. here's my revised mix, just for the sake of it.
some may find a part of it a bit inspired by mrtuesday's... they may also be right

cheers!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24873953/YoungGriffo_BloodToBone_stickfigure_mix_v3.mp3.mp3

[DirkZuber]

So this is my final mix ....

There are still some things I´m not 100% happy with...

But right now I would show the mix to the band and it would be their call to say what they want to change in the mix :-)
I didn´t change too many things, cause I think there are so many things you could do that it is impossible to determin what the band really wants to be done with the mix !

Thanks for the possibility to mix this song !!!
This is a great forum.

www.polyphon-recording.de/_uploads/BloodToBone-Dirk-Finalmix.mp3

Dirk

[cahyanandra]

Hello there,

Here is my mix. I hope everybody will enjoy it!!v

Thanks

http://www.4shared.com/audio/yRWX7xJ2/Young_griffo_cahya.html

[Aidjeen]

Hi There guys!

So there is my Final Mix, hope you guys like it, and also the band.

http://soundcloud.com/aidjeen/young-griffo-blood-to-bone

See you guys.

[vvv]

Aiight, my FINAL MIX:

http://soundcloud.com/vvv-4/blood-on-the-bone-vvvfinalmix