NightFlight
New member
Your mix might have some characteristics of the kind of sound the band wanted.
PS. Good job MS. Thanks for the feedback!
And thanks to NL5 for making it available. It was a great learning experience.
Download and Mix Contest
- Thread starter NL5
- Start date
Your mix might have some characteristics of the kind of sound the band wanted.
PS. Good job MS. Thanks for the feedback!
And thanks to NL5 for making it available. It was a great learning experience.
NYMorningstar
Recording Modus Operandi
MS thank you for posting the results. Could you when you get a chance in the mixing forum or somewhere list what you look for in each of the categories that you judged in. I sure would like to improve on what I did. Thanks again to you and NL5 for the opportunity!
LemonTree
Suck 'em and see!
Woo! Top 11!
After listening to my final mix, I kind of wish I would have stayed with one of the earlier ones. Oh well, it was fun!
I guess you don't pick up on sarcasm very wellRead back a couple pages
I said you got to do this for free, you can't buy experience like this.
What part of sarcasm don't you get? Would sir like a smashed nose to match his busrst lip?.....that's sarcasm
Freudian Slip
New member
JuliánFernández
2&4
Thanks to NL5, Mshilarious, the band and everyone who made this contest possible! I learned a lot from it! 
Hopefully, next contest will catch me with my room properly treated and with a nice pair of monitors... Will see! jajajaj
Hopefully, next contest will catch me with my room properly treated and with a nice pair of monitors... Will see! jajajaj
mshilarious
Banned
Well, let's talk about punch/impact. There are two ways to make a song loud, the good way and the bad way. Actually, that's not true, there are probably many ways to make a song loud, both good and bad. But good loud and bad loud have some defining characteristics.
First, if you are trying to hit an RMS number, yes, you can simply turn up gain and clip the master bus. You will get a nice loud track that way. It will sound like poo. Why? Because when you clip a signal, you create a square wave, which consists of high-order harmonic distortion. That creates a lot of dissonant overtones in a region of hearing that is painful--3kHz to 5kHz and up. Think about a baby crying, and how much you would enjoy listening to that at 100dBSPL. Not only that, but try having a conservation while a baby is screaming in the room. I have a lot of experience with that. I wish I didn't. That distortion is masking the sounds that naturally live there, reducing the clarity of your mix.
Using a limiter is sometimes only different, not better. One thing you must understand is that limiting is always a distortion. So is compression. Again, good and bad distortion. Try to hear the difference. There are a lot of compressors with very good sounding distortions.
Good loud is tight, punchy low end. There should be little to no distortion. It should hit you right in the gonads (unless you are female, then I have no idea what happens). It isn't painful to listen to, because the ear isn't particularly sensitive to low frequencies. Most of your volume needs to come from this region.
At the same time, most musical content resides in the midrange, and you need some high frequency content to add clarity and excitement. Again, too much excitement becomes fatiguing. It creates a stress response in your body. So don't overdo it.
When you are thinking about balance in your tracks, maybe one time, and one time only, put your mix up on a FFT. I mean analyze the whole song and chart the average. Now, listen carefully, because you can't tell a good mix on an FFT. But often you can tell a really bad mix. Your ears can tell you that too, but I am assuming something in your monitoring chain and/or room is keeping you from realizing that. So you are looking at that graph. It should somewhat resemble pink noise; that is, it should fall off at about -3dB/octave. There are 10,000,000 exceptions to that rule, but IF your mix looks like a giant smile, or a flat line, chances are that might not be a good thing.
Once you fix a basic imbalance in your mix, possibilities for loudness magically open up. You might know this, you might not, but subtractive EQ (cuts) can sometimes increase volume! It's true! So if you hear someone say they only use subtractive EQ to preserve headroom, they are wrong! You ALWAYS need to leave plenty of headroom, no matter what kind of processing you use.
A lot of times though, you make those cuts/remixes to restore balance, and volume does drop a bit. It happens, don't worry. Because after you have a track in balance, you can turn up that limiter and you know what? It doesn't fall apart! It doesn't distort (badly)! It might even sound punchy and good!
This is not to suggest that stereo bus limiting should be a part of mixing. Really, it shouldn't. But again, it's not a bad check to see if you're going in the right direction. And then turn it off, and go back to making a clean mix with some headroom. Look for natural volume with a good drum mix, a tight bass. Make sure the drums aren't sitting above the mix, because then a limiter will kill all dynamics. Make sure they aren't buried, otherwise you will get all guitars, no low end, and therefore no punch. If necessary, use compression on those tracks long before the master bus.
If you do all that, then when you are really and truly done, you get a free 2 or 3dB on the limiter, it still sounds great and all your HR friends are jealous.
First, if you are trying to hit an RMS number, yes, you can simply turn up gain and clip the master bus. You will get a nice loud track that way. It will sound like poo. Why? Because when you clip a signal, you create a square wave, which consists of high-order harmonic distortion. That creates a lot of dissonant overtones in a region of hearing that is painful--3kHz to 5kHz and up. Think about a baby crying, and how much you would enjoy listening to that at 100dBSPL. Not only that, but try having a conservation while a baby is screaming in the room. I have a lot of experience with that. I wish I didn't. That distortion is masking the sounds that naturally live there, reducing the clarity of your mix.
Using a limiter is sometimes only different, not better. One thing you must understand is that limiting is always a distortion. So is compression. Again, good and bad distortion. Try to hear the difference. There are a lot of compressors with very good sounding distortions.
Good loud is tight, punchy low end. There should be little to no distortion. It should hit you right in the gonads (unless you are female, then I have no idea what happens). It isn't painful to listen to, because the ear isn't particularly sensitive to low frequencies. Most of your volume needs to come from this region.
At the same time, most musical content resides in the midrange, and you need some high frequency content to add clarity and excitement. Again, too much excitement becomes fatiguing. It creates a stress response in your body. So don't overdo it.
When you are thinking about balance in your tracks, maybe one time, and one time only, put your mix up on a FFT. I mean analyze the whole song and chart the average. Now, listen carefully, because you can't tell a good mix on an FFT. But often you can tell a really bad mix. Your ears can tell you that too, but I am assuming something in your monitoring chain and/or room is keeping you from realizing that. So you are looking at that graph. It should somewhat resemble pink noise; that is, it should fall off at about -3dB/octave. There are 10,000,000 exceptions to that rule, but IF your mix looks like a giant smile, or a flat line, chances are that might not be a good thing.
Once you fix a basic imbalance in your mix, possibilities for loudness magically open up. You might know this, you might not, but subtractive EQ (cuts) can sometimes increase volume! It's true! So if you hear someone say they only use subtractive EQ to preserve headroom, they are wrong! You ALWAYS need to leave plenty of headroom, no matter what kind of processing you use.
A lot of times though, you make those cuts/remixes to restore balance, and volume does drop a bit. It happens, don't worry. Because after you have a track in balance, you can turn up that limiter and you know what? It doesn't fall apart! It doesn't distort (badly)! It might even sound punchy and good!
This is not to suggest that stereo bus limiting should be a part of mixing. Really, it shouldn't. But again, it's not a bad check to see if you're going in the right direction. And then turn it off, and go back to making a clean mix with some headroom. Look for natural volume with a good drum mix, a tight bass. Make sure the drums aren't sitting above the mix, because then a limiter will kill all dynamics. Make sure they aren't buried, otherwise you will get all guitars, no low end, and therefore no punch. If necessary, use compression on those tracks long before the master bus.
If you do all that, then when you are really and truly done, you get a free 2 or 3dB on the limiter, it still sounds great and all your HR friends are jealous.
mshilarious
Banned
What am I talking about with that FFT thing? Here's an example. First place vs. last place mix here. Look at the midrange. Middle C is 262Hz. That's music right there, and both mixes have the same energy there. From that point, winning mix drops smoothly. Losing mix goes for a roller coaster ride. Look at what happens above 3kHz--it's like it flatlines or something. That's where the volume is coming from--high frequency information, in this case distortion.
It might seem like I'm advocating a Har-Bal like approach to mixing (or judging). I am not. Indeed, Har-Bal (an automatic dynamic EQ which generally tries to squash a mix to fit a pink noise, or other selected curve) would not help here. It would bring the distortion back into balance, but then you'd just have a smooth-sounding square wave distortion. It is also a crude tool even in the absence of distortion, as it will apply its correction to an entire mix, when an imbalance is probably the results of one or two tracks.
So don't think, hey, I can just hit a high shelf cut over 4kHz and I'm good to go. True, that probably will improve your score, maybe up from a 3 to a 5 or 6. But you can't hit 7,8,9, or the ever elusive 10 that way.
PS Don't feel bad that I gave out no 10s. I think I have judged 3 or 4 of these, and I've only given out 1 or 2 category 10s, and overall my highest rating is 8.5. I'm an asshole! Other judges usually average about 0.5 points higher scores than me.
PPS, no, I didn't look at FFTs when judging. I confess I do use a phase meter. That, and I check for reasonable mono compatibility. I don't hear too well in my right ear, so I use those tools to confirm my imaging suspicions. Other than that, it's all ears
It might seem like I'm advocating a Har-Bal like approach to mixing (or judging). I am not. Indeed, Har-Bal (an automatic dynamic EQ which generally tries to squash a mix to fit a pink noise, or other selected curve) would not help here. It would bring the distortion back into balance, but then you'd just have a smooth-sounding square wave distortion. It is also a crude tool even in the absence of distortion, as it will apply its correction to an entire mix, when an imbalance is probably the results of one or two tracks.
So don't think, hey, I can just hit a high shelf cut over 4kHz and I'm good to go. True, that probably will improve your score, maybe up from a 3 to a 5 or 6. But you can't hit 7,8,9, or the ever elusive 10 that way.
PS Don't feel bad that I gave out no 10s. I think I have judged 3 or 4 of these, and I've only given out 1 or 2 category 10s, and overall my highest rating is 8.5. I'm an asshole! Other judges usually average about 0.5 points higher scores than me.
PPS, no, I didn't look at FFTs when judging. I confess I do use a phase meter. That, and I check for reasonable mono compatibility. I don't hear too well in my right ear, so I use those tools to confirm my imaging suspicions. Other than that, it's all ears
jaybriggs84
New member
so it seems that lots of people used limiters on the entire mix? isnt that cheating in a way of a mix contest, not a mixing/mastering contest?
LemonTree
Suck 'em and see!
I didn't put anything on the master buss which might explain the punch aspect being my lowest scoring catagory with a 5. nine times out of ten I'd rather reach for the volume and turn up a quiet mix with dynamics than endure certain brain damage form a mix smashed six ways from sunday.
Just me?
Just me?
picadogrueso
New member
Thanks mshilarious for the judgement.
NL5 what happened to the mixes? I can't access the files anymore.
I would like to listen to the top rated so I could see what I did wrong.
NL5 what happened to the mixes? I can't access the files anymore.
I would like to listen to the top rated so I could see what I did wrong.
mshilarious
Banned
No, I don't think so. And I don't care someone does use a limiter on the stereo bus, if they do it right and it helps punch. You might get an extra point that way. But if you do it wrong, I will punish you mercilessly
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My earlier comments are more for the lowest scoring group, because they need the most help. The middle group is on the way, and the high group . . . well, mixing is the sum of doing 1,000 little things right, and they got I guess like 850 of them. This is why I don't like mixing, I don't have the patience! It's much easier to tell what is good than to actually do it.
Let's go back to the middle group. If a song is well tracked, then a faders up mix with some basic panning is going to be about a 5. Add some editing, volume envelopes, etc., to clean up the obvious stuff, you probably have a 6. When I mix, I do all that before a touch an EQ. Next, I'll high pass where necessary. Some people feel that's generally unnecessary, but I like high passin'.
Next, tracks I know are going to need compressors, I'll add the compressors. Bass. Vocals. Not too hard on the vocals to start with, just trying to get the general color of the vocal to see how it fits in the mix.
Now the drum submix. In a style like this, that is going to take some time. In fact, more time on edits and envelopes could pay off in the end. Get the relative levels of the drums right! Now it's ready for a bus compressor, if that's your approach. Mostly I would do the drum edits while soloing the bus, but never compression or EQ, I'd want to hear that in the mix.
OK, now what is still wrong? Go after it with EQ, whatever else you got.
You will note I don't spend a lot of time on guitars. I heard a lot of time spend on guitars, because the guitar tones were often very different. I am guessing many of you are guitarists. Here's the thing: I am also guessing the guitarist spent a ridiculous amount of time getting their tone the way they wanted during tracking. This is simply because they are guitarists, and most of them are that way (on the flip side, if you track a guitarist who is an idiot and has a horrible amp and horrible tone they insist on using, well then you probably need to try to fix it in the mix . . . and I don't envy you!)
Now, that isn't a bad thing; in fact, if I am mixing somebody's tracks I generally assume they spent all that time in tracking because they wanted the guitars to sound that way. So I tend not to change them unless there's an obvious conflict with another instrument, or a hole that needs filling.
When I judged, generally I didn't pay much attention to guitar tones. This is because I pretty much like nearly any tone I hear, unless I think it's really horrible. This is also why it's good to have another judge . . . I was first a bassist, so I like to hear tight drums. If you are a bassist, you will understand that.
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More on volume . . . another thing I did was run RMS on every mix. Then I ignore it (well, it's not like I can't hear it, but it's not important). Once I have everybody scored, it never fails: there is almost no correlation between final score and RMS. OK, there is a slightly higher average RMS in the top third, but the standard deviation is high. The top third ranges from -10 to -16, and not in that order. #1 was on the lower end of that range.
So there is no reason to try to mix to a number. It won't help your score.
In the bottom third, there was some crazy stuff going on . . . mixes from -7 to -22. I already talked about the superloud mixes. The really low level mixes, I just feel like they never finished mixing the song. When I say -22, I mean peak to RMS, so I consider there to be no difference between a 0 to -22 mix and a -6 to -28 mix, for example. A totally natural, uncompressed drum bus will be -20 or so. Add guitars, totally uncompressed, that's probably -16. Anything much less than that is likely to be unbalanced, either in relative levels of instruments, or some crazy EQ goin' on.
So you can use the numbers a little, at the extremes, as an indication that something is wrong. But in that middle range, say -11 to -16, it doesn't mean a thing.
So why do I keep referring to numbers? Well, I can type them. I can't make you hear what I am hearing, but I can show you how what I can see relates to what I hear.
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PS to LemonTree: my notes say that I thought yours was a bit muddy in the low mids, and that harmed the punch. Those low mids . . . they are hard. Maybe the hardest part of the spectrum.
ecktronic
Mixing and Mastering.
Thanks for judging, I know it must have been a killer job to do!
I'm pretty disapointed I only got 5 for high end/air.
I don't really understand why I got such a low score for this category.
I've been known for harsh mixes in the past! and I pushed the high end as far as my ears would let me.
Is there any way that we can hear the mixes again?
That would be great as I'm interested to hear the mixes that got 7 for high end/air.
Cheers, and thanks again for taking on the massive task of judging so many mixes!
Eck
I'm pretty disapointed I only got 5 for high end/air.
I don't really understand why I got such a low score for this category.
I've been known for harsh mixes in the past! and I pushed the high end as far as my ears would let me.
Is there any way that we can hear the mixes again?
That would be great as I'm interested to hear the mixes that got 7 for high end/air.
Cheers, and thanks again for taking on the massive task of judging so many mixes!
Eck
NL5
Unpossible!
I've been known for harsh mixes in the past! and I pushed the high end as far as my ears would let me.
I haven't listened to your mix, but I'm guessing this is the reason for the 5 right here.
picadogrueso
New member
To NL5:
Is there any way that we can hear the mixes again?
Is there any way that we can hear the mixes again?
NL5
Unpossible!
To NL5:
Is there any way that we can hear the mixes again?
Feel free to listen to them again.
There are some that were uploaded to LightningMP3 that seemed to have been deleted. I am looking into that. We just had the site re-coded, and it looks like some old files may have been deleted accidentally.
Thanks for judging, I know it must have been a killer job to do!
I'm pretty disapointed I only got 5 for high end/air.
I don't really understand why I got such a low score for this category.
I've been known for harsh mixes in the past! and I pushed the high end as far as my ears would let me.
Is there any way that we can hear the mixes again?
That would be great as I'm interested to hear the mixes that got 7 for high end/air.
Cheers, and thanks again for taking on the massive task of judging so many mixes!
Eck
I don't think as "air" as just pushing up the highs, I would also use the term "open" or "sheen" I didn't do mush better (only a 6) but I didn't have my "air" plug-in, or any of my 3rd party plug-ins installed, just the stock Sonar plug which I never usually use so I Got to know them a little better this time, took longer to get where I wanted to go (and didn't quite get there), it made me be thankful for my 3rd party plugs thats for sure.
mshilarious
Banned
ecktronic, I think you might be a victim of the coarseness of the categories. I have in my notes that I thought your guitars were too crispy. That's not exactly air, but it isn't balance, as their volumes were good, and it wasn't punch . . . so you got dinged in air.
Anyway, you had a top mix, I wouldn't sweat the absolute score too much. Obviously I was in a bad mood
Anyway, you had a top mix, I wouldn't sweat the absolute score too much. Obviously I was in a bad mood
TyphoidHippo
1Trillion K Platinum User
Yea, I wasn't impressed with his tone - in fact, I thought it was horrible, and spent most of the hour or so I spent on this mix trying to carve a tone out of the tracks that just....wasn't there. On top of that, whenever I'm tracking - I track a lot of guitars... I also track to a click track. I'm not gonna try to make excuses or anything - I'm only sharing this information in case anybody wonders "What the hell was he thinking" when they see the score you gave me and then go listen to my mix (which apparently, quite a few people have done in the last day or so - but I WILL leave the mix on my server, so that others can learn from the information to be learned here). <--See. now, that's being a good sport!
MSHilarious, I hate to ask for any more of your time - but if you could spare 1 minute and 22 seconds and listen to this and tell me if this would score a 1/10 with you also, I would appreciate it.
It's just a short snip of one track of an EP I am wrapping up today (for a paying client). Being in charge of tracking for this song, I was able to do everything the way I want:
I only ask because of what you said about all that high-end distortion in my mix for this contest. I noticed that this particular track can be a bit hard on my ears if I really crank it up loud. I know there is a serious sibilance issue with the vocal track (and actually it sounds weird, too - like I scooped it out or something), and I'm actually going to fix that before I go home for the evening...anyway - just if you have, literally, 1 minute and 22 seconds to listen to this and tell me if you think it's a horrible mix, too - thanks!
mshilarious
Banned
No, that track is not a 1. 5/6 or so. It's quite a lot different from your entry here. First off, you can just look at the wave and see some dynamics. Your mix contest entry was literally a big full scale block.
So you've got 3dB more dynamic range from the get-go, and that's a good thing.
OK, other good things . . . the guitar sounds nice and ballsy. I can tell you spent time on that!
Now, the issues . . . not crazy about the drums. The kick is kinda papery. Find its fundamental--50 or 60Hz, usually--and boost that. The snare has that popcorn sound, but I don't think it's what you wanted here. Too much wire, not enough body.
I didn't mind the vocal too much--I don't think it's a sibilance issue as much as just fighting for space in a mix that's VERY busy in the presence range. The vocal has that processed sound which I assume is what you were going for, and I don't mind it.
Try this as an exercise, throw a 4kHz cut, fairly wide Q, about -3dB, on the stereo bus. Watch what happens to your master meter. Mine is now peaking at +2dB! Great example of what I was saying earlier--cuts can increase peak levels! So there is hidden dynamic range in that mix waiting to come out.
Now, turn off that bus EQ, and I think you might want to go back to the guitar track, and automate an EQ to pull back its presence during the vocals, if not simply fading it back a bit. Right now it sounds like you create a huge guitar sound and try to make the mix fit that, but you should try the other way around.