My Mix for contest
So happy to be part of this mix contest. Here is my mix. I went for a little different vibe than a lot of other mixes I've heard - big open live rock band sound. After all it was a live performance!
Please listen and leave comments! I would love to hear them! Good luck everyone.
I'm in graduate school for chemistry, but music is a definite passion. It's too bad that the income is so unreliable, otherwise I probably would have pursued it! I will be posting a very detailed breakdown of my thought and approach to this song on my soundcloud. I had a blast mixing this; its an absolute pleasure to mix a very talented group of musicians!
This song was very different from what I'm used to. I tried hard to keep the song as balanced as possible - which was quite difficult having 1 guitar. To alleviate this, I used Dave Pensado's wide guitar trick (thanks Dave!) to get a wide guitar image. Being a guitar player, I know how a guitar players tone is a precious thing, so I tried my best to EQ it as little as possible and simply place it in the mix using reverbs and delays.
For the drums, I originally wanted to blend the tracked kick with triggered samples to get a big in your face rock sound, but I opted to take Fab's advice given at gearfest one year: "...triggering is a crime against humanity." So the next best thing is to
crush/distort the hell out of it. I used lots of parallel compression/distortion to make it sound larger than life and also to retain the transients. Lots of the passages were automated with volume, reverbs, and delays to help build the emotion throughout the song and keep it driving. You will also notice the cymbal ducking on the chorus to give it a sense of power. I also sculpted the snare with a transient designing plugin to bring it to life.
Bass I used a multiband compressors to help keep the low end nailed down and ran the DI through an amp simulator to bring out the top end a bit. This was also run in parallel with the soundtoys distortion to beef it up. I also added reverb - which is a big no no, but I thought it gave the song a nice vibe and helped it sit in with the rest of the instruments. The bass is also sidechained to the kick of course to help the kick cut through. Bass and guitars were bussed together and sidechained to the vocals to help keep the mud out when everything was building.
Vocals took a lot of automating to get all of the words to be clear in the mix. I also ran parallel distortion to beef up the vocals and help them cut through the mix. I usually don't like to hear my reverbs in a mix, but this song was a bit different. I pushed the reverb a little louder than I am usually comfortable with, but since there was so much space, I felt it was necessary. I rode the delays and reverbs to keep it clean.
Added a little bit of bus compression and some mid/side eq to widen the image a little more.
There you have it. I hope that I shared the same vision the band had with my mix. Please leave comments, tell me what you think, etc. Enjoy!
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Mixed with Cubase 6 on Windows 7 x64.
Plugins used:
Waves:
Basic
plugins (Q, C1, C6, Trueverb, H-Delay etc.),
CLA series 1176 and LA-2A
S1 Image, L3, and TransX,
Soundtoys:
Microshift, Little Radiator, and and Devil-loc (the free ones
Variety of Sounds FerricTDS Tape Simulator
Tokyo Dawn Records Feedback Compressor II
