I am sorry to burst your bubble but, a great mixing engineer can spot a truly great mix from a bunch of good mixes very very easily. A great painter can notice a great painting easily from a bunch of ordinary ones.
When you know your game it "doesn't matter about opinion", what is amazing, IS AMAZING. And if you are amazing, you will easily spot what's amazing.
Besides, even the best mixing engineers I know come to criticize their own mixes, and improve upon them. The best people are great auto-critics.
Dr Dre took 1 month to perfect his mixes, it's called being a perfectionist, and an insatiable auto-critic.
By the way your mix sounds very good! one of the best I've heard(If not the best). Gorgeous balance. One little niggle is that in the chorus the low end gets smaller(master buss comp kicking in?) than in the verse...the other very slight niggle(splitting hairs now) is that the vocal exhibits peaking frequencies from time to time, it's not awful at all but it just 100% controlled(just 95% lol) and it's not nice when it peaks(by the way how did you control those peaks?), the last niggle is that the solo guitar in the break doesn't really fill the gap which the vocal took as a lead. The vocal also changes character a bit in the last chorus and gets hollow at 1 time, maybe your automation kicking in, but normal people won't hear it I guess so no worries. Also the mix isn't very deep nor very big. But again ...splitting hairs here mate
Top job man!! I hope you get your twins soon
Thanks for the comments and the critiques, bro! I agree with what you said when you burst my bubble. The only thing I must have forgotten to mention was, there must be a crapload of people listening to these mixes. I remember doing some doo-doo calculation about how long it would take to listen to
all the submissions. It showed me that unless Fab was listening, pretty much every day, as people were submitting (starting the day the contest launched), it was going to take many folks to do this, and not just Fab and Ben. From what fHumble just shared (thanks for the find, btw), this bit seems to be true -- that there was no way Fab was going to listen to every single one (but I'm sure we all figured that much when we saw the final number of entries). But even so, I wasn't saying that their team -- who
would collectively be listening to
everything -- wouldn't be able to spot what's good, great, amazing, whatever. Rather, I'm just not too sure that each individual person from this team would take the exact same candidates to the final judging pot for Fab to judge, if they were sanctioned, individually, with the job of listening to every single entry. And I'm also not too sure if this would indicate that these team members weren't great mixing engineers; I don't think it's that absolute. What if some of them are not mixing engineers at all? They don't have to be, although they likely are.
I just think we shouldn't really expect anything because, when there are almost 3000 entries (most of which we didn't even listen to), it would be crazy to think that it's impossible for someone else to beat us. Truth be told, I've felt that there's the potential that some of the folks who don't win will be kinda pissed and will try to initiate some sort of backlash. In fact (and this is for GaugeFX, too), when I posted that message, it wasn't even really
for Gauge; more so, it was an attempt to try keeping folks in perspective after the contest is over, because the vast, vast majority of entrants will lose, of course. And I don't feel that there's a need for a Puremix backlash or bashing the folks who will win (as I've seen happen in contests before, like a couple Pensado ones, lol); and since this is like the biggest one ever, I thought there might be the potential for an even bigger, unfortunate backlash. When they pick their winners, I have no doubt in my mind that they would have chosen the folks they wanted.
Still, what you're saying is true -- a truly great engineer will be able to spot a great mix. But if there are 100 great mixes out of the 3000, there are going to be really fine lines (very subjective things) that will dictate how they will choose the "great
est" of this theoretical 100 great mixes. I think Fab, Pensado, TLA, CLA, Marroquin, etc, are all great engineers, but would they all present the same 16 winners tomorrow as Fab is going to announce? Personally, I think the odds say there's a good chance they wouldn't. When we consider the 'why' in this, I guess this is what I was trying to articulate.
And thanks again for mix comments. Nice observation on the bass in the choruses. Funny enough, I automated each track to be lower in the verses, but I missed automating the bass down along with all the other elements. I didn't use any mix-buss compression or anything like that. I do remember leaving some of the peaks in the vocal but removed most of them. I did this with Pro-Q automation of many bands, having them aligned (with a very narrow Q) with the frequencies correlating to the peaking notes and harmonics. lol, I hate to say this in the Official thread, but I was running out of time when doing a lot of this, and I felt that I had automated so many of those peaks to the point that I may be destroying it too much. I didn't have time to debate myself because it was June 1st and time was literally running out. I hate being late to stuff like this so much. lol, I guess it's cuz I'm black. hahahahha! BTW, with the bass automation, it was the same thing -- when I noticed that I missed pulling it down in the verses along with everything else, I was REALLY pushing the deadline time. I described a lot of this in my description, btw. And having the guitar doing a little more in the solo section would have been great!
Thanks, bro! And as for getting those twins, PFFFFT -- yeah, right.
