Greg_L mix contest/clinic/critique - just for shits and grins

  • Thread starter Thread starter Greg_L
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If any of you have been following my (lack of) progress in the Studio Building forum, you know that my studio is completely disassembled and in the throes of construction.

So as much as I wanted to jump in on this, I couldn't stand the thought of creating a mix on headphones. But still, I wanted to jump in. So I took my favorite mix of those presented (thanks Rami) and cooked it up with a heavy dose of Uncle Bob's Rock 'n Roll Hot Sauce.

Maybe too much Hot Sauce, I dunno. Like I said, I'm using headphones. But I still had fun cranking this one and running it through the press.

Sorry if I butchered your mix Rami.

Check it out here.
 
If you plan on doing another one Greg, notify me. Hopefully by then I'll have monitors.
 
guitar zero said:
I'd hate to have to pick the best mix, but I'd say RAMI has the best drum sounds of any mix. Especially the snare. Care to share the secret drum sauce?
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Yup, if I know greg, it's going to be decided by the snare. No doubt about it.
 
Chili said:
Yup, if I know greg, it's going to be decided by the snare. No doubt about it.
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Lol. Not really. I'm gonna post up my results later today. I'm making a list of pros and cons on each mix and why I decided the way I did. My super-secret guest judge mostly agreed with my findings without knowing who's mix was what, so there is no bias.
 
guitar zero said:
I'd hate to have to pick the best mix, but I'd say RAMI has the best drum sounds of any mix. Especially the snare. Care to share the secret drum sauce?
Click to expand...

WhiteStrat said:
So I took my favorite mix of those presented (thanks Rami)

Sorry if I butchered your mix Rami.

Check it out here.
Click to expand...

Seriously??? I thought a few mixes were better than mine...but then again, I'm never confident with my mixing. Thanx guys.


Guitar Zero: I really didn't do much with the snare. But maybe I was the only one that thought of flipping the phase on it. Made it jump right out. If the phase wasn't flipped, then it's out of phase.
Whitestrat: You didn't butcher it. I don't remember mine sounding that good. :D

I have to say that I think we were all guilty of not thinking outside the box. I realize now that I was lazy. We could have done so much with this. There's no vocals so there was opportunity to get weird. Like taking snippets of the guitar solos and pasting them into different parts, maybe reversing them or putting them through some weird effects, etc.... We could have dropped everything but the drums at some point(s) and had a flanged out drum break or whatever.

Either way, speaking for myself anyway, I could have been way more creative. I think I was just thrilled about playing with someone else's tracks for the first time in my life.
 
Note to self: try and flip the phase on each and every track just to make sure...

;)

Other than that I think I felt just like Rami said: thrilled about mixing someone else's tracks.

Cheers
Tim
 
timkroeger said:
I listened to all the mixes and liked those of pandamonk, Chili, PoeticIntensity (nice panning at the end of the track), philbagg and RAMI best. No particular order. The others had either too much reverb, too much lead guitar or too little separation in my opinion.

Cheers
Tim
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Hah! Thanks, dude. It was way fun! Working with someone else's drum tracks was nice... Although I gotta say, The bleed-in on Greg's toms was pretty crazy. Gates, anyone?
 
PoeticIntensity said:
Gates, anyone?
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Spent about a half hour running through them with a fine tooth comb. Chopping up, removing anything that didn't involve toms, tiny fades, etc. etc. :o

timkroeger said:
I listened to all the mixes and liked those of pandamonk, Chili, PoeticIntensity (nice panning at the end of the track), philbagg and RAMI best. No particular order. The others had either too much reverb, too much lead guitar or too little separation in my opinion.
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Only saw this when PI quoted it. Thanks for the inclusion dude :)
 
Yeah, the gate on the toms was essential. I have set up a stereo tom-bus, too lazy to set it up for all three tracks ;)

...and ducking the bass to the kick (sidechaining anyone?) helped bring the bass out for me and keep the peak led sane.
 
I gated the toms, and ducked the bass to the kick, used some parallel compression on the drum buss, but my drums sound nowhere near as good as RAMI's. I'm going to keep practicing and fooling around though. Got to learn how to mix good drums.
 
I did hope someone was going to add some vocals. So, I may kill this song and add some next time I'm recording vocals. I always save vocals last on all my projects. If I get that far on my current project, I'll submit a trash version of the song just for kicks :laughings:
 
Fairly noob question here, What is meant by ducking the bass to the kick?
 
79_Les_Paul said:
Fairly noob question here, What is meant by ducking the bass to the kick?
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You can do it with either a compressor or a gate.

Basically, you set up a bus send on the kick track, you set up either a gate or compressor on the bass track, with the sidechain input set to the bus from the kick.

Then, when the kick hits, the gate or compressor will kick into action and duck or compress (respectively) the bass. It helps them not step on each others toes, without separating them completely with EQ.

Doing it with a compressor:
The bass will be attenuated using compression, and standard compression techniques will apply

With a gate:
You set the range really low (about 5dB or so), and the signal won't be compressed, it will be just turned down, or "ducked".
 
79_Les_Paul said:
What is meant by ducking the bass to the kick?
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It means some people read too many articles. :D

But seriously, I'm sure someone can explain it better than me. Basically, you're gating your kik and allowing the gate to be triggered by the bass so that the kik mic only opens up when a bass note plays. Or is it the other way around??? Like I said, I'll let someone else explain it. :eek:
 
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