Please Mix This - A Challenge (really, very challenging)

  • Thread starter Thread starter chrisharris
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I just had to download "dumbfuck blues"

Pretty cool! where's the rest?
 
Meshuggah
(back to Juliet) Cute little echo at the start there. How'd you get the bass to sound like that? and don't say "I left it alone" lol
 
Doug H said:
Meshuggah
(back to Juliet) Cute little echo at the start there. How'd you get the bass to sound like that? and don't say "I left it alone" lol
Click to expand...

A little cut around 250hz, and a little boost around 900hz IIRC..


P.S. Dumbfuck Blues is just a little ditty I made to try out a guitar I've borrowed. I don't think it'll make it a whole song..
 
OK... here's what I've done..

1. New drums.. Drumkit From Hell in Fruity Loops. Some waves RVerb in the mix.
2. Bass - see above post
3. Guitars - removed some lows and mids
4. Slide - removed some lows, a little boost around 7khz
5. Steel - left alone
6. Vocals - Waves RVox (compressor), RDe-esser and RVerb
7. Backing Vox - Made faux stereo of both tracks, slight shelving EQ on highs and lows.
 
"A little cut around 250hz, and a little boost around 900hz IIRC."

hmmm, take the "wow" out of it but leave the deep bottom in and give it a bit of edge, nice
 
Good idea!

Just got to this one. Downloaded the files, and as soon as I get a chance I'll throw a quick mix on this sucker. Should be interesting.

I'll be back.......
 
Ok........here's mine.......

Chris!!!!...........Great idea for a challenge. I deliberately didn't listen to any of the mixes or read the posts 'cause I didn't want to be influenced. I'm gonna go hear these for the first time right now.....should be interesting.

I have to say ( Chris my buddy, my good friend, old pal......love ya' and your children are wonderful! :D ), that's got to be the absolute worst sounding bass I've ever heard in my entire life.
Quite an accomplishment really.....I mean, I wouldn't have thought in this modern age we live in, that a bass could sound that bad but you did it! :D

BTW.....ya'll see why I don't use a compressor? :D

Here's my link and I'm gonna go listen to everyone else's mix.
Juliet and the Compressors
http://www.nowhereradio.com/wondercow/singles
 
Chrisharris, I now like your mix the best! I think, its yours anyway. I got lost as far as who did what (should have saved as author/ juliet). It says june 19,2003 23:58 16 thats yours right? If so you just gotta back off on the vocal fx some but dont go as dry as many others IMHO.
The harmony really,thats absolutely, works and those drums are Soooo much better. There may be some bass issues. theres some kind of tone (sound like a hearing test)right ear :) at 1:30 exactly. something similar at 2:03 maybe thats a bass thing? 2:55 as well. somethings resonating.
Its 1 am so Im listening with the sennheiser ears attached :D

This is a GReat Song My friend!!!

Brilliant Idea to post individual tracks. I had hinted at that a while back myself. I really need this type of exposure to what a track should sound like before its mixed. I sure hope we can make this a regular event at least now and then.

I Truly enjoyed this whole thing

My appreciation as well to all who participated.

Id like to take a crack at this myself,But You HAVE TO POST THE NEW DRUM AND BASS TRACK first. :p:p :p :D

The other deaf guy from TX


Peace
Bill
 
I'm gonna try this...I have to say though, it sounds exceptional by itself. This can't be a DRY recording...can it??
 
Wow, Chris, that was brave! It was a real pleasure to have access to the individual tracks fo one of your songs. And I'm completely unfamiliar with the genre, so that made mixing it a real challenge.

Juliet mixed by alibish

First things first: great song, typically excellent lyrics, nice harmonies, nice simple guitar playing, really strong lead vocal. Al's slide and steel playing were beautiful too, but I found them very difficult to mix - more on that later.

Also, I decided to try and do a mix that kept the drums and bass intact - brave or reckless, you decide... :)

OK - mix was as follows:

Drums

Plumb centre, and mono - to reduce the amount of space they were taking up.
EQ - broad boost 6db around 63Hz to beef up the kick. 6db narrow cut at 472 to tame the ringing snare. 5db broad cut at 2.5 kHZ to tame the cymbals. 3db broad cut above 15kHz to tame the sizzle.
I used Dominion from DigitalFishPhones to try and sort out the drum sound. Basically I lengthened the attack parts of the drum track, shortened and cut the sustain parts, and dropped the overall level a bit. I also used Dominion to convert to mono.
I used Silverspike RubyTube to add a bit of gentle "warming" to the sound.
Finally I used Silverspike RoomMachine to add a bit of ambience - I used the "Studio" preset.

Bass

Plumb centre.
Dominion again - Boosted and lengthened the attack, shortened the sustain.
EQ - gentle roll off below 60Hz, gentle roll off above 500Hz.

Guitar 1

Panned hard right.
EQ - gentle roll off below 150Hz to reduce mud, 4db broad boost around 770 Hz for body and character, 4db boost above 13kHz to open up the sound.
Compression - 7:1 ration, hard-ish knee, threshold -17db.
A bit of Aux Bus ambience.

Guitar 2

Panned hard left.
EQ - same as guitar 1, but broad boost around 2700HZ to distinguish the two guitars.
Compression - same as guitar 1.

Steel

I found the steel really difficult to mix - very dynamic, and heavy compression just knackers the swells, plus it seems to occupy a pretty wide raneg of frequencies. Anyway, here's how I attempted it:

Panned 80% right.
EQ - gentle roll off below 250Hz, 7.5db broad cut around 700 Hz, gentle rolloff above 15kHz.
Compression - essentially the same as the acoustics.
A bit of Aux Bus ambience.

Slide

Panned 80% left.
EQ - gentle rollof below 250 Hz, 4db broad cut around 1350Hz to thin it out.
Panned centre and boosted a few db for the solo.
A bit of Aux Bus ambience.

Main Vocal

Plumb centre.
EQ - gentle rolloff below 200Hz to reduce mud, 4db narrowish cut around 470 Hz, 1.5db very broad boost around 1600Hz, boost above 14kHz for air.
Compression - 6:1 ratio, very soft knee, threshold -9db.
A small amount of Aux Bus ambience.

NO AUTOTUNE!

High Harmony

Panned 30% left.
Autotune :)
Fair amount of Aux Bus ambience.
There are some "oohs" in both harmonies that are really over-compressed or limited in the original waveforms. I cut the level a lot during those, to avoid the "synth" sound they were giving.

Low Harmony

Panned 30% right.
Autotune.
Fair amount of Aux Bus ambience.

I grouped the harmonies and put some compression and EQ on them:
Compression - 6:1, soft knee, threshold -12db.
EQ - rolloff below 250Hz, rolloff above 2kHz to push them back in the mix.

Then I bounced to stereo and did some finishing off with Izotope Ozone:

EQ - gentle rolloff below 40Hz, 1.6db very broad boost around 178HZ to add body, 5.6db narrow cut arround 7780Hz to tame the cymbals some more, gentle boost above 16kHz for air.
Gentle multiband compression (crossovers at 100Hz and 2700Hz).
I deliberately mixed very quiet, so I was able to add 9db boost with the limiter without really affecting the sound at all!

Anyway, it was a really interesting thing to try, and I learned a lot. The genre and some of the instruments were completely new to me, so that was a challenge. I can't wait to hear the other mixes, and I'm sure they'll all be a lot better than mine, but thanks Chris for giving me the opportunity to mix someone else's stuff - I enjoyed it. :)

Cheers

AB
 
Re: Ok........here's mine.......

Lt. Bob said:
I have to say ( Chris my buddy, my good friend, old pal......love ya' and your children are wonderful! :D ), that's got to be the absolute worst sounding bass I've ever heard in my entire life.
Quite an accomplishment really.....I mean, I wouldn't have thought in this modern age we live in, that a bass could sound that bad but you did it! :D
Click to expand...
LMAO - Yeah, ummm...about that "bass,"...hehehehee...remember a little conversation in the clinic about "short neck" basses and how they sound like absolute shit? That track is an acoustic guitar....compression was sorta mandatory :D :D

You used it!!

Okay, I can't shut up much longer...Some of you (meshuggah and alibish) posted what you did; I'd be interested to hear what anybody else did...specifically:

1. any EQ verb used on the guitars (including bass) and/or vocals.

2. Any limiting/compression/mastering done.

3. The drums actually sounded better on some tracks than others, so include any verb/EQ on the canned crap too. :D

I hope you guys have enjoyed this...It helped me in more ways than I can recite...for example, I knew the drums and bass had problems, but I didn't know that they were the worst rhythm section ever invented until you guys had to listen to the individual tracks. I'll be posting all of my tracks from now on (kidding) :D :D :DI'm gonna' move up my response time b/c I'm swamped next week; so if you read this...

VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE MIX

Feel free to vote for yourself.

And now, the mother of all mixes :D :D :D :D
Crawdad mangled my tracks (which was great, btw), so I mangled some of his... He's always talking about how he loves "reverse guitar" and vocoders and Autotune and stuff, so this very special mix is inspired by Al.


www.nowhereradio.com/honestmango/singles
"Juliet (Psychadelic Headphone Mix)"

NOTE: This is NOT the song entitled "Juliet," this is called "Juliet (Phychodelic Headphone)"...they're a tad different, lol.
 
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groucho said:

After listening to all these mixes this song is so embedded in my brain it's *never* coming out. I mean, it's a catchy tune to begin with but after spending a few hours mixing it, then listening to god knows how many other versions... it's a part of my mind now I believe.
Click to expand...

I'm sayin'!
 
wfaraoni said:
It says june 19,2003 23:58 16 thats yours right?
Peace
Bill
Click to expand...
I don't think so, but I don't know whose that is either, b/c I keep renaming mine as I download them. Mine's called "6-19 (New Drumz)", I think. Anyway, cool on you for jumping in. I gotta' convert and upload the new drum and bass tracks in case anybody wants to take a crack at it. I'm kinda' up to my ass in aligators at the moment :D...I'll get it done. I'd like to hear what you'd do to those acoustic tracks. It's been interesting...some people are just posting them straight up, which (with my guitar tracks) is a brave and scary thing, lol. :D
 
Now that we've got the straight mix out of the way, it's time for me to add some stuff and see what happens. :-)

Mix notes forthcoming...
 
I Can't Get My PM's To work...so I'll say it here:

THANK YOU DOUG AND DENNIS FOR HOSTING THE FILES
 
Well Fuck Me

I'm listening to all the mixes I've gotten so far, and the psychodelic headphone mix came up (mine). I'm hearing it on monitors for the first time, and it was done as a joke, but the acoustics sound better than any mix I've ever done before... I have no idea what I did, lmao. I'm all...'HEY GUYS, TAKE GOOD NOTES,' and I did this just using every fucking knob on the Lexicon and every phaser effect I could find on my computer.

THAT'S the guitar sound I like, btw... FFFFFUUUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKK.

Sorry, self-absorbing again.
 
Okay, I can't vote yet because I still need to download a few of the mixes. But here's my mix notes.

The mix was done in Vegas Pro 1.0b. "Mastering" was done with Wavelab. I converted the mp3s to wavs before importing them into vegas using LAME with RazorLame as a front-end.

In Vegas, I set up 5 busses: Main voc, BGVs, Bass, Guits, Crawdad. All plug-ins were on their respective busses... no aux feeds or track effects.

Acoustic guits: I pretty much left 'em as is. Panned hard, like 80%-80%, and then submixed to a single stereo track. The only reason I submixed is that I wanted to draw a volume envelope at the opening vocals so that they didn't step on that vocal part (I'm lazy and didn't wanna draw the envelope twice). Brought them down like 7dB at the start of the vocs and slowly let them fade in to full by the chorus. Other than the one envelope and level setting I didn't touch 'em.

"Bass": The octaver left some artifacts and it wasn't the greatest tone in the world, but it's country man. I just ran it through the default preset in Waves MaxxBass and brought the level down by 8dB. The idea was for the bottom to be there without having to pay much attention to the ugly details. It wasn't a great sound but I did't find it unusable.

Main voc: Buss effects: EQ -> compressor -> delay. Paragraphic EQ: Low-cut at 58Hz to get rid of any unneeded rumble down there, 3dB cut at ~2100, and a high-shelf boost around 8800. The EQ fed a Waves RCL compressor: used the vocal preset and set the thresh to give about a 6dB reduction at the peak points. Make-up gain of 4dB. The comp fed a BlueDelay: 100% dry on the left, 100% wet with a 15ms delay on the right. With the delay, I was going for some open-ness on the vocal without reaching for a reverb. The vocal track was just too nice to smear, IMO.

The delay trick almost worked like I wanted. The left/right seperation was too pronounced for a main vocal... no real center channel feel. Plus, since the left channel hits the ears first it feels a little left hefty even though I brought the left side down about a half a dB. If I had it to do over I'd probably do one of two things differently here. First choice would be to use the delay trick on a seperate fx buss so that the vocals were still hitting the center as well as the left/right trick. The other option would be to add a tiny bit of reverb to the end of the chain to center things up a little.

Harmony vocs: Panned 70%-70%. Maybe a little too radical, but I liked it that way for the most part. Ran the buss through a Waves TrueVerb (the only reverb I used on the whole mix). Went with the Bijou Theater preset with balance of -8.4 and a reverb time of 1.1. Also took the room reverb OUT... I don't like the TrueVerb's room reverb sound at all.

Pedal and slide: Sent both to the same buss and dead center. Used the delay trick here to better effect, IMO. Left side 100% wet with a 75ms delay; right side dry. No other plug-ins. I did quite a bit of volume envelope stuff on the slide track (including cutting it out completely in a couple of spots). I just gave it a listen without looking at the screen, and stopped and did some volume adjustments in spots where I felt the slide was stepping on the rest of the music a little too much. The pedal steel was just beautiful. I did a little panning envelope stuff at around :44, just for fun. I could have spent hours doing little subtle stuff like that with this track but that's just not gonna happen :).

I ditched the drums for two reasons, actually. The quality of the sounds is the obvious one. I even tried to trash 'em to lo-fi and put 'em way back in the mix in the hopes that I'd end up with some hints of snare for the rhythm. But the other reason was the pattern used. This tune is really subtle and delicate, IMO. And the drum pattern just steps all-the-fuck over that strength. Luckily the other tracks were brilliant and able to carry the tune with the acoustics providing all the rhythm backbone that was needed.

On the "mastering" I used the Waves Ren EQ, Waves RCL comp, and the L1 Maximizer. EQ: Gave a 2.5 dB bump at around 90Hz to help some of the bottom and a 3 dB shelf at 8400 because we're all deaf in the high end :D. RCL and L1 were used in tandem to bring the level up without too much squashing. I don't know if I'd do the 90Hz boost if I had it to do over again, I didn't spend much time here.

So there ya have it; only one EQ, one comp, and one reverb in the premastered mix.
 
pglewis said:
Main voc: Buss effects: EQ -> compressor -> delay. Paragraphic EQ: Low-cut at 58Hz to get rid of any unneeded rumble down there, 3dB cut at ~2100, and a high-shelf boost around 8800.

With the delay, I was going for some open-ness on the vocal without reaching for a reverb. The vocal track was just too nice to smear, IMO.
Click to expand...
Thanks for posting that. This would partially explain why your mix is so much fun on the headphones. Also, on the vocal cut...did you "see" or hear anything in that mid area, or is that something you normally do. It smoothed it out a lot, I think.

I know we still have some submissions out, holding off on the voting's probably a good thing. I'm just impatient, and I have like 25 new mixes on my hard drive, and I get all girly about it, lmao.

Again, that took awhile to post, and I'm sure others besides me will benefit too.

Thanks,
Chris
 
Uh-oh...

*Somebody* gave this thread one star; lmao - HEY, THIS IS NOT A 'chrisharris' THREAD, IT'S A CLINIC THREAD... so ease the fuck up already. :D

I guess Guernica's right.
 
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