Public Mix Contest #5

  • Thread starter Thread starter giles117
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Drum Roll Please .................

Well, I have to say I am quite surprised that all three judges picked the same 3 mixes in the top three. In the same order as well !!

Here you go:
 

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Cool. Thanks for your hard work in compiling all the scores RT.
 
Congrats Bear

Congrats Bruce
I guess the 23 minutes mix before the deadline didn't get me into the top three after all.lol
Again thanks for the advice on the HD24 man. It arrives tomorrow with lots of extra drives. I bought another 30 drives to keep me busy.
Now all I have to do is find the power button.

Nice tune guys with great vocals.


C
 
Im not surprised at my score. I figured it would be near the bottom. I wanted to try to enter this contest so bad that during the move I mixed on the floor in the middle of a bare room. lol I really enjoy mixing this style of music. Thanks Giles for putting these tracks out there for everyone to give it a shot. Thanks to the judges who put their personal time in too. Thanks guys for the server space. My hat goes off to the Winners, Giles, Judges and anyone else involved. Look forward to another one soon. (hint there Giles or Blue Bear)

Congrats to Blue Bear, Greet, jtvrdy and everyone else who entered.


Eddie
 
very nice. ill win one of these, i swear. lol, although i did place 5th, which is surprising considering hip hop production is not my niche. nice work, guys.
 
I'm gonna enter the next one.... yeah, that's the plan.

Last two I downloaded and mixed around for a while, and got bored and moved on to other stuff =P

Too bad none of that other stuff was studying calculus...
 
Holy shit. I got second again! Wow. Thanks, judges.

I guess I'm doing something right. Heh.
 
geet73 said:
I got second again! Wow. Thanks, judges.

I guess I'm doing something right. Heh.
Click to expand...

Yeah man, you are!

I'd like to make some more comments about the entrants. I'll give the normal disclaimer - these are just my opinions.

There is something which I noticed in the 'poor' mixes. The tracks which Giles supplied were pretty nice right from the start. If you went ahead and did a mix with just fader adjustment, and got it right, you would have certainly been in the middle of the pack, perhaps even higher. Many of these mixes were either too compressed, too much reverb, or over ED'd. And in most cases, the 'mastering' only hurt the mixes. Louder entries got nothing extra for being loud, but the loss of impact certainly hurt the overall sound of the mix. Brickwall limiting and exciters can easily do more harm than good.

Congratulations Bruce - who would have thought? :)
And Geet - you gave him a SERIOUS run IMO.
 
Congrats guys... and thanks for the judging efforts, RT, Cary and Vestast!

Very nice job, Geet - and since I wasn't really considering myself a contender you, in essence, got top score!
 
Congratulations BLUEBEAR!

These were great tracks to work with-lot of fun - Thank you Bryan!

I wish I had more time before the deadline.......to send out bribes to the judges.
caryindy, vestast, Raw-Tracks - Thanks for your time and work - after listening to all the mixes, I certainly didn't envy you at all.

BlueBear, the kidder, when I saw you were participating, I was tempted to stick ice-picks in my eardrums and take up lawn work, but went ahead and gave it a shot anyway. Any suggestions or criticisms of the 4th place mix would be muchly appreciated - as long as you don't send an invoice with it. :rolleyes:

Looking forward to PMC #6.

triggoff :cool:
 
And we will followup with who got the vision. I have listend to maybe 3 mixes but none of the finalist so this shall be fun. results up in about 2 hours

Thanks to the Judges for their excellent support through my server issues and professionalism with the contest.

BB if you had not been #1 I would have driven 9 hours to speak my mind. LOL

Fader placement is more imprtnat than a lot of the other stuff. we cut so sounds did not conflict but compliment so as cary said this would have been an easy one on just fader levels before eq and reverb.
 
caryindy said:
There is something which I noticed in the 'poor' mixes. The tracks which Giles supplied were pretty nice right from the start. If you went ahead and did a mix with just fader adjustment, and got it right, you would have certainly been in the middle of the pack, perhaps even higher. Many of these mixes were either too compressed, too much reverb, or over ED'd. And in most cases, the 'mastering' only hurt the mixes. Louder entries got nothing extra for being loud, but the loss of impact certainly hurt the overall sound of the mix. Brickwall limiting and exciters can easily do more harm than good.
Click to expand...

I would like to echo this. Many of the entries seemed to be quite thin and bright/brittle. I think many folks tried to add more high end to a lot of the tracks. I have to say that after judging these mixes, my ears were quite fatigued as a result of the "ice-picks". I agree with Caryindy that a mix that had no eq at all would have rated higher than many of the mixes. I think that a lot of the mixes lacked a good solid mid-range. This is probably a result of the mixer being overly concerned with the score for the lo end, and the score for "air". I don't want anyone to think I'm cutting on them. I just think a good lesson to learn from this exercise is that you don't HAVE to eq everything, sometimes less really is more.
:)
 
Eric. to take a list from the original mix (mine :) ) Ok no horn tooting but I know what i wanted when we laid the 1st 3 sounds. LOL

The air in the mix came from the openess of the vocal (though i still hate the verb i used on her) the way we cut the BGV's 5 parts with the top note giving a sense of sizzle and the Pad that I made. Love Sound Design. those sounds lifetd the overall mix without massive boosts to the high end.

Just another quick tip. Notice my placement of the Gtr. That is an essential instrument as it was the foundation for the entire track. Everything else was built around it. in it's raw form it is very muddy. Ensonig Gtrs are that way. It needed to be thinned up so everything else would sit in place well.

And one that I have noticed from listening. the Rhodes. If listening to it musically you realize it is just a pad. Some of what I have heard have had the Rhodes TOOO loud for being a pad and ended up hiding the Piano.

Just 2 some quick notes for yah.

The biggest thing in mixing is not the technical aspect but the musical aspect of the track. So as we move to PMC #6 remember the musical performance is 1st. Capture that acurately then have fun. :)
 
Well said Eric, Cary and Bryan.

Another issue I had was with some of the tracks being hidden by other tracks. For example I felt there were a couple of critical areas in the song that I paid attention to. One of them was the bridge. On many of the mixes the vocals were not seperated enough in the bridge (IMO) and some parts went MIA. A couple of mixes buried the whisper track as well and a couple more had a very mono feel to them.

Again Please everyone, don't take this as a shot.

Anyway I think everyone did a good job and I hope everyone (including myself) are inspired to learn more about how they mix :)

I know for myself this has helped me want to learn even more about my new room and I think it's helped my listening skills !

Dave

P.S - Chris Harris's mix was by far the worst ! (damn I hope he reads this :p )
 
Jeezz...couldn't the judges get together to post an initial (fake) result showing BlueBear as dead last? This is probably one of the reasons I'm not a moderator of any forum or a judge of any contest.
 
Actually Chris - I already volunteered you as a judge for the next contest. I mean you've got lots of spare time on your hands, dont you ? :D
 
vestast said:
P.S - Chris Harris's mix was by far the worst ! (damn I hope he reads this :p )
Click to expand...

I for one am glad Chris sat this one out.
It just means I was able to be that much closer to the top.
Even though I need a ladder too see the top. *Sigh*
Damn that man and His mixing skills!

C
 
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