PureMix / Sonnox Mixing Contest!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Chater-La
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Hey everyone!

Track uploaded.
Great recorded material usually sounds allright once you've set the levels and panning and this was no exception. IMO this song needed a great deal of volume rides to get everything to fit in the mix. It was pretty busy at times but I hope I got it in the right ballpark at least.
Lots of waves C6 and 1176 going on pretty much all over the tracks.
Mixed ITB using PT11 and a few plugins from waves and a few that came bundled with PT. Can't live without the SansAmp emulation :)
Good luck to you all.
 
Track Count

Can some one please verify the track count? I have a total of 94 tracks, many L and R of same track. Here is a screen shot of all my files. if you could all confirm if these or ALL the files or share how to get all the the rest of files please let me know! It would be greatly greatly appreciated!

Also, the mix on the Puremix site, is that the model which we are going after for production, or is that someone's mix to give us an idea of what to shoot for?

Sorry for all the basic questions. Been a long term member on this forum, but this is my first mix contest. Would greatly appreciate some veteran guidance as I do not want to change to much, or not change enough as I am not exactly sure what the holders or the contest are looking for! Thanks so much guys! Pumped to be working on this with you all!
 

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Hi everyone,

I really enjoyed mixing this song. I tried to create contrast between airy, laid back verses and punchy, in-your-face choruses. I wanted the chorus to feel like an explosion after the quiet verses. The main beat had a lot of room, which I didn't think helped the song, so I used the additional samples a lot to give the drums both more power and more space. Talking about space, this song has a lot of things going on, so I used very little reverb, mostly delays to shape it. The production had all it needed to create a beautiful build-up, and the events that were there were enough to make it powerful, I only added a filter sweep at the end of the prechorus to emphasize the impact of the chorus. I mixed everything ITB, using Pro Tools 11 Native, its stock plugins (mainly Mod-Delay, D-Verb and Lo-Fi) and Metric Halo Channel Strip. Since my computer is a little old, I had to do a lot of track reduction at the start of the session, bouncing vocal stacks together and some guitars. My main weapon in this session was automation.

Good luck to all of you, and I hope you'll enjoy mixing this track as much as I did.
Sorry if my English isn't always clear, I'm not native.
 
I posted mine too.
Pretty straight forward mix, needed a couple of hours.
Mixed ITB with REAPER, using stock plugins, Waves CLA and altiverb.

Beat
I was not very impressed by the sounds chosen, I had to make them punchier with a bit of compression and eq. That was the hard part.

Bass
a bit too heavy and cloudy. I used a high pass filter around 30Hz and some eq to bring out some harmonics

Guitars
just a bit of high pass filter. Acoustic guitars sound a bit like a synth, but it works well in situation.

Synth and fx
mostly balancing here

Vocals
I love the sound of the vocals, I'd like to know what the vocal chain was. I didn't process too much: high pass filter, CLA76 compression and reverb (altiverb with a spring impulse), and some delays. Balancing and panning do the rest.

On the bridge, I filtered the 'oh' with an autopan. Th edog whistle is fun, but I guess that not a lot of peaople can hear it (myself included). So I pitched it an octave lower. It is still very high and does the job well I think!
 
Hi to all,
I really enjoyed to mix this nice song,
Thanks PureMix, Sonnox, Amber Skye and EMW Music Group.
Mixing with ProTools 11 , native protools plugins, P&M Bundle Plugs, and external reverb Korg A1 Guitar Processor.
Best Regards
 
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Hi Everyone!!
I haveupload my mix just now!
I hope the producer like it!
Enjoy and Good Luck ;)
 
Hey Guys,
Its a cool production, and my take on it is to enhance the vocals, and pretty much just let it shine :-)
 
Great opportunity to mix an energetic, emotional modern pop song. I really enjoyed this and hope to contribute to more Zelab contests in the future.

Techniques... all done in Reaper using Reaper, Slate, Waves, and various other plugins. My workflow for a mix involves three phases, "premix", "mix", and "home-mastering".

During "premix" I do all the importing, aligning, track cleanup, and various housekeeping tasks. I'll listen to the mix with all tracks in mono panned center to learn where I might have conflicts and take notes on those for work during the 'mix' phase. During the 'mixing' phase I well... mix the song... starting with a static mix and working through panning, compression, EQ, and automation until it's a 'song'.

The "mix" phase is where the fun part happens. I tend to mix kick and bass, then lead voices, then the rest of the drums. After that I'll work different instruments and tracks into the song, depending on what is provided. Remembering that the goal is the SMASH the rough, I compare and contrast to any provided rough or reference materials. I utilize a multi-buss compression scheme in Reaper, blatantly influenced by Michael Brauer and Dave Pensado teachings. Mixing into calibrated compressors on submix busses allows me to 'mix down the funnel' as the mix progresses from working on many individual tracks down to my main Vox, Drums/Bass, Music, and FX submixes. My goal for a 'mix' phase is a great sounding 2-track peaking between -5 to -3 dBFS with a decent 9 or 10 RMS.

Finally, in my "home mastering", I take the 2-track output and listen again with critical ears, after a reasonable break away from the song. During 'home mastering' I'm basically applying subtle EQ, parallel compression, and the Slate FG-X to enhance what came out of the mix phase. This is also where I bring the mix up to a -0.1 dBfs peak with an RMS appropraiate for the song. I am definitely a fan of leaving a decent dynamic range! With Howlin' being a pop/dance type song I ended up with RMS between 7 and 8 for plenty of detectable dynamic range and impact.

My mix is on the PureMix Cloud as "Howlin - Amber Skye (Rusty Falcon 2014-0526-MST-320).mp3". I have 16-bit WAV also available but the PureMixCloud only allows MP3 and AAC.

Hope you enjoy it!
 
Howlin

I just posted my mix in the cloud and I like to know what you think about it.
The DAW I used was Studio One from Presonus, because of the very good quality of the stems the most I did was some levelling.
All of the used effects are on board of the program; verb, gate, multiband dynamics, limiting and a little compression here and there.

I tried to stay as close as possible to the original stems, all the channels are used exept the dog channel( I don't like clipping tweeters and for as far I could see it's above the human hearing border).
The guitars did have a special treatment, I tried to make them, airy, bit spooky perhaps?

As I said, the rest was just levelling and panning.

Kind regards
Anne from the North of The Netherlands
 
Hello everyone,

and thanks for this great contest.

I mixed the track with Pro tools 11 and some waves plugin.

Good luck to everyone.

regards.
 
Hello friends I am from Venezuela, in the mix and master use only brand plugins waves, only the reverb of the voice you use the Tracks-Reverb and Valhallaroom.

The battery has the pure waves ssl.
The effects have nothing
In the harmony of the theme used in each instrument CLA2A, JPS.
Only use the main voice of the waves JJP, other voices they are clean

use google to translate apology
 
I counted the files by hand. There are 89. Some people might have been getting higher numbers by looking at file properties, which can include folders in a count (for example, 89 audio files + the folders for Drums + Keyboards + Vocals + Effects + Guitars = 94 items).
 
Anyone else having trouble finding people's submissions to listen to?
 
Just posted my mix, really enjoyed mixing this track!! Was tricky mixing the vocals with so many tracks, had to use a lot of panning and fx !! I mainly used plugins from UAD, waves, sonnox, izotope and fab filter and used Logic as my DAW. Thanks!
 
Hey everyone!

Just uploaded my mix on my puremix account. It was a lot of fun mixing this song and tried to make a natural and clear sounding mix.
My main focus during the mixing process was to create some kind of overall build up in terms of depth, dynamics and width.
Also, before I started mixing the song I decided what the key elements of the song were. To my opinion the vocals, drums and acoustic guitar in the verses and the drums, bass and vocals in the chorus. Basically, I tried to identify the driving element in every section of the song. After doing that I had a very clear vision of what needed to be done.
I used Ableton Live 9 as my DAW and used several Waves, Fabfilter, Izotope Ozone and stock plugins to get the job done.
Thanks to pureMix and Sonnox for having this contest, I learned a lot working on this song!

Lars
 
Hello everyone ,
I'm pill , I really enjoyed this song and singer indeed ,i'm using AL 9 most slandered waves plugins nothing special ,tried to make a balance mix between all elements ..hope you enjoy it and many thinks to PureMix ..
 
Hello
I've joined the fun. The song is well arranged so I was feeling like it was dictating me my mixing decisions.
I used Reaper and bunch of free vsts.
 
hey guys, it was lots of fun to mix this track. a great production. i used pro tools 9, tc reverbs, fabfilter eq/comp and ssl bus comp. good luck for everyone. cheers...
 
This was a nightmare to mix because my studio closed it's doors in April and my partner inherited the computer so the 90 plus track count really taxed the old dual core here at home not to mention having to mix through headphones as my mix room isn't up and running yet...ARGH!

The process began with making a rough mix of the song (sans drums) then working on the individual groups of instruments and vocals starting with the drums, roughing out each group until I was able to get a sense of how I wanted the mix to go. Once that was done I committed to the tracks I used and deleted any unwanted audio and edited all dead air out of the mix (where possible).

This got me to the point where I could play the song with no glitching (pauses for buffering) but that quickly ended as I started tweaking the tracks and the mix.

The song was mixed in Reaper with stock Reaper, EQ, Compression and Delay, Waves EQ, Compression and Reverb and Slate Digital VCC and VBC plugins.

With that said I think it came out okay and thoroughly enjoyed the process and the song.


edited to add: I decided to do an abrupt end as opposed to a fade out as the fade out could be added after the fact quite easily
 
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