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Mixing Contest 06182012: VOTE!

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oldbobd:
!:  Great drum sound & rhythm instruments.  Vocal is not quite as present and sounds like it's separate from the band (not the same performance.).  The lead guitar isn't up front and doesn't hit powerfully. Probably more the EQ used (or lack thereof) rather than levels.  Overall good.

2.  Drums bright & thin.  Vocal too far out and in your lap.  These two factors make it come off weak. Good hit and sound on and placement of the lead guitar.  Not as good as #1.

3.  Overall at a lower level - but this doesn't mater for the mixing stage.  Great sound on the guitars and good sound on the drums.  The low end is too loud (kick & bass) and it's difficult to hear the bass notes (muddy) - vocal a little weak.  Better and 2 but not as good as 1.

4.  Very "false" (irritating high end) sound on drums with the kick over-accented.  Bass guitar however is buried.  Good sound on vocal - very present without swamping the mix.  This is not a weak mix but the drum sound in particular makes me put it on par with #2.

So my first vote is for #1 and second for #3.  Both of these should come off well after mastering.

So that's my take, now I'll check out what everyone else thinks.

:old: bob 

Silent Bob:
OK all, the contest has come to a close and we have a winner.
01, Yours truly, Silent Bob.
02, Vas Dim.
03, oldbobd
04, pyrael

That puts me in the lead with Vas Dim a short second, good job Vas!

Let the discussion begin!
I'll go first:
I took a listen to the raw tracks and got my bearings.  It's a fun song that doesn't take itself too seriously, so I asked myself "WWJD (What would Johnny (Rotten) do?"  Make it as clattery and raw as possible!
Drums, I started by panning the floor-tom side mic hard right and panned the overhead left until the bass drum and snare sounded centered (68%).  I made no attempt at fixing the hard clipping.
I boosted an 80Hz band by 8dB to bring out some thump in the bass drum, 180Hz -2.5 to cut some ringing, 2.5K -3dB to cut some harshness in the cheapie cymbals, 10.4K band +6dB for added clarity.

Bass, 210Hz band -2dB to let the guitar and vocals speak a little better.  2nd order LPF at 3.5KHz to get rid of that horrible electronic ringing.  I also brought up the beginning of the bridge a couple of dB for impact.  I panned the bass left by about 50% to counter balance the guitar.

Guitar - Rhythm; the guitar bleed in the drum mics is predominantly on the left side of my mix, so I panned the guitar right by about 50% to avoid masking the bleed.  1.6K -2.5dB high shelf to reduce some harshness.  I did some automation to keep the guitar out of the way on the verses and brought it back for the choruses & bridge.

Guitar - Lead, centered with a -1.5dB high shelf at 2KHz.

Vocals, here was the trouble for me.  There was some clipping and poor intonation in places, so I ran some clip restoration to smooth it a bit.  There was also lots of snap, crackle, pop from an ill-adjusted record computer.  This was true of some other tracks (bass) as well, so I fixed these issues here.  I tuned the vocals a little bit using a combination of techniques.  I used Audition 3.0's tune for some of it, which is not very good, so I had to manually fix a couple of other notes.  I also took some notes from elsewhere in the song and used them to replace other notes that weren't as solid.  I tried to stay out of the way as much as possible in this endeavor to avoid taking the life and spirit out of the sound, leaving it JUST raw enough to be OK without being too noticeably out of tune.  I did some level automation to help retain clarity (not much), used a little bit of gating as well.  There's a low-shelf, 6dB cut at 1.2KHz (yes, low shelf) and a band cut of 6dB at 290Hz to combat the proximity effect of the mic.  I guess I took it too far.  There's also a 6:1 compressor, fairly hard knee, fast attack & medium fast release.  It's working about half the time in the verses and almost all the time on the choruses.

The whole mix was blasted through one of my Alesis M1 Active MKIIs that I put in the kitchen and had a couple of Avenson STO-2 omni condensers in my living room.  That was combined with the dry mix and sent to a ten year old, used metal particle cassette tape with HX Pro and Dolby B (though I have Dolby S and new metal cassettes) at about +6dB average on the deck's meters.  It's not hard to hear the dropouts or distortion.  ;D  It took a few passes to get the distortion right.

The drummer hesitated a lot in three spots, but the rest of the "band" stayed with him, so I chopped out a frame or two in those spots to help keep the groove.  In retrospect, I think I did the right things for the most part but should have taken down the bass track 2dB or so and not cut the low end on the vocal so much.

It was a lot of fun working on this and I applaud Py for the bold Recorderman technique & raw performances.  The drum mic technique worked pretty well IMO and the time alignment with the mics was quite good.  It's funny, because most of his stuff is pretty complex and polished by the end of the day.  I had been daring him to do a short pop tune, so I guess that's what I get!

pyrael:
I'm Glad SB's mix won!!  Mine was way too polished for this song, and it really shows, I put too much in, even though i didn't do THAT much!!  ;D

These tracks were recorded in my living room. We had my original scratch vocal blasting over my RCA 5.1 system (hence the vocals in the distance), My 50 watt Jubilee clone (The Blitzkrieg) facing down the hall way because it was too loud. The drums were barely in tune if at all, and a cheap set to boot. 5 peice with 1 crash/ride and hat. the crash had an L shaped crack in it about 3" long and 1" wide. Believe it or not, it's a paiste  ;) I have 7.5' ceilings so micing was a disaster. the bass and lead were both recorded afterwards as this was the two of us. I was standing 8' away from the drums when we recorded with the mic facing away from the drums. The room is 12x20. so I really felt it was a challenge to mix because of all the tracking issues.

Since I already knew the tracks, I knew I wanted to get rid of the bleed. I cloned the 2 drum tracks, linked the pans and faders and panned hard left and right and set the starting level at -6dB. i switched the cloned tracks out of phase and EQ'd the tracks so that most of the sound was drums and the bleed diminished (alot of it anyway).

I EQ'd the bass and guitars complimentary and added a sidechain compressor to the lead and scooped the EQ 2 dB to give it separation.

I cloned the vocals track and mixed the original to an acceptable level and then compressed the $^% outta the clone and boosted the mids and syllabance. i mixed this in 3:1 ish (by ear) hoping to "just" clarify the vocal. I used a room reverb to match the dubs to what was already on the live takes and then a large plate with a slight regeneration and the highs and lows cut.

All tracks have the plate for consistency, only the vocal, lead and bass have the room. I also automated the beginning count in so that it would be more audible.

I personally think that SB's is the most "creative" approach. And you really can't hear what he DID!!

Congrats again SB!!

oldbobd:
Hi All,

I don't know if it's of much use to describe what I did, since the only person who liked anything that I did was me  ;D

But I used the approach of sending a mono signal from the drums to other channels and then EQ'ing them to get a dedicated kick & snare track.  I think it worked well for the snare but the ballace got really off when I put in the foot (see below). 

I haven't been mixing my own productions recently except adding in the final vocal to a mixed track.  I've got huge issues with mixing right now as follows.  I'm VERY old school about it all of this. 

1.  To me the way to get a vocal have good intonation is to have the vocal sung right.   I remember one production on a new female vocalist spent 30 hours dubbing in the lead vocal to get the performance & intonation just right.  I played it for a production company exec and he marveled how "relaxed and good" the vocal performance was (he knew the singer was working on her first production).  I said to myself, "If he only knew."  George Clinton used to complete a verse or two in one 5-6 hour session.  Those Motown hits had vocals where 6 hours were spent on getting the lead vocal down.   This is were I'm coming from - the idea of patching up a substandard performance with pitch correction softwear is the norm today but something I have a hard time getting myself to get into.  I view vocal performance as part of the recording, not part of the mixing.  I guess I need to "modernize" my thinking and actually try using pitch correcting softwear.  I have it - I've just never used it.  As a producer, I have an engineer I work with and pitch correcting softwear can be easily used when it is called for.  I guess I can't call myself a mixing engineer until I get warmed up to the idea.

In the history of music, exact intonation didn't have the same priority as it seems to have today.  Exact intonation doesn't necessarily make hit records or cause superstardom.  I think Frank Sinatra sang EVERYTHING flat - go back and listen to his performances.  Tony Bennet and Barbra Streisand maybe never would have had a hit record if they didn't record their vocals live with a full orchestra behind them, because they had great difficulty singing on key to a prerecorded track.  When you sing with an orchestra, the musicians adjust to the pitch of the singer, not vice verse.  Sometimes a flat pitch in a performance lends color to to performance - part of the art that is easily lost in pitch correction softwear.

2.  Ditto on timing correction - same deal.  To me timing is part of the recording process.

3.  A big problem I'm having right now is that I am doing some things at the studio but mostly doing them at home.  The amount of bass in my monitors is light at home and heavy at my studio mastering room.  Neither is necessarily "right," in fact I know that neither is. It makes it very hard to judge the amount and the color of the bass (and spectrum analysis is of little help).  If you work with one setup that has deficiencies it's easy over time, and by using reference cuts, to "hear through" a monitor system providing that it doesn't have large ranges missing (like no extreme highs or lows).  Unfortunately that's not my situation.

I can use the main mastering room at the studio, but I would have to "work around" it being used for paying clients and I don't like the overrated and under performing softwear it has (Pro Tools and Wave Bundles).  So that's no a real option for me.

I am going to run some filtered pink noise tests to see if I can somewhat correct this situation by experimenting with sub-woofer placement - hopefully I'll get things working a bit better for me.

:old: bob

Dino Ziogas:
I hear you Oldbob, I wouldn't touch pitch correction with a 100ft pole and I'm a "get it down on tape right and it mixes itself" kind of guy. I guess when the rest of the production is quantized and artificial, a flat vocal doesn't gel.

Oh, well...

Don't worry about the mixing thing, I'm about 200 miles away from my studio right now and did the last couple of mastering contests on the PC - and we all heard the results  :P

Btw, congrats SB - it was a great mix!

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