Boz Digital Mixing Contest

Nice. Thanks for the heads up. Might enter this one if I manage to get the Carcer record mixed in time. Haven't mixed pop rock in ages.

 

Surprised there isn't more interest around this. Here's my entry anyway: https://soundcloud.com/ermin-hamidovic/boz-labs-mix-comp-ermz

 

Thanks for heads-up!!!
Can someone give bit of tips on bass guitars like in this song? I've been doing metal clanky ones and not really got nice round mid-range like in this song.

 

I entered this not long ago.Found it purely by coincidence when I went to buy the Mongoose plugin. On hindsight there are things I would do differently haha.

https://soundcloud.com/kellii123/i-am-cassette-believe-mix-kellii123

Nezer others will have better advice but if you double check the tuning, split in two just like you would with metal. With the bass track handling the top end aim for a nice warm bass amp sound with a little bit of drive or gain. There so much space you don't need a lot of clank or distortion to make it cut through.

 

Ermz, I really dug your mix and approach to the song. Well done.

Here's my effort.

 

I think I'm going to have to give this a shot. I've never mixed anything like this before. And I don't stand a chance against some of you guys!

 

Ya never know until you give it a whirl, man!

The one thing I've noticed that sets the "good" mixes apart from the "average" mixes for this song (of course, it's all subjective) is that a lot of guys aren't mixing for the song. Keep that in mind, and it'll give you a good place to start.

At least that's how I see it.

 

My mix:

 

Glad to see more people taking a crack at it. It's starting to feel like an engineering forum again, haha.

Don't know about you guys but I found it really difficult to lock the kick and bass in on this one. I think a large part of it is due to the bass performance being so dynamic, the tone being so awkward and.... well, the runs are out of key. Also, to those who didn't notice it, they edited the bass transients right on top of the kick, so the two clash by nature. Offsetting the bass by around 30ms lets your lows breathe a lot more naturally.

 

The bass was definitely a sticking point for me, along with the timing of the backing vocals. I probably spent more time trying to get the bass to vibe right than any other part of the mix.

The flipped polarity on one side of the overheads and the awkward sounding room mics were also a nice touch. Ended up blending in some kick, snare and tom room samples just to get things to breathe a bit more.

Ermz, did you notice the pumping and glitching from time-stretching on the overhead, ride and snare tracks? That was a weird one.

 

Here's my attempt at it.

 

Nice Gonna do an entry, but jesus this source material is a mess.

 

Better than 95% of the self-tracked stuff I usually get from bands, and better than a LOT of studios around here

 

You know, I didn't flip the overhead. It never even dawned on me because I've never dealt with a project where the tracking engineer messed up that badly. The overheads and rooms sounded awkward to the point of being near useless, so I just got them out of the way fast and tried to bury them under the acoustics. Noticed all sorts of weird artefacts in there, and not sure where half of them came from.

It's all sleight of hand anyway. When you have poor bass and drum tracks, you highlight the vocals and guitars in an attempt to mask them.

 

actually sounds to me like the whole track has been shifted tempo wise to be slower...hence the odd sounding drum tracks especially.

 

CFH13 Sounds like your sample rate is wrong. It is in 48Khz, That's why it sounds funny. I made that mistake too at first haha.

 

Great mixes so far!

Here's my own take:


666th post, hooray!

 

Tricky but workable raws. Loved working with this and kept goal somewhere between CLA and Grosse reference wise.