I normally don’t mess with mixing contests, but the multi-track sessions can be very handy to have around for reference and for experimenting with.
https://mixwiththemasters.com/contests/softube-console-1
Thought I’d share this with you guys (if you aren’t already getting the emails from Softube).
Cool! I’ll check it out!
I need to dig up some tracks for OUR next contest!
If I had a damn drummer, you’d have tracks now. lol
Just downloaded it - nice song - great recordings. On a side note, you guys think it might be nice to have a section related to downloadable tracks to practice mixing? For somebody like me who will never be able to record live musicians these tracks are worth their weight in gold
@madpsychot, with high end sessions (which are the best ones to practice on), you’ll almost always run into copyright and licensing issues. No one like Slate, Warren Huart, or MWTM who hosts competitions is generally ok with posting old competition content on other sites, as the purpose of said content is to drive traffic through theirs. The use agreements are usually explicit before you can even download it.
Its a great idea though.
We could start a page of links to those…but it’d take some effort because of link rot. Companies tend to retract the downloads for a certain amount of time after the competition ends.
I wouldn’t want the site to get into problems with copyright, but a collection of tracks would be so nice. The Mike Senior site is bookmarked and I’ve dowloaded most of the songs that are on that site, but I’m always on the lookout for newer tracks. I don’t just mix them, but use them as references for my own recordings (I’m obsessed with getting my virtual guitar amps to sound as real as possible).
Currently I’ve signed up to SKIO music as they’ve got 3 mixing contests going in a genre I wouldn’t dream of working on normally.
Would there be a legal problem with downloading and archiving contest material? The mixes would not be released for commercial reasons - in fact they wouldn’t be released at all and really be for personal use.
That depends on 2 things. The terms and conditions which you consented to upon acquiring the material, and the manner in which you disseminate it. You can archive it for your own purposes. That’s fair use. What you sometimes can’t do is share it publicly.
There are instances where people WANT you to share it publicly, but they want the public to go to their site and use their link to get it. That’s understandable.
Another case is with Warren Huart (for example) who allows people to use monthly multi-track mixes in their own portfolios, so long as they credit the creators. But he would NOT allow the multitrack to be uploaded to Bryans IRD server to be accessed by all of us. Because only paying members of Produce Like A Pro are supposed to be able to access the multi-track files.
Course material for mixing contests is created TO BE downloaded by everyone. Paid tutorial content almost always isn’t.
I ran into an interesting situation with my mixing console. The audio masters and segments of edits for a ton of A list movies (Thor, Divergent, Metallica 3D, Prometheus) were never wiped from the hard drive at Todd Soundelux when the federal government seized over $30m in audio assets and auctioned them off. The intellectual property rights are still wholly owned by Universal, Sony Pictures, or Disney regardless how I came to possess them. So I have the legal right to poke around in those sessions, or put a stutter effect and vocoder on Natalie Portman’s ditsey character in Thor, but certainly not the right to re-distribute them. Nor do I have the right to create a derivative mechanical copy from them, even for my own non-commercial, educational, or non-profit purposes.
Now could I distribute the mixer template and channel settings from Iron Man 2? Or could export the automation settings if I wanted to? Yes. I could. Trying to claim that as intellectual property would be like someone trying to claim a copyright on a window layout arrangement in ProTools.