VirtechStudios - Personality better late then never mix :)

Hello there children, me again, and this time with a brand new mix, a first one on this amazing site.
Had a lot of fun mixing it, hope it grabs your ears :slight_smile: Comment and rate, and as always - just have fun!

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0 voters

I corrected the upload link for you so the built-in player would work. All is well now :wink:

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Some wildly adventurous twists and turns with this mix! Love the creativity. At times, it feels a bit over the top, given the genre, but that’s largely a personal taste thing. My only other critique at the moment would be the lead guitar. Some folks missed that the intonation was out of whack on that guitar. A little pitch correction does wonders on that one, but you’re not the only one :wink:
Overall it’s a solid mix. Certainly fun to listen to when you’ve heard several versions! Great job!!

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WOW! loved the “space” sound you got there!
and crazy drum sound as well!
good job buddy!

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Interesting take onthe song.

Kind of a mix of edm more than metal.

It is a bit much for me but a good job on creating your own sound.

Good luck.

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Thank you holster for the comments, as well as for fixing the upload link :slight_smile:
My biggest concern was to make the mix frequency balanced and tight, and to get the most punch out of the instruments, especially drums, bass and the guitars. That’s where I spent most of my time on, and the little twists and turns were added just for fun sake, that’s way more than I would ever include if I was doing a commercial release, but since it’s not, I said what the heck and just had fun with it. You’re right about the guitar, missed that one, but to my ears it’s not that much detuned that it pokes out of the mix. Once you pitch correct it however, I believe it’s a pain to listen to the non-pitched one :slight_smile:
Thanks again and I’ll be typing with you soon :slight_smile:

Zsolt

Thanx asafsweet :slight_smile:
I like my mixes to be more spacious, given the genre off course, and this one was no exception. As for drums, I ended up with 9 samples on just the snare (and some of them aren’t even snare hits, one of them is a rifle shot) so go figure, I love to layer different textures to get as massive and detailed sound.
Thank you again for listening and commenting it means the world to me :slight_smile:

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WOW…really cool man. Very creative man…I’d definitely say your strength is in production and that’s a great skill to have.

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Haha, thanks TeeThomas54,
as I got my initial sounds tight and balance where I wanted to be, I just said to myself why not have some fun with it. It goes without saying that this kind of treatment is over the top for this particular genre ( I wouldn’t go as far to call it metal, more of a rock song), and if I were the mixer doing the bands commercial release, I wouldn’t even dream of doing it, but since this forum is all for fun and creativity (and learning), I said why not differ a bit from the rest of the mixes :slight_smile:
Thank you for taking the time to listen and to comment, I really appreciate it :slight_smile:

Hey there Deevs,

thanks so much for the kind words, and for taking the time to listen, it really means the world to me :slight_smile:

Very inventive - I love taking the analogue sounds and mashing them into synth territory. On my computer speakers it’s a really pleasing song to listen to. Good job!

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Thank you very much madpsychot :slight_smile: I personally found that layering, sampling sounds that are available, or even the ones I recorded myself (I’m a big fan of field recording) is the gateway to the most creative juices ever. Glad to find someone on here that shares the passion :slight_smile: Keep it up :slight_smile:

Wow !
You’ve got the best mix IMO. Creative, and nicely done !
Did you rebuilt the drums ? Have heard some stuff i didn’t in the original version.
By the way, clear job !
Your work didn’t make me love the song (i found it to much edited natural feeling is totally killed), but listening to your version was a pleasure.
David

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Hey David :slight_smile:
Thank you so much for taking the time to listen, and for commenting, I’m very glad you liked my mix (although not the song my mix turned it into ) :slight_smile:
As for the drums, yes, there was just too much bleed in the tracks, especially hi hats in the snare track. Long gone are the days where engineers spend hours, even days of picking and trying out different drum kit pieces, beaters, skins, finding the perfect one that would fit the song. Then placing microphones in ingenious ways to reduce the bleed… I liked how the rest of the tracks were recorded, but the drums were just not there. And I’m all for the: if I can make it sound better, I will.
So yes, I augmented the drums in some areas (cymbal hits on few occasions, hi hats) and completely replaced the kick and the toms, I didn’t like the room mic so I trashed it and made my own room by sending the drum kit to a room reverb, and as for the snare, thats where I got creative, I sampled just the one snare hit from the start of the song, then replaced all the other hits with that sample, and then I layered 8 more different samples, each doing it’s own thing (some were just high end crackle, others were just the body, punch), and I added an AK 47 rifle sample, that thing has a lot of transient and it cracks nicely through a dense mix :).
As for the feel of the song I hear you, I just couldn’t live with that drum performance, so I aligned the whole thing, and when you do that, you have to align the bass and the guitars so they wouldn’t drift apart. So you get that polished tight feel of the song, that you either love or hate. :slight_smile:
Thanks again for commenting and hope to hear from you again in the future :slight_smile:
All the best,

Zsolt

Pragmatic behaviour, you were right.

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I like the modern rock sound you’ve got here, I think it’s the right feel for the song.
I also like the way you played with the arrangements, really cool, the only bit that I didn’t think worked as much was how you faded out the guitar before the first verse, it felt a little bit anticlimactic.
The cymbals get lost in the chorus which throws me off a bit since I was expecting massive cymbals and crashes by he way you’re featuring the HH in the verse.
I would suggest a longer fade out at the very end, it ends a little prematurely for me.
Great work here, a great rocking take overall.

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Hey tachin1 :slight_smile:
Thanks for the comments and for taking the time to listen, much appreciated :slight_smile:
You are right, I agree with you, the cymbals in the chorus were something I was planing on doing, although I never got around to, I didn’t want to raise the OH level because there is a lot of ride cymbal hits in them, and those were too distracting for me, I tried taming them down with a compressor, so I could bring up the cymbals, but that only made the ride sound overly squashed. So I was planing or either adding some sampled cymbals or a pad synth with just the high frequency content left in it, but I ran out of time. The fade out at the end was the first thing I noticed this morning with fresh ears, but the upload was already done, and the anticlimactic guitar fade out was just done for the fun of it, I wouldn’t have done it if I were mixing the commercial release :slight_smile:
Thanks for the detailed info, I really appreciate it, I will take them into notice and definitely apply them on my mix :slight_smile:

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Awsome idea to design the instruments with different samples such as gun shots :slight_smile:

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Fantastic mix! I don’t have any real critiques, anything I’m coming up with is simply my personal tastes. Good job, and good luck!

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Beautiful sonics, Zsolt! Nice spread of frequencies, great tight low end, detailed yet smooth top end. It sounds like you put a lot of care and detail into your mix.

I particularly like your treatment of the vocals in the second verse, with the radio voice and the delay throws - nice creative details that progress the arrangement and take it out of the ordinary.

The technical aspects of your mix are extremely well done, and pretty much faultless to my ear, so I’d like to focus my critique in other, slightly more “esoteric” areas…

The drums certainly sound very good. The work you have put into the sounds themselves has certainly paid off.

That said, I would venture that the detailed timing editing, while admirable, has not produced anywhere near a payoff commensurate with the work involved. I do know for a fact that when the band recorded the tracks, they put in considerable editing work on the drums before recording the other instruments to the edited version of the drums.

To my ear, editing the drums (& subsequently the rest of the band) “to the grid” has been ever-so-slightly counter-productive in terms of overall feel of the song. The original collective timing of the band, while certainly not “perfect”, did contain a certain “pushing the beat” urgency that works so well with this genre, in that it creates vital excitement and liveliness.

Ultimately, I think your focus on the drums may have affected the overall outcome of the mix too. It’s understandable that you would be proud of the drum sounds you created, but to my ear, they dominate the mix a bit too much, and this, again has been slightly counter-productive to the all-important excitement and subjective “power” of the mix.

I find that a lot of the subjective “power” and excitement in a mix comes, not from the drums, but the midrange instruments - in this case the guitars. The guitars here are very much taking a back-seat to the drums. That’s not something I hear when I reference rock music in general. The drums can be big, but not so big that they dwarf the guitars.

That said, I think you still could have used the drums-biased mix balance to your advantage with a few crucial automation moves. For example: The “reprise” chorus that comes in after the big floor tom hit @ 2:34 is just begging for a HUGE, unapologetic shove north on the guitar faders. In fact, if the drums weren’t so loud already, they could come up too… If this was an EDM song, that would be the DROP… I think I might be able to hear a little bit of an automation move on the guitars there, but it’s too polite, IMO - a missed opportunity to really inject something extra into the arrangement and take it to the next level.

I really like the intention behind the arrangement “stop” (tacit) you created @ 1:30. I love the way the vocal picks up out of silence for the second verse. However, to my ear the execution of it is a little awkward. Perhaps finding a guitar ending from another part of the arrangement that sounded more natural might have worked better there. Great idea, though.

One other aspect that I think could improve the mix is the vocal ambience. You’ve achieved a very pleasing vocal sound, with a really wide, luscious reverb and ambience around it that still manages to retain the clarity and definition in the vocal. However, the vocal starts with that sound and continues (at least to my ear) pretty much all the way through song. Granted, I can hear the added delays in the choruses, which are very effective, but considering how much impact the telephone vocal has in the 2nd verse, I wonder if starting with a much tighter, drier vocal sound in the verses might have created even more contrast and progression in the arrangement.

All in all, my points are - as I said above - venturing into the fairly murky philosophical and taste-related aspects of this crazy craft. They are highly subjective, so feel free to ignore them if you choose.

The fact is, you’ve done an exceptional job, and yours is (certainly from a technical perspective) one of (if not) the best mixes I have heard so far. It scores very high in the creative and boldness stakes too. Top job! :beerbang:

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