What has been your biggest challenge with the mix contest mix?

What has been (or was for those that finished) your biggest challenge with this mixing for this contest? What are you using to work around it?

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Personally, I had to fly out of country and wanted to get this mix finished in quick time. I gave myself about 24 hrs to complete the project, which most of that was spent asleep admittedly. I wanted to experiement with just how much fatigue and general glossing over I could experience given a crunch like that. I have taken each of the (I’m truly humbled by the amount of great and helpful constructive) criticisms and made a lessons learned list for future mixes, time-crunched and otherwise strained.

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Also, I can finally access the website at work, whee!!!

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The multitrack drums. I’m pretty new to mixing multitrack drums, so it was hard for me to find the right mic balances for the whole drum set.

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Convincing people that muddier indie songs have made it big.

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well played :thumbsup:

Well, this one is good practice for you then. To their credit, the band did a pretty good job of tracking these drums, so this will be a good learning experience! Did you feel like it’s coming together?

First of all time, I wanted to take my time, but all of a sudden work got it the way, so I had to finish and upload, cause I wouldn’t have time to do any more work on this song till the deadline. Not saying that my mix would be much better if i had more time, hahahahaha. Now in the actual mix, my biggest problem was the cymbal bleeding in the snare track, it drove me crazy. Cause I don’t like to have the hi hat in the center, but when I panned it left at first, you could still hear it from the snare channel at the center, so I had to do some surgery to tame that.

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I found getting the vocals to sit right and sound good was the hardest part for me. Apparently getting the bass right was also an issue but not one that i knew about until after i submitted the mix. :confounded:

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The clicking in the snare track

I’m struggling to find a way to make the mix memorable, I’m also struggling with getting the drums to sound punchy and rockin’ but I think I have an idea how to achieve that, what eludes me is finding ways to keep it interesting. It doesn’t help that the reference mix is awesome and intimidating, I almost wish I hadn’t listened to it, except that if I hadn’t I might have felt like my version is finished already and might have already submitted.

the kick was a bit weak on verse and too clicky on chorus.

Yeah, I agree. The weaker kick on the verses made it tough. I ended up re-sampling so I could get some consistency.

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Yep, totally. I always felt disappointed to fight against “pro”-mixes.
By the way, it gives some goals… the question still is: how to reach them :blush:

My daughter!
My 7 months years daughter wanted to make her own mix.
Kept moving faders around.

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Getting an early start!

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Letting people know that there was only one serious mix, and to stop objectively listening to silly mixes! Come on guys! St. Anger mix was a joke. I know the drums are out of time, and it’s too compressed, that’s the point!

Cheers,
Doubletrackinjive

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You should save it sometime just to see the result. It may be better than some of my work. :slight_smile:

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Definitely!!

Yeah, I’d say it was the drums. They were recorded well enough, but with the hihat leakage I couldn’t get the lighter snare hits to speak without adding a sample, which I don’t usually do… I also found that the drummer’s kick was a little ahead, which was tugging at the groove for me, so I sliced and diced a bit, which I also don’t usually do . Good practice tho…:grin:

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