reaMIXed: The Reaper Mixing Contest - May 2023 - Four Graham

[MisterGTR]

Very few out in the first round mixes this time round (so far)

Lots of very different mixes as expected from a tough set of files.

I'm having to bring up my reference (Blink 182 - All the Small Things) quite often (i should have done more of that during my mixing!) and it's taking quite a bit of time to go through as there's no clear cut better than the rest (so far!)

[MisterGTR]

Down to my final three and one thing that did for those that didn't make my final round was a lot of 20hz on mixes (ie. more than any other frequency). I'm listening with 2 subs but then used Digicheck to check as I'm one of the rubbisher mixers on here (i've finished 2nd last last month!).

Again i'm using Blink 182/Sum 41 as references. So maybe it's a time has moved on thing? And there should be more low end? And so my marking is flawed! Sorry!

Must admit i learn more from listening to the other mixes than anything i do myself - so i just wanted to ask if anyone else had noticed that?

[JerZee]

Originally Posted by MisterGTR

Down to my final three and one thing that did for those that didn't make my final round was a lot of 20hz on mixes (ie. more than any other frequency). I'm listening with 2 subs but then used Digicheck to check as I'm one of the rubbisher mixers on here (i've finished 2nd last last month!).

Again i'm using Blink 182/Sum 41 as references. So maybe it's a time has moved on thing? And there should be more low end? And so my marking is flawed! Sorry!

Must admit i learn more from listening to the other mixes than anything i do myself - so i just wanted to ask if anyone else had noticed that?

I personally like a strong bass sound in a mix, that is what can drive the song for me....but it needs to be controlled and not muddying the mix. That is not always easy. I don't mean that the bass should overshadow the rest of the instruments, it is more that it should have an equal role in the mix and not be burried underneath the rest.

Listening to the mixes this month it was obvious to me that it was a difficult song to mix. Lots of mixes that just didn't sound right to me. But that is ok, we are all here to learn

[Punchipum]

Originally Posted by MisterGTR

Down to my final three and one thing that did for those that didn't make my final round was a lot of 20hz on mixes (ie. more than any other frequency). I'm listening with 2 subs but then used Digicheck to check as I'm one of the rubbisher mixers on here (i've finished 2nd last last month!).

Again i'm using Blink 182/Sum 41 as references. So maybe it's a time has moved on thing? And there should be more low end? And so my marking is flawed! Sorry!

Must admit i learn more from listening to the other mixes than anything i do myself - so i just wanted to ask if anyone else had noticed that?

Do you use RME DigiCheck? Do you find it better than other analizers? I have had an RME for a very short time and have not yet installed DigiCheck. It's worth it?

I took a lot of bass out of my mix at the last moment, because when I listened to it on my Technics speakers I could tell that there was a very dirty low end, but I think I went too far and ended up with little low end..

[Wallaby]

Yes Digicheck is worth to install ! Especially the new NG version (Next Generation) where the playback channels can be monitored, before only the input channels was.

[MisterGTR]

Originally Posted by Punchipum

Do you use RME DigiCheck? Do you find it better than other analizers? I have had an RME for a very short time and have not yet installed DigiCheck. It's worth it?

I took a lot of bass out of my mix at the last moment, because when I listened to it on my Technics speakers I could tell that there was a very dirty low end, but I think I went too far and ended up with little low end..

I'm not a pro and i use my PC to do my day job. So i can comment on it being the best. I use Span in Reaper (on the monitor fx) and to me that is better. But what i like about DigiCheck is that it's systemwide and i can start it with WindowsKey+2 while listening to music and have a quick look at what i'm listening to in Tidal or YT Music without having to route it back in via Reaper (easy via Totalmix).

I'm trying to get better by using references, mixing faster, doing less. Starting with volume, then panning, and only then Eq. And then trying to solve issues. So it's mostly ears. But i use DigiCheck or Span to check what i think i'm hearing.

Remember - i've never done well at this mixing contest. So my opinions are pretty worthless.

[darjama]

About 7 and half more hours to get your votes in!

[Eclipse]

Congratulations to winner Malandro!

ps. Thanks to all who left comment on my mix. Those are very valuable infos.

[MisterGTR]

Well done to Malandro. Great mix. Clear winner for me.

Thanks to everyone who voted and left feedback.

Happy to finish in the top 10. Now need to stay there!

Does anyone know which entry is Jon Tidey's? I just saw that he did it live on YT. And I thought it was good/better than mine.

[Broken Glass Audio]

Originally Posted by MisterGTR

Does anyone know which entry is Jon Tidey's? I just saw that he did it live on YT. And I thought it was good/better than mine.

I believe his is EpicSounds (Mix 1). Pretty sure that's his username around here.

[darjama]

Congrats Malandro, I'll be in touch shortly about picking next month's song.

Comments, and project files available at https://reamixed.com/results

[Eclipse]

I've just downloaded all of the sessions and starting analise the top ones. What a treasure chest.

[jax]

Good work Malandro!

[EpicSounds]

Thanks to those that voted and left comments. I was going to, but with 25 entries to critique that would take far longer than I actually spent on my mix.
The comments I got on my mix were contradicting, but first round mix notes often are


If anyone wants to see how I achieved a rank #13 mix, i have a video here

https://youtu.be/yosGQo0ZMsQ

[Punchipum]

Congratulations Malandro. I think it was the best mix of all. I went from being a winner to being among the last. I have messed with the drums, which I could never make sound good.

[WaveTrans]

Congratulations to the winner!

I thought samples were not allowed.
Would have saved me a lot of work.

[TomekSmilok]

Congrats Malandro ! congrats guys !

Thank you for voting, I didn't get the time as I was travelling. I could have do it bits by bits on the way but that huge list of 20+ mixes feels quite intimidating.

Wavetrans, that sampling trick doesn't really imply samples. This is the cool in the box thing you can do with Reasamplomatic, just choose a section of an already present audio track (in the project), and play it back with midi. Also you could have do it manually (as I already done this on many projects), copy pasting on every snare hits the best sounding snare hits. Time consuming, but not that much as it saves a lot of trials and error on making the original snare (kick) track sound nice.

Unless you like the challenge of doing something nice without repeating a sample. Personally, I am really addicted to this challenge, too much maybe ^^

[Malandro]

Originally Posted by Eclipse

I've just downloaded all of the sessions and starting analise the top ones. What a treasure chest.

Seriously! I've been following this mix competition and a few others for a while, and this competition has been the most valuable to me exactly because of that. While I've found some nice plugins and techniques by digging around in the project files here, one of the biggest things that's struck me about the project files for the best mixes I've heard here is how simple they tend to be: It seems like most of the time all you need is EQ, compression, some saturation, reverb, delay, and volume automation to get a great-sounding mix.

Daryl asked me if I could put a little post together about my approach to the track. I'm working on that now and hope to have it ready to post later today.

[Malandro]

Here is the post about my approach to mixing the track:

First, a little about my background. I'm a total amateur when it comes to mixing. I've been doing it for 6 years or so, but I've always just done it to get better at understanding sound and to make my own music sound decent. I've never had a paid mixing gig, so take any advice I give with a huge grain of salt.

Okay, so about this track: I started by listening to the song once through with all the faders up to get an idea for what I would be working with. I took note of how the song ebbed and flowed, and I noted which tracks sounded pretty good already (bass, vocals, and to some extent the guitars) and which tracks would need the most work (drums). I also noted that the performances - especially the drums - were a bit sloppy.

I started by soloing and editing the drum timings, using the built-in metronome. I'd never done this before, but I knew it would be important for this mix. I watched a few videos about drum editing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bCnk5kPkKA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0yOsMd2Eu4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIw86ggPISk

and then I got to work.

The ideas from the videos worked well for the snare, toms, and overheads, but I had some trouble getting the kick track to split and quantize properly. More on that in a moment...

Next I worked on mixing the drums. It's important to know how the mics for a drum kit fit together to get a good overall sound. If you struggle with mixing drums (like I did for many years), see if you can find some youtube videos where a mixer solos each drum mic in a finished mix. You might be surprised by what you hear. For this mix, I took a standard approach, using the overheads as cymbal mics, using the shell (kick, snare, and tom) mics to get the attack of the shell drums, and using the room mic to get most of the sustain and body of the shell drums. I also added a stereo reverb to simulate a stereo drum room track, since the supplied room track was mono.

Eventually I realized that I couldn't get a good drum mix with the tracks as supplied. My solution was to "sample" the supplied multitracks. I took the best snare, tom, and kick hits I could find in the track and loaded them into the built-in sampler. (If you pull up the RS5K instances in my project and zoom out on the waveforms, you'll see how I did this within the bounds of the contest rules.) I used the best snare hit to layer with the supplied snare track, and I did a complete replacement of the kick and tom tracks. You can see in my project on the kick track a bypassed "JS: Audio To MIDI Drum Trigger" plugin. I wanted to layer my sample with the kick track, but as I mentioned earlier, I couldn't get the supplied kick track to quantize properly (I think it's because the waveform for each kick hit blooms in a strange way, confusing the built-in transient detection algorithm), so I abandoned that idea in favor of complete kick replacement. I recreated the kick and tom tracks with midi to trigger the samples. By the way, the reason I did tom replacement was because of all the cymbal bleed in the supplied tom tracks. I wanted clean close mics with minimal cymbal bleed to work with. I also replaced a few of the weaker cymbal hits with stronger hits from elsewhere in the song, just by cutting and pasting the overhead waveform.

Once I had all these edits in place, I mixed the drums normally and was able to get a drum mix I was happy with.

Next I seasoned the bass (pretty easy - split it into clean low end and amped high end) and lead vocal (also pretty easy - just compress the snot out of it with the Tukan 76B, EQ it with a low cut and hi shelf, and give it a little delay - this pretty much just always works on vocals) and mixed these with the drums. For level setting, mostly I worked in mono, at low volumes, with an EQ on my monitor FX cutting out <100 and >8k to let me focus on the midrange.

From there it was just a matter of fitting the guitars and backing vocals in with everything else, doing some sweetening on the master bus, and doing some automation (mainly to keep the vocals clear above everything else and to emphasize an instrument part here and there throughout the song). I also mixed the parallel drum track and snare plate into the whole mix, and did a few timing edits on the vocals and the guitars.

I'll admit I spent way too long messing with the guitars, as you can probably tell from all the EQ on them. I'm sure I could have gotten just as good of a result with way less work, but I like to tinker and I struggle with distorted guitars. They're essentially just noise in the high end, and how are you supposed to mix noise into your project in a way that sounds good? That's the struggle. I found with these guitars that an EQ band at 3500 was an "aggression" control and almost even a volume control for them, and for me that ended up being the biggest thing that helped me place them in the mix.

All in all this took about 4 days: 2 evenings for drum edits and 2 evenings for the rest of the mix. I then finalized my mix over the course of the next week by listening to it with fresh ears each day on different systems (including my phone and some $30 computer speakers) and making small tweaks to fix the problems I would hear.

I'm happy to answer any questions y'all might have about the mix.

---------------------

Also, here's some unsolicited mixing advice:

1) Reference! There were a number of mixes this month that were really far off in terms of overall frequency balance, amount of reverb, amount of distortion/saturation, and/or amount of compression. Use reference mixes to calibrate your ears before mixing and to check yourself while mixing. Don't try to match a reference mix while mixing (although trying to do that is a good exercise in sound design). Rather, have reference mixes that establish the bounds of what's reasonable. For instance, here's how I check the bass level of my mix: I have two references that I like the sound of. One of them is really light on the bass, and the other is really bass-heavy. If I think my overall mix sounds good and the bass level of my mix is between the bass levels of my references, then my bass level is probably fine.

2) See if you can find isolated stems for your favorite songs on YouTube. While you shouldn't mix in solo (most of the time), it's enlightening to hear several examples of how stems can fit together to form a professional mix.

3) If you struggle with EQ, check out Hardcore Music Studio on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@hardcoremusicstudio/videos), especially his "Magic Frequences" series. Those videos won't give you everything you need, but they'll take you a long way.

[Punchipum]

Originally Posted by Malandro

I have two references that I like the sound of. One of them is really light on the bass, and the other is really bass-heavy. If I think my overall mix sounds good and the bass level of my mix is between the bass levels of my references, then my bass level is probably fine.

Thanks for the description of your approuch. I think as I said from the beginning, in this particular song the sound of the drums was key for the song to sound good, and you have done it masterfully. Good job!

Could you say which are those two references you use?

[Wallaby]

June has started with a surprise ! Malandro, what have you done ?! That's outstanding !
i'm speechless, where will this go ?
Can't wait for listening the results !

[WaveTrans]

Thanks, (obviously) didn´t know that.
Always amazing what Reaper can do.

Originally Posted by TomekSmilok

Congrats Malandro ! congrats guys !

Thank you for voting, I didn't get the time as I was travelling. I could have do it bits by bits on the way but that huge list of 20+ mixes feels quite intimidating.

Wavetrans, that sampling trick doesn't really imply samples. This is the cool in the box thing you can do with Reasamplomatic, just choose a section of an already present audio track (in the project), and play it back with midi. Also you could have do it manually (as I already done this on many projects), copy pasting on every snare hits the best sounding snare hits. Time consuming, but not that much as it saves a lot of trials and error on making the original snare (kick) track sound nice.

Unless you like the challenge of doing something nice without repeating a sample. Personally, I am really addicted to this challenge, too much maybe ^^

[Tesgin]

Originally Posted by Malandro

Here is the post about my approach to mixing the track ...

Wow, thanks for this, Malandro.

Yeah, I was about to upload my mix and didn't realize until an hour before the deadline that samples weren't allowed. Had to go back to the original kick and snare and it was 2 am. Couldn't pull it off.

Love what you did here. Your mix was solid. I listened several times and couldn't figure out how you got the drums to sound so good. Wow.

So is there a thread somewhere where people share their project files? Would love to look at what you - and others - did. Would be a great learning exercise.

[Malandro]

Originally Posted by Tesgin

Wow, thanks for this, Malandro.

Yeah, I was about to upload my mix and didn't realize until an hour before the deadline that samples weren't allowed. Had to go back to the original kick and snare and it was 2 am. Couldn't pull it off.

Love what you did here. Your mix was solid. I listened several times and couldn't figure out how you got the drums to sound so good. Wow.

So is there a thread somewhere where people share their project files? Would love to look at what you - and others - did. Would be a great learning exercise.

All the project files are available here:

https://reamixed.com/results

Scroll down to the "Download All Project Files" button.

Could you say which are those two references you use?

Sorry for the delayed response. I thought I'd responded to this earlier. I could, but it was just an example and I think it defeats the purpose. The idea is for you to have reference songs that you personally know well, and to have different references for different aspects of the mix. I have references for bass amount, different references for reverb levels, different references for compression, etc. It helps to have genre-appropriate references too, and I got lucky with the song choice this month since this is the type of music (broadly speaking) that I have the most experience with.

[Tesgin]

Originally Posted by Malandro

All the project files are available here:

https://reamixed.com/results

Scroll down to the "Download All Project Files" button.

Thnx for this. I didn't see it there. Much appreciated.

So ...

I'm looking at your project and there are three plugins that are missing in my installation:

JS: Tukan/Limiter 3 (Tukan)
JS: Tukan/Deesser (Tukan)
JS: Hard Clipper With Oscilloscope

I'm not finding any of these in Reapack. Other Tukan ones are there but not these two. And the hard clipper?

Where would I d/l those from?

[Malandro]

Originally Posted by Tesgin

Thnx for this. I didn't see it there. Much appreciated.

So ...

I'm looking at your project and there are three plugins that are missing in my installation:

JS: Tukan/Limiter 3 (Tukan)
JS: Tukan/Deesser (Tukan)
JS: Hard Clipper With Oscilloscope

I'm not finding any of these in Reapack. Other Tukan ones are there but not these two. And the hard clipper?

Where would I d/l those from?

Huh, normally the download would include a JSFX folder with those sorts of things in it. Maybe darjama forgot to include it this month?

Anyway, the Tukan Limiter 3 and Deesser are part of the Tukan "BusTools" and "Compressor 2" installations on ReaPack. The Hard Clipper is here: https://stash.reaper.fm/v/45463/Hard...20Oscilloscope

[Tesgin]

Originally Posted by Malandro

Here is the post about my approach to mixing the track ...

Originally Posted by Malandro

All the project files are available here:

https://reamixed.com/results

Scroll down to the "Download All Project Files" button.

Malandro, THANK YOU for your notes. I've been studying your project files. Wow. Learning tons. I had no idea you could use ReaSamplomatic that way. Opening new doors for me!

I do have a question, just curious: how did you create your MIDI tracks for the drum and toms? It's not clear from your project files, but I'm guessing you used something like JS: Audio to MIDI Drum Trigger and then printed the file to MIDI?

I was amazed at how you nailed that snare. Never would've figured that out on my own. Thanks again so much for your explanation.

[Malandro]

Originally Posted by Tesgin

I do have a question, just curious: how did you create your MIDI tracks for the drum and toms? It's not clear from your project files, but I'm guessing you used something like JS: Audio to MIDI Drum Trigger and then printed the file to MIDI?

Yes, exactly. (I think the track option was something like "record output: MIDI".)

That took care of most of the song. Then I transcribed the parts that didn't quite come out correctly that way by ear.

[bitgo.space]

Several times, I think in two competitions, we heard a project that sounded intentionally destroyed... (mistakes sound different from intentional destruction). I mean a pretty well-balanced mix, with some very incomprehensible effects in front of it. Anyone noticed that too? I'm interested in the story behind it, but I haven't made a note of whose project it was.

[Punchipum]

Originally Posted by bitgo.space

Several times, I think in two competitions, we heard a project that sounded intentionally destroyed... (mistakes sound different from intentional destruction). I mean a pretty well-balanced mix, with some very incomprehensible effects in front of it. Anyone noticed that too? I'm interested in the story behind it, but I haven't made a note of whose project it was.

I always think it must be the monitoring system.