AEA R88, AEA R84, T.Bone RM700, Oktava ML53, GAP R1mkII, NADY RSM-2 on overhead, kick and room.

A small test on panning and adding interest to a mix.

Single

Alexxx - Mix Challenge HOT 2012

Blumlein-rb100-hpf

Blumlein-rb100

Ms-rb100-hpf

Ms-rb100

Testmix

Nympho (original mix by Geoff)

Punkmix (Jeddr Mix)

First off, I've listened to the existing recording of the band. They have a rather heavy sound on that recording, of which I'm not sure it fits the bands musical style best. But, since they are in control, I've tried to respect their choice for a rock sound, but I've made it a bit softer never the less. That's what we call a compromise, right? 

Only a few tracks needed some corrective editing to remove hiss, noise and even the public at the end. Nothing fancy, just making it sound more like a record.

Anyway, I haven't been using that much EQ on the individual tracks. I grouped the main instruments, like "drums", "Bass",... and EQ'd those as groups. I did this because of the bleed, although not so excessive, and it kept the natural sound that way. But it was high-pass and low-pass filtering for the most part, with just some bandfiltering where needed.

I made the guitars sound "stereo" by adding a delay via a buss to the opposite panned buss. I really don't like doing this, I prefer double tracking the guitars, but I had to do it with the tracks given. This makes them sound a little more distant, due to phase relations. But I think it's ok, because they didn't need to be very upfront in the mix. 

After that, I moved on to sidechaining the lot, to gain some power and impact. Drums, guitars, bass (with added harmonics, thanks to the standard Avid distortion plugin) and vocals. For the sidechained vocal track, I boosted the high a lot, to gain some sparkle in the track without making it to bright. Because I really don't like overly bright mixes at all. 

I didn't use any limiting at the masterbuss, so my mix is one of the quieter mixes submited so far. I leave "mastering" to dedicated engineers anyway. So I prefered no to ruin my mix with tools I don't really master.

The gear used:
- Pro Tools 9
- My ears and musical taste
- Stock Avid Plugins, Some waves Renaissance, IK Multimedia
- ADAM A5x Monitors
- Command8 for automation
- Steinberg MR816x interface

Alex Dierickx

Popular tracks