Pedaling Prince Mix: Believe - I Am Cassettes

[Pedaling Prince]

After completing this mix, I decided to check out the winning mixes for the Box Digital Labs contest. After doing so, I wrote them the following letter:

This is in reference to the following contest:

http://www.bozdigitallabs.com/mixing-contest/

Yes I know I missed the contest big time. I was preparing to tavel when I found out about it and I just didn’t have time. But the song was so gorgeous that I felt I had to do a mix of it for my own use. Recently, I found the time to take a shot at it. The tracks had some serious issues but I was able to iron them out sufficiently to get a final mix I was reasonably happy with.

After I finished, I decided to poke my head in and see what the winning mix sounded like; I found the winners here:

http://www.bozdigitallabs.com/

I was expecting the winner to be better than mine, or at least an even match.

Not even close.

I have to be honest here. I am thoroughly puzzled as to how Marin Lashev’s mix could possibly be the winning one.

I liked the reverb effect he put on the vocals but it was a wee bit overdone. The snare drum wasn’t loud enough; it didn’t punch through the way it should. The kick drum, by contrast, was way overdone; way too much punch for a song like this. Appropriate for dance and hip-hop, maybe, but not an emotionally charged power ballad. But the biggest gripe I had was the crescendo at the end. No instrument definition at all. I couldn’t distinguish the flute or the piano in there at all and the lead guitar was totally swamped by a wall of sound. I mean I was literally, “What the f*BEEP*?” when I heard that, particularly since this was the winning mix. Your sample mix was better overall; at least the kick was properly balanced but it still suffered from the lack of definition among the instruments during the crescendo.

The second place mix by Henrik Hjortnaes was actually rather interesting; he made considerable changes to the arrangement which, I felt, worked well and the instruments he kept in the arrangement had decent definition. The latter was hard to judge, however, because he hammered the whole thing flat with master buss compression (an unfortunately common practice nowadays that crushes the dynamics, and life, out of music). I wish I could hear his mix raw without the “mastering” treatment; I bet it’d blow Mr. Lashev’s mix completely out of the water. But the “mastering” treatment totally ruined it.

Now Giuseppe Novella’s third place mix is interesting. Of the three, it’s the only one to accomplish decent instrument definition, and in a mix this dense that’s hard to do (it took me many, many hours of work to get that), and I just love the sound he got out of that snare drum. It’s still a little narrow on dynamic range, though, which is interesting since the description of it on SoundCloud says it’s “without mastering.” How in the hell do you end up with a mix with an RMS at -10 without “mastering?” There’s clearly a lot of compression going on here, and that’s usually a side effect of “mastering.”

I can’t judge these three mixes against all the others entered into the contest of course, but of these three I think Mr. Novella’s mix was the one that deserved first prize.

I’m rather dismayed that none of the three mixes here are any more dynamic than the average commercial mix. I flatly refuse to use compression on a finished mix; I use it only on individual tracks as necessary, and then as sparingly as possible. I believe that the dynamics of the music should stand on their own, that the variations in volume and crest factor all contribute to giving the music room to breathe and sound natural and open.

On a technical level, I have no doubt that my mix is better than any of the three prize winners; it has a nice smooth dynamic sound while maintaining definition among the different instruments in the mix. Having grown up on a crystal clean sound and amazing dynamic range of CDs mastered in the 80s, that is the sound I strive for in my work. I personally don’t believe that this overcompressed mush coming out of most studios today is “good sound.” You did state in the contest rules that loudness wasn’t, and shouldn’t be, the goal of the mix. This is another reason the choice of three finalists surprises me as none of these three mixes have natural dynamics; all three have clearly been given some kind of limiting or compression treatment.

I wish I had’ve been able to get my mix into the contest on time. I can’t help but wonder how it would have stood up against the other entries.

If you’re curious to hear my mix, let me know; I’ll be happy to send it to you, and I welcome any thoughts on it, good or bad. Regardless, though, I felt I had to say something. Yes, music is a very subjective thing but still, from my perspective, I just can’t understand how Marin Lashev’s mix is a winning mix.

Thank you for your time.

If anyone has any thoughts on my mix (attached here) or on my letter above, please feel free to comment.