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Ubiq... Ubi.... Ubiquo...thing. (I LOVE this track, it was an honour to mix!)
#1
Big Grin

I really gave the best I got with this one, because I instantly fell in love with it once I had done some initial gain staging... I'm not too familiar with how Minimal Techno is "supposed" to sound, but I know how it feels when the walls are shaking cause my practise room neighbours used to have minimal parties every few weeks some years ago, which were famous for being obscenely loud and excessive Cool

I made "minimal" the main priority, my main focus was to keep all the precious dynamics and timbres intact and to alter them beautiful waves as little as possible...
Well I ended up doing quite a lot in the end:
carefully saturating the bass and kick, subtracting a lot of the 4k range out of the cymbals, then distorting them heavily, then brightening them again, taming the low mid range and rumbly basses of the "glass drums" as I called them, with some gentle low shelves and dynamic EQ, using some transient shapers and soft-clipped parallel compression along the way to make both the transients and whistly ambience shine, and I placed some gentle compression, limiting and soft clipping here and there to make the whole thing a little more consistent without squashing it to death (hope I didnt squash it to death Big Grin)
The only effect I used was a reverb on the (heavily clipped) claps, which ended up being kinda loud when they first enter the stage, I should have done some automation there maybe...
Last step was a subtle sidechain compressor on the bass, ducking it about 3db when the kick hits, and that was the mix.
Mastering was easier than I expected. Since I deliberately left the dynamics of the synths and hats mostly alone I feared that the final mix would be all over the place, but astonishingly it wasnt, all I had to do is use another dynamic EQ to tame the 100hz range another 2-3 db, put a brickwall limiter on the whole thing (ceiling is at -1db to be safe for mp3 conversion) and then put a soft clipper (clipping less than 2db) BEFORE the limiter just to tidy up the transients' peaks before losing them totally in the limiting process... (a trick that I picked up from Mixbus TV on youtube, just like the trick to hide compression, limiting and gentle soft clipping in the mix instead of throwing them all on the master bus afterwards, big shoutout to him, he's incredible!)

IMO it worked out incredibly well and I'm really happy with the result, but I could be totally wrong about that because I'm limited to monitoring everything on my home stereo, computer speakers and cheap headphones (and I know that my room is extremely bad at handling low frequencies), and also I have little experience in mixing anything, least of all EDM and hip hop, so I cant really judge weither the balance between low and high frequency content is okay, weither bass and kick work well together and simply weither it feels good and sounds enjoyable and powerful anywhere else than in my room...

That's where you come in Wink I'd love some feedback, positive and negative!
Cheers from germany Smile


.mp3    Albert Kader Ubiquitous Mix Master.mp3 --  (Download: 12.52 MB)


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Ubiq... Ubi.... Ubiquo...thing. (I LOVE this track, it was an honour to mix!) - by Fleisch Berg - 17-10-2017, 12:39 PM