Okay, so at long last I've got a mix worthy of posting. I probably should wait until tomorrow and listen to it with fresh ears first but I've been chattering about my progress in so many other threds, I figured I owed you lot. 
If you listen through monitors, I also suggest a pass through headphones to catch some of the subtleties as well as the climax at the end.
About this mix:
First, yes, I put a limiter on the master bus but only to get the audio into a decent range (avg digital peak -6 dB from like -20 dB). I did not squash it. The peak limiter triggered only like 6-8 times during the entire mix.
Second, I had just finished reading Mike's book before I started this and attempted to apply some of the lessons I had learned. I didn't do the assignments from the book, intending to come back to them later as an excuse to review. Oh, that brings up a question... Mike, just what have you got against ole Nod's ties? I mean, seriously, would you rather have Dave's wardrobe?
This was easily the hardest mix I've done here and I felt myself losing control of it on a few different occassions which necessitated stopping for the day. The difficulty of this is evidenced by Mike's little contest. The fact that he couldn't get it to fairly quickly settle enough for a demo should be the biggest indication that it will take time and effort. There were many challenges here. The biggest one being the all out war for dominance at ~2k. It was NOT a polite debate but a pitched battle. I hope I was able to negotiate a suitable peace...
This was a mic demo so there were lots of extra tracks. I chose to dump some of the instrument tracks but retained all of the vocals since I thought it presented interesting opportunities for orchestration. I also found myself quite liking the sound of the 4047 although it is brighter than I expected. I'm not normally a fan of ribbons but the 4080 also didn't fare that badly though it requires some EQ to add back in more of the high end here.
When all was said and done, I didn't feel it necessary to add any effects other than reverb/delay but did do a decent amount of panning automation.
Challenges:
As noted, everything wants to have control over a pretty narrow band. As if that weren't bad enough, you had to pay attention to the ~500hz region as well because of the bass guitar, the tone on the electric, the piano, and that kick drum, as well as some undertones from the vocals.
It took me nearly two weeks of working through Melodyne to complete the vocal enhancements. (That's where I started before even trying to clean the other tracks.) I did not try to get them perfect since I was already hearing more digital artifacts than comfortable, just tried to get them to blend better without poking you in the face.
There was what sounds like comb filtering going on in the piano mics. Probably a placement problem. I couldn't get rid of it but after fiddling with a delay insert to dial it in, I pushed the lower mics back by about 1.1ms and that pushed the phasing problems into the lower regions where they were less noticable.
There was some cleaning and comping done before these tracks were posted and it appears that it was rushed since there are a couple of bad fades, I cauight one bad punch, and even a chop or two.
The bass guitar was recorded with a mic at an amp cabinet. (You'd expect that in a mic demo.) It is unfortunate there was not a DI also supplied since it appears that the bass player had the gain turned up right at the edge of overdriving his preamp and that meant particulary hard struk notes or less than exact string changes distorted the sound of the guitar. This also took away from us most of the transients from his playing since the amp was at its limits and made it hard to manage the part. I finally settled on an expander followed by peak compression to try to bring back some of the attack and then shelved off most of the low end of the guitar to get rid of more of the sustain.
Far and away, the biggest problem with this mix was handling the vocals. It might have been easier to deal with if there were multiple vocalists here since the different timbre of their voices would have made it easier to separate them one from the other. The more tracks you add in, the wider your stereo panning, and the more reverb/delay you apply, the less they want to settle into the mix and the more it just becomes a cacophony of sound. These tracks all required fairly hefty compression and lots of EQ both on the individual tracks as well as on the group faders to deal with the buildup. Because of timing differences, compression had to be on each individual track to avoid being audible so ther were LOTS of plugins active. When all was said and done, I ended up with 15 vocal tracks feeding four group faders and then into a VOX submaster with a deesser on it tuned to a 1.9k band to try to lessen some of the bruises from getting punched in the face repeatedly... Good times...
This is also the first mix I've done where there were enough tracks that I had to color code them in order to keep track rather than being able to glance at labels. (50 some tracks and aux/group faders A-S.) I spent much of my time wishing I could get everything to display at the same time!
Anyway, enough rambling. I hope this is an acceptable mix to you all. I tried my darndest to compensate for the various problems but there are still areas I could probably improve. Comments and suggestions are very welcome!
[edit: updated the file about an hour after I posted it to add some slight EQ/level adjustments and timing on one vocal entrance.]
If you listen through monitors, I also suggest a pass through headphones to catch some of the subtleties as well as the climax at the end.
About this mix:
First, yes, I put a limiter on the master bus but only to get the audio into a decent range (avg digital peak -6 dB from like -20 dB). I did not squash it. The peak limiter triggered only like 6-8 times during the entire mix.
Second, I had just finished reading Mike's book before I started this and attempted to apply some of the lessons I had learned. I didn't do the assignments from the book, intending to come back to them later as an excuse to review. Oh, that brings up a question... Mike, just what have you got against ole Nod's ties? I mean, seriously, would you rather have Dave's wardrobe?
This was easily the hardest mix I've done here and I felt myself losing control of it on a few different occassions which necessitated stopping for the day. The difficulty of this is evidenced by Mike's little contest. The fact that he couldn't get it to fairly quickly settle enough for a demo should be the biggest indication that it will take time and effort. There were many challenges here. The biggest one being the all out war for dominance at ~2k. It was NOT a polite debate but a pitched battle. I hope I was able to negotiate a suitable peace...
This was a mic demo so there were lots of extra tracks. I chose to dump some of the instrument tracks but retained all of the vocals since I thought it presented interesting opportunities for orchestration. I also found myself quite liking the sound of the 4047 although it is brighter than I expected. I'm not normally a fan of ribbons but the 4080 also didn't fare that badly though it requires some EQ to add back in more of the high end here.
When all was said and done, I didn't feel it necessary to add any effects other than reverb/delay but did do a decent amount of panning automation.
Challenges:
As noted, everything wants to have control over a pretty narrow band. As if that weren't bad enough, you had to pay attention to the ~500hz region as well because of the bass guitar, the tone on the electric, the piano, and that kick drum, as well as some undertones from the vocals.
It took me nearly two weeks of working through Melodyne to complete the vocal enhancements. (That's where I started before even trying to clean the other tracks.) I did not try to get them perfect since I was already hearing more digital artifacts than comfortable, just tried to get them to blend better without poking you in the face.
There was what sounds like comb filtering going on in the piano mics. Probably a placement problem. I couldn't get rid of it but after fiddling with a delay insert to dial it in, I pushed the lower mics back by about 1.1ms and that pushed the phasing problems into the lower regions where they were less noticable.
There was some cleaning and comping done before these tracks were posted and it appears that it was rushed since there are a couple of bad fades, I cauight one bad punch, and even a chop or two.
The bass guitar was recorded with a mic at an amp cabinet. (You'd expect that in a mic demo.) It is unfortunate there was not a DI also supplied since it appears that the bass player had the gain turned up right at the edge of overdriving his preamp and that meant particulary hard struk notes or less than exact string changes distorted the sound of the guitar. This also took away from us most of the transients from his playing since the amp was at its limits and made it hard to manage the part. I finally settled on an expander followed by peak compression to try to bring back some of the attack and then shelved off most of the low end of the guitar to get rid of more of the sustain.
Far and away, the biggest problem with this mix was handling the vocals. It might have been easier to deal with if there were multiple vocalists here since the different timbre of their voices would have made it easier to separate them one from the other. The more tracks you add in, the wider your stereo panning, and the more reverb/delay you apply, the less they want to settle into the mix and the more it just becomes a cacophony of sound. These tracks all required fairly hefty compression and lots of EQ both on the individual tracks as well as on the group faders to deal with the buildup. Because of timing differences, compression had to be on each individual track to avoid being audible so ther were LOTS of plugins active. When all was said and done, I ended up with 15 vocal tracks feeding four group faders and then into a VOX submaster with a deesser on it tuned to a 1.9k band to try to lessen some of the bruises from getting punched in the face repeatedly... Good times...
This is also the first mix I've done where there were enough tracks that I had to color code them in order to keep track rather than being able to glance at labels. (50 some tracks and aux/group faders A-S.) I spent much of my time wishing I could get everything to display at the same time!
Anyway, enough rambling. I hope this is an acceptable mix to you all. I tried my darndest to compensate for the various problems but there are still areas I could probably improve. Comments and suggestions are very welcome!
[edit: updated the file about an hour after I posted it to add some slight EQ/level adjustments and timing on one vocal entrance.]
Old West Audio