C U Next Time - Blackcapaudio mix

[Blackcapaudio]

Hey all, wanted to tackle this one for fun and it turned out to be a real headscratcher. 

Keeping the guitars powerful but out of the way of the vocal is such a balancing act and I found I got lost quite a bit while working on this, so I'm posting here for posterity and I may revisit at some point down the line.

Anyway I obviously had a nose at the infamous version posted in this forum as a reference but I found that I couldn't get it up to that loudness and I don't have much in the way of samples to augment the drums (used a couple of stock one shots from Logic, but thinking I need to step my game up and get a good library together).

Anyways hope everybody's good and having fun with this one. Gonna take a break from the track for a few days and then pop in and see what everybody else has been doing to this track -  peace!

UPDATE:

After listening to a few other mixes in here I felt inspired to go back and make the guitars a little more aggressive and everything a fraction louder for the hell of it. Leaning into the punch of the drums and the vocal here to make up for some of the deficiencies in the tracks. Thanks y'all!

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THIRD UPDATE: (or is it fourth?)

The remake

Decided to redo this one from scratch to see if I could get it more in line with commercial releases - I've come to realize my original was overhyped in some areas in a lot of ways and I'm trying to unlearn bad habits I've developed that I can hear now. This one I actually tried to be more in line with a CLA mix, used a lot of early-00's pop punk/rock as reference. Thanks!

[latanielvss.]

Hey , your mix sounds way better than the so called CLA mix. The vocal is a bit dark but other than that and the machine gun snare , this mix is banging. Good Job.

[mikej]

Hi!

Yes, I agree this is a nice mix. I recall this one is quite challenging. Mixing rock is also really difficult. I think you might be able to fix that machine gun snare by just changing the volume of each snare hit a bit.

If you wish to pursue getting a loud mix (6-7 LUFS seems to be the ballpark for loud punk/rock mixes) it is more about getting the right volume balance between the instruments to give the impression of loudness, as well as getting the overall frequency balance and compression right - so nothing is poking out too much when it hits the limiter.

It's worth demoing different limiters too, as some handle being pushed far better than others. I find subjectively 'better' mixes take being pushed easier, with less bad side effects.

Speaking from experience It takes a lot of hard work, trial and error experimentation, and also a lot of failures and frustration. Hard to describe but loud mixes kind of just happen, if you start from the outset with that goal in mind.

(As an aside, I thought I'd done a half decent mix of this a while back, but I just checked and it's truly terrible! Far too much low end on the kick for a start).

I'm still very much working at this, but a couple of more recent (and hopefully subjectively a whole lot better), loud mixes I did were House Of Bedlam - Eventide, and The Laminar Flow - Headspace. It might be worth having a try at those if you wanted a couple of good tracks to practice mixing loud with.

This may or may not be of any use, but thought I'd share my thoughts anyway, in case it might help.

Anyway, keep at it as I feel you are probably further ahead with this than you think.

Cheers!

[mikej]

Just found that 'CLA' mix. So whilst it is 5.1 LUFS which is insanely loud - it does actually go over 0 by 2db true peak.

Cheers.

[Blackcapaudio]

Hey Mike and Latanielvss. - thanks for the encouragement! This is a hard mix to get right as there's a lot going on almost all of the time in the midrange, however it is fun to listen to 

I'm not normally one for chasing loudness but I felt this one warranted some slamming to give it the energy it deserves. That's actually unholy loud on the CLA mix though and I don't think I'd feel comfy even attempting to hit -5LUFs - but people do and successfully sometimes too so who am I to talk haha!

I only have a couple of limiters to hand (Logic stock and Waves L1+2) but I did notice I bounced that last one with the output ceiling still left at -1.5, so there's a whole potential db of volume to claw back right there too.

Anyways thanks for the encouragement again, it's nice to hear when you're getting somewhere - going to listen to both y'alls mixes and post on your threads when I get back from work this evening and take some notes and maybe give this one another pop. 

Thanks!

[Roy]

Hey , your mix sounds way better than the so called CLA mix. The vocal is a bit dark but other than that and the machine gun snare , this mix is banging. Good Job.

There's also no way that was a CLA mix. It was ok but not great, overly loud and the text was mostly just spouting stuff from a Sound on Sound article from almost a decade earlier.

[Blackcapaudio]

Updated version, wanted to tackle a couple of oldies while learning a new room - not a huge change, just a little more polish