Howlin

[Olli H]

I'm actually a little embarrassed how proud I am of this

With quick listen I think your version is absolutely coherent now with clear overall vision behind. Spatial ideas blend nicely together, balances feel good, individual intstrument sounds interact nicely, separate sounds create one big sound etc.

Now I can agree with you: this IS one of your best mixes. You shouldn't be embarrassed at all, only proud.

[The_Metallurgist]

this multi' was for a mixing competition, and created by Fab Dupont. if you've had the chance to explore some of his demonstrations and interviews, you'd soon notice the guy has a sense of humour? one needs to be thoughtful of the "traps" inherent in the material, so the "immediate and obvious losers" can be quickly weeded out with minimal effort and impact on staff resources. the dog FX track was clearly one of those traps? so...... where, and indeed, what are the other traps? i think one of the biggies is the track length and the endless, useless mind numbing monotony of the outro. imagine not even having to play a submission, but merely look at the file size...even the secretary out on Reception could do that bit...and hit the trash button. i bet that would clean out 98 percent of applicants!

so, Fab is clearly challenging the entrant's ability to be in tune with the material and show some reasonable mixing competences worthy of winning a bundle of Sonnox gear. i think the track length was the major filter which, if attended to, would lead on to the next phase in the elimination process...looking out for the dogFX track might be one of those...and so on and so forth.

we could debate whether the track length is a legitimate mixing decision and something necessary to fix. let's debate it....

know any radio's that will spare over a full minute of broadcast time looping an outro? do you know anyone who finds the outro especially appealing and worthy of all that space on a CD? know any DJ's in clubs that would run the outro to it's full conclusion? was it really worth running the full time merely to hear a Ukelele for one bar right at the end?

moving on...there's the guitar during the intro which comes in at around 0:20. it's bone dry and so up-front it's like right in your face. he's testing our ability to place an instrument in the depth field (assuming, that is, the entrant even notices the issue!). the vocal too, is super close and needs pushing back, or does it? we could also question the vocal's sonic quality and it's relevance in the song; it appears contrary to the standard tracking sonic stamp at 3:00. should it be fixed? i personally think it's decisions like these that sorts real mixes from the general masses and mixing goes wayyyyy beyond simply grabbing hold of the tracking and pushing some EQ about. it's surprising how many people in the forum find it immensely difficult to bring themselves to muting an instrument, for example, even though it's been looping for half an hour and the song isn't even that length! indeed, it can blaze its way though verses and choruses with endless repetitive monotony, but so long as it's EQ'd and we can hear it properly and is appropriately positioned in the stereo domain, every one here is happy and praiseworthy! but i'm not everyone

it's also pretty common these days owing to the ease and simplicity in recording something almost at will, is to have more material than we need at the mixing stage. a musician will generally run some ideas at recording, and try out sudden arrangement alterations for consideration and decision making during mixing. if we don't have the luxury of speaking to the client (as in this case....for a competition....and a really basic brief), we have to make those "tasteful" decisions and be prepared to ditch material that is "surplus to requirements". i suspect Fab would be looking out for those kind of decisions somewhere in the vetting process?

this isn't a straight forward mix by half, because of all the intentional traps and hurdles and Fab Dupont idiosyncrasies. but if we simply grab hold of it and load it up in the DAW and do rudimentary mixing tasks like a robot, it's going to come out overly busy, overly long and overly monotonous through verses, choruses, bridges etc etc. And it won't deliver emotional synergy.

i'll flag the piano at the intro....panned left....and that REALLY irritating synth part screaming all over it like a rampant virus which you made the executive decision to spread WIDE across the stereo width in all it's glory: does the synth fit the scene of a love song? and is it good to have a piano panned left (with a minimal contribution in the right channel), when pianos generally fill up the whole room with sound? shouldn't the piano be the main emotional driver here? the intro is crucial in setting the scene and the vibe for the whole song, and it needs to be sonically engaging so an audience is invited to hang around to listen to the rest of it......EQ, compression, balance is all totally irrelevant if the context of the material is wrong or contradictory. we need to make it right and engaging, and all this technical stuff is only a tool with which to help make it so - importantly, it's not a solution in it's own right. the synth virus had me running for the escape hatch. there are millions of technically competent mixes out there in the world, but all too few engage and that's why the majority of CD's sell less than 100 units (and then blame piracy for their failings!).

great effort though and it shows a summary of progress - on a technical level. but sometimes i think you are way too technical for your own good, and you completely miss the big picture. so, with this in mind, what sort of changes would you facilitate in V2, assuming on reflection that you concur of course?

while this project is a little bit different to the normal mult's in the library, the kind of thinking and approach we take should be no different regardless of whether it formed the basis for a competition or not. but the fact that it was a competition should have got you thinking on a broader level....and you should have been looking for trouble instead of simply mixing it?

hope this helps give an alternative, somewhat reflective approach and fresh perspective to the norm, which you can take with you to other projects.

laters..
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[pauli]

This is the sort of critique from which I've always learned the most. Thanks for listening and laying out my opportunities. I agree with your criticisms and was in fact aware of some (but not all) of the shortcomings you've mentioned. So here I go :

this multi' was for a mixing competition, and created by Fab Dupont. if you've had the chance to explore some of his demonstrations and interviews, you'd soon notice the guy has a sense of humour...

I wondered about the silly dog track, honestly, and I think I read somewhere the entire song may have been a bit of a joke, as it's kinda silly. But I enjoyed it and the recordings were very nice to work with. Although that dog whistle very legitimately upset Patches, I laughed like an idiot when I realized what was happening. ELIMINATED, with extreme prejudice.

we could debate whether the track length is a legitimate mixing decision and something necessary to fix. let's debate it....

This will be a recurring thread in our conversations about the shortcomings: I downloaded and mixed this song to challenge myself. 90 tracks is a much larger project than I've EVER attempted, although there are more realistically 60 because around 30 of the tracks as presented are divided stereo pairs for some goofy reason. Perhaps a challenge/joke from Fab?

At any rate, it's very easy to lose sight of the big picture on a track like this, and it's clear that I did here. Sometimes after exhausting myself having balanced each section individually, I fail to consider things like overall track length, or the target audience. This is easy to correct, and version 3 will reflect further consideration on this point.

moving on...there's the guitar during the intro which comes in at around 0:20. it's bone dry and so up-front it's like right in your face. he's testing our ability to place an instrument in the depth field (assuming, that is, the entrant even notices the issue!). the vocal too, is super close and needs pushing back, or does it? we could also question the vocal's sonic quality and it's relevance in the song; it appears contrary to the standard tracking sonic stamp at 3:00. should it be fixed? i personally think it's decisions like these that sorts real mixes from the general masses and mixing goes wayyyyy beyond simply grabbing hold of the tracking and pushing some EQ about. it's surprising how many people in the forum find it immensely difficult to bring themselves to muting an instrument, for example, even though it's been looping for half an hour and the song isn't even that length! indeed, it can blaze its way though verses and choruses with endless repetitive monotony, but so long as it's EQ'd and we can hear it properly and is appropriately positioned in the stereo domain, every one here is happy and praiseworthy! but i'm not everyone

...i'll flag the piano at the intro....panned left....and that REALLY irritating synth part screaming all over it like a rampant virus which you made the executive decision to spread WIDE across the stereo width in all it's glory...

Ouch. Much of this probably owes further to having been overwhelmed at the length and number of tracks, although some of what you mentioned was intentional on my part.

In this song, I treated the Chorus vocal (and it's double-tracks) as well as the verse vocal as the Lead Vocal. All of the other vocal tracks I treated as Less Important, although whether or not that was the intention is tracking is unclear. Perhaps my interpretation is wrong, perhaps not, but it certainly deserves further consideration.

At any rate, I was aiming for a very intimate and present vocal in the verse (note the rather distant, lowpassed, distorted delay), and attempted to give every vocal section different sonics to make each section sound a little different and move things forward. Maybe I overdid that?

The palm muted guitar, I placed up front and off to the side relative to a reference track (Never Give Up by Haim), although there is a high roll-off to try and keep it further back than the vocal. I tried reverb (delay too, but much as I suspected, that was a mess owing to the busyness) but my efforts muddied it up too much, as I was hoping for a somewhat funky single-note groove, a la Michael Jackson. This is an issue I was aware of very early on, but got distracted elsewhere evidently. This, too, I can revisit, and I already have some ideas as to how I can improve the psychoacoustic message without losing my vision for the track.

The piano... well, that's embarrassing. I put it off to the side to fix a balance issue in the chorus (it's a hungry beast in the low mids and nearly nonexistent elsewhere) but in the intro it should clearly be central. I didn't automate very much on this track... an oversight, again related to lack of scope.

The synth, while abrasive (though I did attempt to correct that... possibly didn't do enough in that regard?), I felt was a crucial part of the song's sonic character. I didn't deliberately spread it wide, and actually did no stereo processing on the track at all, apart from moving it off to the side. I will experiment with narrowing it, and fading it out when it's less relevant to the emotion

On these points, much of what you've flagged up is related to my vision for the song... and the mistakes/sacrifices I made in my effort to present them. Much of my processing is static across the entire track, whereas many elements of my vision are perhaps only appropriate section by section. Part of all of this was something I read in the nebulous "terms" of the contest: that entrants were to engage in the mixing process as though the tracks were presented according to the producer's vision, and as such, passing mention was made to making limited alterations to the arrangement. Obviously I'm not in the competition, though, so I shouldn't have let that color my decision making so much as it did. Although I will note that while busy, much of what's on the radio (at least where I live) is even worse in this regard, and also smashed to hell during mastering compared to my efforts, that's comparing my work to music that's a complete mess in my opinion.

So in V3 I will address depth field concerns, and attempt to unify the sonics across the vocals. More automation will be applied, stereo concerns will be evaluated, and I'll attempt to alter the arrangement such that technical concerns will not impinge on emotional engagement. I firmly believe in my vision for the track, but I agree that my attempts to convey my vision have been sidestepped by my technical efforts.

great effort though and it shows a summary of progress - on a technical level. but sometimes i think you are way too technical for your own good, and you completely miss the big picture.

while this project is a little bit different to the normal mult's in the library, the kind of thinking and approach we take should be no different regardless of whether it formed the basis for a competition or not. but the fact that it was a competition should have got you thinking on a broader level....and you should have been looking for trouble instead of simply mixing it?

Where I live we say "you can't see the forest for the trees." This is my big struggle in the mixing process, especially on a huge multi like this. For instance.. the ukelele at the end and the acoustic guitars in the chorus section. I actually noted that they were basically irrelevant to the track, even after I attempted to force them to be relevant. Yet they remain... because I got distracted by something more important. That's the key then, isn't it? Sonic importance, relative to emotional engagement.

I've no qualms with altering the arrangement of a piece, although I may have been influenced unduly by the (irrelevant) terms of the competition in this case. Toward the end of mixing this project, my rather capable PC was struggling with the track load, and that should have been a warning sign.

Anyhow, thanks for your honest appraisal. It's always appreciated! I'm proud of my technical achievements here, but engagement is at least as important and I'm lacking there. Hopefully the virus synth didn't give you a headache (lol) .

I'll post a revision in soon, and I firmly demand you give it a look, because it's all your fault

[pauli]

Version 3 changes:

The "Arp" tracks are slightly narrowed, panned centrally, and have less high frequency content. I'm using them more like a pad in this mix, and as such the levels are much lower.

The piano is panned centrally now. A little more automation is in order, probably... the track is very hungry in the mids. And of course, that's where everything else is hungry, too. I didn't worry much more about sonic realism with the piano at this point... in the choruses I was tempted to mute it, but at a low level it fills it out really well. More important to me in this case was power in the bass and more contribution from the vocals in the areas where the piano wants to be strong. I guess maybe I could try sidechaining a ducker.

Added some verb to the drums.

Worked very hard on the reverbs for each vocal section, trying to unify the sonic signature of each group without losing their distinctiveness. I found my usual method, using a cocktail of reverbs applied to the entire mix, didn't work for this song. Amber uses a different vocal technique during the bridge, for instance, which doesn't respond to reverb in the same way. And during the Verse and Chorus sections, I found delays more prudent than verbs for all the usual reasons. So I dried up all of the reverbs just a teeny bit, and dialed in a bit of reverb pre-compression during mastering.

I deleted the Chorus guitars (couldn't hear them anyway), and found I'd already deleted the ukelele I remember when I saw the uke track before I'd even run through the song I thought "...seriously?"

And I pared down the track length a good bit.

How's this for your ears?

[pauli]

I'm actually a little embarrassed how proud I am of this

With quick listen I think your version is absolutely coherent now with clear overall vision behind. Spatial ideas blend nicely together, balances feel good, individual intstrument sounds interact nicely, separate sounds create one big sound etc.

Now I can agree with you: this IS one of your best mixes. You shouldn't be embarrassed at all, only proud.

Thanks, Olli!

[takka360]

good balance mate,yep your work is deffo taking shape.
Well done

[pauli]

thanks alan. everything is always a lot harder than it appears at first!

[bmullen]

Great work, pauli!

[The_Metallurgist]

Pauli, full credit to you for nailing the spectrum here, the top end is especially well controlled and you've rolled it off for maximum comfort without losing it's essence. there was a lot of nasty, brash top-end sonic rattling around in the raw material, so well done in containing it. it also proves without question, that you managed to control the low-mid elements well, otherwise you'd have been fighting for the clarity in those critical, potentially fatiguing HMF's? cool.

i also especially liked the occasional point you made with the vocal, eg @ 3:30 where "Howlin in the moon light" almost subliminally garners attention of my ear in the right channel....i love subtle details like that.

i agree with the problems regarding the piano, it was a sonic catastrophe in many ways, with both it's lows and highs rolled off with serious detriment leaving us with little to go with. but a flat, boring piano with skewed frequency response, can create some real interest with a creative approach. then you can build your EQ and compression strategies etc around the concept early on to help drive/deliver/manipulate the emotion. work on the foundations, then build. if your plan isn't working....roll the project back to a previous instance and start from there.

i have to say though, i'm struggling with the verse/chorus transitions. perhaps this is one of the problems in defining which instruments should be center-stage and which can/should be pulled back in the mix away from the spotlight? and this leads me back to my original post; i don't think you are defining in advance, how you plan to make those kind of transitions happen so the chorus sections end up being almost a non-event instead of your core emotional driver? i think you need to be REALLY fussy about choosing your instruments carefully, and being quite ruthless if necessary in killing off irrelevant material that contributes nothing to the song - mute it. and with what's left, promote one or two instruments for my attention, and drop the rest at various levels in the depth field, out of the way. remember, the brain can only focus on so many events at a time and you'd be surprised how easy it is to mess up in this regard. "less is more", but it's what you do with the "less" that's essential.

there's a snare here that sounds like a clap? it first commences in your mix at 0:38 and doesn't fit the scene (whether clap or snare). it's an ideal candidate for making into a decent clap perhaps and getting it to fit in with the mix at appropriate moments, for example, like from 0:43 onwards when the chorus hits....use it to help drive the groove, say, then drop it out until the next opportunity - it's not like there are insufficient snare sounds that's forcing you to use this track as a snare? (NB, i'm alive to your understanding of this track) now this instrument was banging along through verse AND chorus with regular monotony. indeed, i think it actually contributed to the loss of transition and emotional drive - if you keep an instrument running for too long, we will grow familiar with it and ignore it's presence.....are you getting the idea? now, we can EQ it, compress it, balance it in the mix but what's the point if it's not fulfilling it's emotional duty because it's not happening in the right places, or my brain has grown bored with hearing it for too long? every single instrument, no matter how long it's duration in a scene, should be rigorously scrutinised for it's legitimacy and it's role in the song. if it's not a star player but you think it should be, then make it happen. if it's just a noise and has no function in certain places....MUTE IT. and if the whole thing is utterly irrelevant, DELETE IT. the good news with this forum, is that you don't have to validate your decisions with the musician...only us

giving your mixes this sort of attention the moment you open the project would advance your mixing generally - don't only focus on this mix....take the CONCEPT of these points with you. i've just checked out your most recent one also, and it's suffering similar issues; technically it's working, but emotionally i'm not tapping my foot. you gotta work the groove, find the instrument(s) that should be delivering it, and work your mix accordingly.

a mix that fails to connect, isn't a mix...it's just a background noise. but it can be EQ'd perfectly, with no masking issues, great use of compression, nice reverbs.....but if that clap is clapping it's butt off in places where it shouldn't be because we lack the courage or awareness or intuition or taste to mute the damn thing, it will help bring a mix to it's knees...and it only takes simple mistakes like this to do so....but something that's not so well compressed or EQ'd will cause less drama. think not about the clap, but about the principle.

i think the source tracking being all in stereo was a red herring. we had to trawl though all of them to actually see which had stereo content within, and which was merely stereo-mono. of course, keeping the stereo tracking in most cases will clutter up the spectrum at the blink of an eye, so we also had scope to mix down some stereo tracks to plain mono. i'll let your creativity consider the opportunities this presents....in future mixes.

i liked how you re-worked the piano during the intro - nice use of space and i got more emotion from it. i'm still finding the guitars during the intro to be too close for comfort though; they are very difficult to move back...but not impossible

a good song can be ruined by the wrong vision (even with perfect EQ, clarity, compression, balance, depth, width, blah blah), but an average song can be made to bang with the right vision.

look for the mojo...rather than studying the tonal qualities of the guitar....unless it's the tonal qualities of the guitar that's driving it, of course!

[pauli]

Thanks for your review, dude. I think "essential groundwork" is my greatest opportunity for improvement, and something I ignored for too long when I was first starting.

Hilarious thing about all of this is that I'M A MUSICIAN and I get so caught up in the technical that I fail to consider the song as a piece of music. My technical understanding was so poor when I first started that I got in the habit of ignoring everything else so that I could focus on improving my principal weakness. In some ways, a good thing, because I'm really proud of myself for the technical gains... but it's kinda silly that I've been ignoring something that for most musicians should be a strength?

Of course, now that you've pointed it out, the clap is completely unnecessary and irrelevant in the verses and bridge, where the emotional delivery should be more subtle. I liked the way the clap sounded, but that of itself is a red herring because it skews objectivity, ja?

The piano I felt sounded very nice in solo or with a light arrangement built around it... I had originally intended to build everything around the piano. I think about spacial realism sometimes when mixing heavily electronic tracks, and at least to my brain it doesn't make sense to be too concerned about realism when the entire song is built around artificial instruments... but perhaps I'm wrong. Maybe allowing the piano more opportunities to sound realistic could bring an electronic arrangement down to earth, if that were the desire.

You mentioned my mix of "heartbeats" suffering from similar arrangement difficulties, and I'll agree with you there. I was more liberal with the scissors on that one, but there are a lot of tricky compromises to be made. So much to like that it's hard to know which can stay and which can go. Working with the recorded musician makes these judgement calls easier because you can just start deleting stuff until they throw a fit

Side note... a few months ago a kid just out of highschool asked me for some help mixing a bunch of his songs, so I've been working with him here and there... I think I've learned some of my most important lessons thusfar with this recent "real world" experience. Had he not come to me for help, someone may have sued him for blowing out expensive speaker systems... he'd never heard of a high pass filter