I am currently engaged in mixing a project for some friends, a semi-pro Jazz outfit called the Ah-Q Arkestra.

The line up is: Drums, Electric Bass, Electric Guitar, Saxophone, Trombone and Vocals, and this is their take on the Ella Fitzgerald classic "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered".

The 8 raw tracks were recorded by the band's guitarist in an office(!) with very basic equipment onto an Akai DPS16 with an assortment of budget mics and a couple of DI boxes for the guitars. You will therefore encounter lots of problems with the raw material but actually I thought that this makes the challenge more interesting - obviously you'll have to do a lot more 'massaging' of this to make it sound vaguely presentable than you would if they'd recorded in a top studio using really expensive vintage German mics and Fearn pre-amps!

I've already mixed a few of their other tracks from these sessions so I am fully aware of the multitude of mixing difficulties you'll encounter and I am, of course, fascinated to see what someone else can do with this material! I chose this track as it features a great vocal take, a couple of short solos and some 'fuller' arrangement with the horns coming in under the vocal to create some quite dense textures which are always fun to mix!

Below are 4 stereo WAV files at 16/44.1k organised as follows:

Bewitched Drums.WAV 39.1MB
Bewitched Kick/Bass.WAV 39.1MB
Bewitched Sax/Bone.WAV 39.1MB
Bewitched Guitar/Vocal.WAV 39.1MB

Right click on the links to download (sorry but .mac websites won't stream) - takes about 11 mins on my ADSL to download all. YMMV.

And here's an mp3 guide mix of the song I received with the raw material just to give me/you an idea of what's there: Bewitched Guide.mp3 5MB. You'll definitely need to improve on that to stand up and be counted but that shouldn't be too hard!

All submissions to be 16-bit stereo WAV files at 44.1k to even the playing field.

EDIT: 192kbps mp3 mixes due to Darren at sos@liquidbughunt.co.uk no later than 19.00hrs Wednesday 2nd August - see later posts for more info!

Ideally you already have webspace to pop these up on for download but if you don't email me your file as an attachment at jameslehmann@hotmail.com and I'll place them on my .mac page. (No MySpace streaming rubbish please!)

If you all thought it would be more fun not to know who has done each mix until the end I'll need a 3rd party who can host all the files and be the arbiter - any volunteers?

No need for this to drag on and bore everyone so let's say a week from now is the deadline?

Good luck and have fun!

James

EDIT: If you just dropped in, since we started this thing there's already lots of different mixes to listen to - GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND/OR STREAM ALL THE MIXES! And do please scroll to the end of the thread, have a look at what gear we all used and leave your comments for us - cheers!

Edited by James Lehmann (31/07/06 03:41 PM)

A note indicating the file size of each .wav and the .mp3 might be useful for those of us on dial-up!

P-X

--------------------
My Home Studio Build Thread

Quote PrinceXizor:

---

A note indicating the file size of each .wav and the .mp3 might be useful for those of us on dial-up!

---

Done, although it would be a brave soul to attempt this on dial-up!

Exactly! Sometimes the size isn't listed accurately or listed at all at the beginning of download. So now I know not to even attempt this at home! Too bad I'm busy this weekend. This would be cool to see how my total lack of experience gets blown out of the water! Should be interesting...

P-X

--------------------
My Home Studio Build Thread

Please post a description of your gear, techniques or plug-ins used,when you post your mixes, so us kids might learn something

Or a stipulation of GarageBand only (sorry windows users). That would sort the men from the boys!

--------------------
Music is the only noise for which one is obliged to pay.
(Attrib. to Alexandre Dumas)

Jazz Eh - scary stuff

I'll give this a go, but no snigggering at the back when I ruin it

jazz isn't scary... it's friendly and welcoming, much like a family member you never knew you had.

Hi James

I just downloaded these and they are all corrupt or invalid zips according to my system... do you have any naming conventions going on?

D

--------------------
This forum is like Hotel California...
You can log-out any time you like, but you can never leave...

Oooh... something to concentrate on! Long summer breaks are not good for me, so this should be fun to play with.

Doubt anything I can make out of it would be worth posting, but I'll be interested to see what the rest of you guys can come up with

Quote DarrenSw:

---

I just downloaded these and they are all corrupt or invalid zips according to my system... do you have any naming conventions going on?

---

Expanded OK with me. Mac OS X.

--------------------
Cubase, guitars.

Quote James Lehmann:

---

If you all thought it would be more fun not to know who has done each mix until the end I'll need a 3rd party who can host all the files and be the arbiter - any volunteers?

---

I have access to some mp3 streaming servers, although bandwith is limited to about 2Mbps total per project.
Let me know if you want to use these.

cheers

Great - some takers!

I actually finished my my own mix this morning - I knew it was finished because despite listening to this track 100 times when I played it the 100th time the hairs on the back of my neck stood up, so I stopped tweaking and printed it right there!

Line up so far:

James L
CharlotteL
"jumpeyspider"
"Lime ZRX"

Is there a problem with PC downloads - I seriously hope not! Can anyone with a PC confirm they've managed to download the tracks successfully?

"Koed" - many thanks for offer of space, let's play it by ear and see how it goes; not sure it'll be needed yet.

My original intent was for this to be a straight-ahead mix effort as opposed to a remix tip, but I guess if anyone is inspired enough to an ambient-deathmetal-breakbeat-goatrance version then go right ahead - I'm sure the band will be fascinated to hear what you do!

The download service you're using appears to be messing up on a pc - it pretends they are zip files then infact, renaming the extension .wav produces the normal wav file.

I've had a go at this, are there any points for simplicity? or a beginners catorgory, i fear im going to make a huge fool of myself, still, we all have to begin somwhere!

--------------------
David Lewthwaite, www.lewty.org.uk, dave@lewty.org.uk

Sounds like fun! I assume the tracks are dual-mono stereo WAVs to make the eight tracks. Downloading now. I'm really busy for the w/end, should be done Monday.

G

--------------------
PA stuff on FB

Uploads to my PC using IE with no problem.

Downloaded to my PC using Firefox, wierd wav-zip extension, but dragged straight into soundforge no problem.
I'll have a go at this, sounds like fun! I'm working until Monday, so hopefully Tuesday will be quiet and I can give this a go - looking forward to it

Great - glad to hear the PC folks are on board, or most of them. .mac does put that weird zip-zip extention on files - no idea why!

Participant update:

James Lehmann
"CharlotteL"
"jumpeyspider"
"Lime ZRX"
"Wonkey Wabbit"
"Herewego"
Guy Johnson
"dave-lew99"

Should have at least 8 mixes up by Wednesday night then?

Question: Shall we do a 'Blind Contest' and ask a 3rd party to host some mp3's or shall we just let everyone host their file and we link each mix to everyone's name from the off? My feeling is that those taking part won't mind either way, but I think it might be more fun for those not taking part not to know who's mix they are listening to.


PS No complaints about the kick drum track yet? I can tell you it's a shocker and sounds like a dead frog falling into a shoebox - have fun with that!

Yes, a blind test sounds a good idea. It might also be a good idea for us to write some short notes on the mix 'style' – to put the mixes into context. And have the mixes as WAVs ( with optional MP3s, for those with dial-up )

Guy

--------------------
PA stuff on FB

I'm in, did a quick mix earlier and will check it over first thing in the morning Its taken 3 months, but I'm finally liking the Liquid Mix Comp and EQs for mixing (rather than just the SSL Master Bus Compressor!).

Chris

--------------------
Freelance Producer / Engineer | www.hernestudios.co.uk | FREE Listening sessions - see www.thelisteninggroup.org

Quote Guy Johnson:

---

Yes, a blind test sounds a good idea. It might also be a good idea for us to write some short notes on the mix 'style' – to put the mixes into context. And have the mixes as WAVs ( with optional MP3s, for those with dial-up )

---

A agree I don't like mp3's - however I think for the casual listeners who might be interested in checking out the results of this they will just want to stream a few of the files and won't want to download 9+ files of what is now over 320MB!

At 192kbps this file will be 5MB which seems reasonable - we could even go up to 256kbps, ie around 7MB?

After next week folks can use their own websites for posting 24/96k versions of the mix if you like - I suspect it will mainly be us contestants who will most want to examine the original files. I'll certainly put mine up!

Let's go for it!

So...

DESPERATELY SEEKING - someone with some fast and reliable webspace who can host perhaps 10+ 7MB mp3 files for us for a couple of weeks? You will also need to have the time to rename the files you will be sent and keep careful tabs on which mix is which. You'll also need to keep confidentiality until the contest is over! ANYONE??

I'm also tempted to ask some of the really experienced listeners here if they'd like to judge, like Hugh Robjohns, James Perrett, John Willett etc, subject of course to them having the time!

Participant update:

James Lehmann
"CharlotteL"
"jumpeyspider"
"Lime ZRX"
"Wonkey Wabbit"
"Herewego"
Guy Johnson
"dave-lew99"
Chris Poulter

This is great - I thought there might be one or two entrants but now we have nine!...

Once again, the challenge here is for us to take a competant band of decent musicians, recorded on some pretty basic home equipment and make it sound as good as it possibly can be. I imagine that's a familiar situation to quite a few SOS readers and that folks will be very interested in the results!

Hi James

I'm in - any PC users struggling? I downloaded using Firefox and, as stated above, just opened them in SForge and they're fine.

I've got web space if you need it James... how about a simple Flash jukebox so one can listen to each remix individually as opposed to downloading them all? PM me if any good to you.

Am I barred from remixing though if I host?

And yes, Kick track is a tw*t!

Cheers

Darren

--------------------
This forum is like Hotel California...
You can log-out any time you like, but you can never leave...

Darren - glad you're in!

Thanks for the offer of webspace. I guess it wouldn't matter if you were also participating as long as you keep silent until the judging period is over!

I'm still thinking about whether or not to make this a blind test or not.

If we did go ahead with blind I am allergic to Flash players though - just links to mp3's in a post here would be fine I think. We've got "Koed" as well who wrote "I have access to some mp3 streaming servers, although bandwith is limited to about 2Mbps total per project." Is your server with a similar limit Also, if you do agree to this it will probably take up more time than you thought - hope you'd be OK with that?

I have done something like this before and in fact it was fun to know who had done what as you listened... I'm having second thoughts; maybe everyone should just put up their own 256kbps mp3?

"Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered" Mix-Off
Participant update:

James Lehmann
"CharlotteL"
"jumpeyspider"
"Lime ZRX"
"Wonkey Wabbit"
"Herewego"
Guy Johnson
"dave-lew99"
Chris Poulter
"DarrenSw"

Last night (well actually 2.00 am this morning) I put the tracks onto Cubase, and just had a listen. What scares me a bit is it all sounded OK to me without me doing anything. Kick drum- OK it rings, but from Js description I was expecting really rough sound. I'd have been happy to get what he got! I think it's time for me to find a new hobby!! Stamp collecting, here I come.....

--------------------
Cubase, guitars.

I have web space if needed, with Tiscali.

--------------------
PA stuff on FB

Great idea James,

Downloading fine to my PC - will have a stab at something over the weekend....

cheers
Adrian

--------------------
getting better all the time..

I've just done a mix. Its not an easy track to mix, as often the guitar conflicts with the horns and the chords become a little ambiguous. If i was producer, i'd kinda want all the tracks to be rerecorded, just because they're imprecise. The drums are too busy, the basslines are meandering, and the vocals are out of tune. I tried to re-tune the vox using v-vocal, but it removes a lot of tone and adds a nasty digital sibilance. For me, at least, the only cure would be to get the singer to sing the culprit bits again.

Dont take this too harshly - i'm an extreme perfectionist. Its a very good recording for what it is.

As for hosting/files - why not a .flac hosted at savefile.com?

Quote LDGuy:

---

I've just done a mix. Its not an easy track to mix, as often the guitar conflicts with the horns and the chords become a little ambiguous. If i was producer, i'd kinda want all the tracks to be rerecorded, just because they're imprecise. The drums are too busy, the basslines are meandering, and the vocals are out of tune. I tried to re-tune the vox using v-vocal, but it removes a lot of tone and adds a nasty digital sibilance. For me, at least, the only cure would be to get the singer to sing the culprit bits again.

Dont take this too harshly - i'm an extreme perfectionist. Its a very good recording for what it is.

---

Ouch!

Believe me I would have liked nothing more than to have engineered these sessions myself armed with my trusty Powerbook, Metric Halos, Microtech Geffel and Brauner mics etc! Unfortunately that wasn't possible so the band (mainly the guitarist) engineered and recorded the tracks themselves using pretty standard home-studio fare, ie Rodes, AKG's Mackies and all onto the Akai.

As a background to the sessions I think the band recorded 18 tracks in two days, and I know they were a lot more interested in nailing a good feel than in perfection. I might possibly concede that the drums are a bit busy (but even this may be to do with the way it was recorded), and the horn players do play better solos on some of the other tracks but I don't agree at all about the vocal - I think it's a class performance there, sorry! And I think overall the band sound pretty tight, like on those hits at the end of the choruses. I agree that mixing the horns in under the guitar and vocal is a good challenge to make sense of in this track.

Anyway - good to have you onboard and I look forward to hearing your mix!


"Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered" Mix-Off
Participant update:

James Lehmann
"CharlotteL"
"jumpeyspider"
"Lime ZRX"
"Wonkey Wabbit"
"Herewego"
Guy Johnson
"dave-lew99"
Chris Poulter
"DarrenSw"
"Dunch"
"LDGuy"
"Vinylizor"

TOTAL = 13 mixes due at 19.00hrs Wednesday 2nd August! Fun!

James...

No promises since I have a really full weekend of mixing coming up as it is, but if I have a chance, I will go ahead and give it a go as well. Sounds like a fun break from my other project which is stessing me out to no end!

If nothing else, I will give it a quick once-over for consideration, although I may be cutting my throat since I haven't listened to the samples yet!

Great idea James!

--------------------
James
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake" ~Napoleon Bonaparte~

Quote LDGuy:

---

Its not an easy track to mix, as often the guitar conflicts with the horns and the chords become a little ambiguous. If i was producer, i'd kinda want all the tracks to be rerecorded, just because they're imprecise. The drums are too busy, the basslines are meandering, and the vocals are out of tune. I tried to re-tune the vox using v-vocal, but it removes a lot of tone and adds a nasty digital sibilance. For me, at least, the only cure would be to get the singer to sing the culprit bits again.

---

The thing is though, you aren't being asked to produce the recording, you are being asked to mix it.

If you are a mix engineer, then this is what you are required to do - take what you are given and make it sound great - no matter what you think of the standard of the recorded parts. In this scenario you would also be treading on dangerous ground re-tuning vocals without permission!

On any mix there are always technical issues to deal with. With this track though, you can't bluff your way around them by using some unusual or cool production tricks. It requires a mix that sounds natural and expensive. It's a technical test of your chops, not particularly an artistic one - thats whats fun about it.

Agreed, but I have to ask... why is the lead vocal a semitone out in the last passage before the end? Or is that jazz?

Should we leave it as is or retune it?

Darren

--------------------
This forum is like Hotel California...
You can log-out any time you like, but you can never leave...

Quote Vinylizor:

---

The thing is though, you aren't being asked to produce the recording, you are being asked to mix it.

If you are a mix engineer, then this is what you are required to do - take what you are given and make it sound great - no matter what you think of the standard of the recorded parts. In this scenario you would also be treading on dangerous ground re-tuning vocals without permission!

On any mix there are always technical issues to deal with. With this track though, you can't bluff your way around them by using some unusual or cool production tricks. It requires a mix that sounds natural and expensive. It's a technical test of your chops, not particularly an artistic one - thats whats fun about it.

---

I think you're right on the money with this post 'Vinylizor'!

I do realise that there are folks here who are used to working with much larger budgets, big name musicians and much more available time, and thus probably wouldn't really be interested in attempting to mix such humble fare. But for me at least (and perhaps other 'Project Studio' members) this is a 'realworld' situation whereby my clients have hired me for the job, sent me the recording (imperfect as it may be), and I just have to get on with it as best I can.

As you say 'Vinylizor', the fun/challenge is in asking oneself "OK - how good can I get this to sound, given all the limitations of the raw material, the fee being paid for the mixing and the resulting time I allocate to spend on it?"

I'm very interested to see what folks can do, and I hope we have a wide range of submissions, from perhaps one or two folks with a major set-up, through the project guys like me and right down to someone with a copy of Cubase LE and some computer speakers and not much else!

Whatever gear you're toting, at the end of the day the only thing that matters is whether or not you can facilitate getting this recording of this music to move, speak-to and engage your listener.


"Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered" Mix-Off
Participant update:

James Lehmann
"CharlotteL"
"jumpeyspider"
"Lime ZRX"
"Wonkey Wabbit"
"Herewego"
Guy Johnson
"dave-lew99"
Chris Poulter
"DarrenSw"
"dunch"
"LDGuy"
"Vinylizor"
"Doublehelix" ?

TOTAL = 14 mixes due at 19.00hrs Wednesday 2nd August! Fun!

Hello all, quick question - what's the view on mastering this mix?

Either we post pre-masters, or have a go at mastering ourselves. Personally I'd opt for pre-masters, what do people think?

cheers
Adrian

--------------------
getting better all the time..

Quote Vinylizor:

---

Quote LDGuy:

---

Its not an easy track to mix, as often the guitar conflicts with the horns and the chords become a little ambiguous. If i was producer, i'd kinda want all the tracks to be rerecorded, just because they're imprecise. The drums are too busy, the basslines are meandering, and the vocals are out of tune. I tried to re-tune the vox using v-vocal, but it removes a lot of tone and adds a nasty digital sibilance. For me, at least, the only cure would be to get the singer to sing the culprit bits again.

---

The thing is though, you aren't being asked to produce the recording, you are being asked to mix it.

If you are a mix engineer, then this is what you are required to do - take what you are given and make it sound great - no matter what you think of the standard of the recorded parts. In this scenario you would also be treading on dangerous ground re-tuning vocals without permission!

On any mix there are always technical issues to deal with. With this track though, you can't bluff your way around them by using some unusual or cool production tricks. It requires a mix that sounds natural and expensive. It's a technical test of your chops, not particularly an artistic one - thats whats fun about it.

---

You're abolsutely right. The trouble i have is i approach it from a musician's standpoint, not the impartial standpoint of an engineer. I dont do very much of it, so it's all in good fun.

Quote LDGuy:

---

I tried to re-tune the vox using v-vocal, but it removes a lot of tone and adds a nasty digital sibilance.

---

Just chop the Vocal up lad and choon only bits that need it.... that will sort out tha nasty problem.

Would like to ave a go misel like, but am goin' on't me 'olidays furraweek ort two - guess me lug 'oles need rest anyways.

Must agree that that Drummer is a busy fella like i'nt he, where the hekkaslike is 'e off in such an 'urry - calm down now drummer lad it's not a bloomin' race, let the lass get on wi' her chirpin - give her sum space, she sounds shweet to me!

Quote dunch:

---

Hello all, quick question - what's the view on mastering this mix?

Either we post pre-masters, or have a go at mastering ourselves. Personally I'd opt for pre-masters, what do people think?

cheers
Adrian

---

Yes - I'll be submitting a pre-master, but I don't think it matters too much. Just put up whatever your best shot at this is, with or without some treatment at the mastering stage. Maybe everyone just states with their file what sort of mastering they've done, that would be fair enough I think.

Im tempted to do a mix as well... although im off on holiday for a week first thing tomorrow morning so may not bother once i'm back! If i do one, i'll definatly post it up. Might do it on my Akai DPS24 to see if i can get it any better with a slight upgrade in gear (although the DPS16 and 24 are COMPLETly different beasts!)

Wont have a chance to download the tracks before im back, but certainly looking forward to seeing what people are capable of!

Doug

Edited by DougR (28/07/06 07:16 PM)

I find LDGuys comments quite amusing, as it seems to miss the point. Yes, the technical quality of some of the parts is not great - I actually had to go back to James' post to find out what the kick track was (!) - but theres nothing in there that you cant get around. The main thing is that the performances are (in the most part) good.

I have always found that it is much easier to get a good mix from badly recorded great performances, than it is to get a good mix from well record recorded bad performances.

By the way, the power cable for my powerbook just snapped clean through, I'm hoping theres enough battery left to print my mix...

Chris

--------------------
Freelance Producer / Engineer | www.hernestudios.co.uk | FREE Listening sessions - see www.thelisteninggroup.org

james, just emailed you my - "oldschool jazz style" - mix of bewitched...

lot's of midrange, grainy vocals and brass and a 50's feel to it.

hope you like it.

i'd have a go but can't do it for 2 weeks yet...

--------------------
Statick Audio

Quote:

---

why is the lead vocal a semitone out in the last passage before the end? Or is that jazz?

---

I think that's just a jazz thing... it doesn't sound like it was a mistake, and from the standard of the rest of the performance I'd be surprised if she was that far out by accident.

Quote CharlotteL:

---

Quote:

---

why is the lead vocal a semitone out in the last passage before the end? Or is that jazz?

---

I think that's just a jazz thing... it doesn't sound like it was a mistake, and from the standard of the rest of the performance I'd be surprised if she was that far out by accident.

---

Spot on Charlotte!

Quote musicproject:

---

james, just emailed you my - "oldschool jazz style" - mix of bewitched...

lot's of midrange, grainy vocals and brass and a 50's feel to it.

hope you like it.

---

OK - that's excellent!!

You obviously had a clear idea of what you wanted and I think it works really well! In fact, I was thinking you could almost pan the drums over hard left like on those really early stereo records?

Great job!

OK folks, I think we need some web-hosting for this - there's way more interest that I thought there'd be, which is great!

I propose we formalise this now:

All submissions to be 192kbps mp3 files

We also now need a webmaster!

Ideally you should have:

- A decent amount of download traffic allowance
- A fast server

and most important...

- You need to be around for another week or so in order to manage this efficiently and accurately!

I have had offers so far from "Koed", Guy Johnson, "DarrenSw" and James Richmond. Be honest guys - are you willing to take this on and do you have the time? If you are please publish an email address where we can send our entries, and please keep careful tabs on who's is whose!

I expect there will be 15 or so entries, so the files will be around 5MB each.

There's no need to make a webpage - as long as we can make a post here linking all the submissions it will be fine. People need to either be able to stream directly or to right click download.

You'll need to name the files properly - preferrably so that when folks download them they will appear in iTunes with the correct name of the mix engineer in the 'Artist' box - this is quite important otherwise confusion will reign as to who did which!

I have three mixes ready to go already - mine, "Vinylizor" and "musicproject"!

Hi James,

I'm a web developer with a re-seller package giving me unlimited disk space and around 40GB bandwidth/month. Happy to host the files (up to a sensible download limit, say 20GB/month, enough for about 4,000 5MB downloads).

If you are interested, let me know.

Darren

Quote stemwinder:

---

Hi James,

I'm a web developer with a re-seller package giving me unlimited disk space and around 40GB bandwidth/month. Happy to host the files (up to a sensible download limit, say 20GB/month, enough for about 4,000 5MB downloads).

If you are interested, let me know.

Darren

---

Darren - this sounds excellent.

If you're up for taking this on can we go for it?

I have 5 mixes that folks have sent me all ready to go - would be nice for people to be able to start having a listen!

Files must be able to stream and right-click download

Just to re-iterate - we don't need a fancy webpage - I'd like simply to post all the links to the mp3's from within this thread, where we will include all the relevant mix info etc. I will do this in a later post which I will update as the mixes come in.

Can you PM or email me (jameslehmann@hotmail.com) your email address and I'll start sending the 5 mp3's I already have as attachments.

Thanks for volunteering!


PS I saw you have some PMC TB2's as well so I'm interested to get your listening feedback too!

"Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered" Mix-Off
Participant update:

James Lehmann SUBMITTED
"CharlotteL"
"jumpeyspider"
"Lime ZRX"
"Wonkey Wabbit"
"Herewego"
Guy Johnson
"dave-lew99"
Chris Poulter
"DarrenSw"
"dunch"
"LDGuy"
"Vinylizor" SUBMITTED
"Doublehelix"
"musicproject" SUBMITTED
"Hugh" SUBMITTED

TOTAL = 16 mixes due no later than 19.00hrs Wednesday 2nd August.

Have fun!

Hi James,

All set-up and ready to go... I've email you with the details.

Darren

Hang on to your hats folks - Darren is just setting this up for us (big thanks Darren!).

Shortly I'll post an email address where you can send your 192kpbs mp3 entries.

Once Darren gets the files up on the site I'll post the appropriate links and add in new ones when they arrive.

After some thought I've decided we will all put our names to our mixes (as opposed to an anonymous 'shoot-out') - this makes it more personal for listeners directing comments/feedback etc, plus you can openly discuss the particular problems you encountered and what gear you used with direct reference to your mix.

OK people - please send your 192kbps mp3 mixes of "Bewitched..." to Darren at sos@liquidbughunt.co.uk

Unless you state otherwise your Forum name will be attached to the mix.

And now presenting...

[loud jazzy drum-roll...]

GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND/OR STREAM ALL THE MIXES!

(If you aren't downloading the raw files, for a rough idea of what we had to work with Mix #3 labelled "Band Akai" was the Guide mix done by the band with minimal processing directly in their Akai DPS16)


"Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered" Mix-Off
Participant update:

James Lehmann SUBMITTED
"Vinylizor" SUBMITTED
Band Akai (Guide Mix) SUBMITTED
"musicproject" SUBMITTED
"Hugh" SUBMITTED
"dave-lew99" SUBMITTED
"dunch" SUBMITTED
"CharlotteL"
"jumpeyspider"
"Lime ZRX"
"Wonkey Wabbit"
"Herewego"
Guy Johnson
Chris Poulter
"DarrenSw"
"LDGuy"
"Doublehelix"


192kbps mp3 mixes due to Darren at sos@liquidbughunt.co.uk no later than 19.00hrs Wednesday 2nd August - please make sure we know your Forum name.

Have fun!

the stream links aren't working .. the m3u files should contain the complete path to the mp3 files.

Instead of

../mp3/mix5.mp3

they should read:

http://www.liquidbughunt.co.uk/jazz/mp3/mix5.mp3

or else they won't work on most systems.

Also.. it's nice to have a m3u with all the mp3's like this:

http://www.liquidbughunt.co.uk/jazz/mp3/mix1.mp3
http://www.liquidbughunt.co.uk/jazz/mp3/mix2.mp3
http://www.liquidbughunt.co.uk/jazz/mp3/mix3.mp3

etc etc..

If you click that m3u link you'll have all the mp3's in your mp3 player.


BTW .. it's almost weird and wonderful how different all of these mixes already are

"Koed" - can you email that info to Darren at the above email address, cheers!

They work fine for me on ie6 btw, just in case yer man is testing.

James -

thanks again for setting this up (and Darren for hosting). Have just spent a very enjoyable couple of hours mixing, and my mix has been mailed ... now to listen to the others!

btw, in case anyone is interested, it was mixed "in the box" using Sonar 5. The only non-Sonar plugin used was the free Blockfish compressor from Digital Fishphones.

cheers
Adrian

--------------------
getting better all the time..

Quote ow:

---

They work fine for me on ie6 btw, just in case yer man is testing.

---

Yes me too

--------------------
getting better all the time..

I have changed the streaming files (M3Us) to absolute references so they should work for non-IE6 users now. When all of the entries are in I'll put up a "stream all" playlist.

Seven up so far....

GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND/OR STREAM ALL THE MIXES!

(If you aren't downloading the raw files, for a rough idea of what we had to work with Mix #3 labelled "Band Akai" was the Guide mix done by the band with minimal processing directly in their Akai DPS16)


"Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered" Mix-Off
Participant update:

James Lehmann SUBMITTED
"Vinylizor" SUBMITTED
Band Akai (Guide Mix) SUBMITTED
"musicproject" SUBMITTED
"Hugh" SUBMITTED
"dave-lew99" SUBMITTED
"dunch" SUBMITTED
"stemwinder" SUBMITTED
"CharlotteL"
"jumpeyspider"
"Lime ZRX"
"Wonkey Wabbit"
"Herewego"
Guy Johnson
Chris Poulter
"DarrenSw"
"LDGuy"
"Doublehelix"


192kbps mp3 mixes due to Darren at sos@liquidbughunt.co.uk no later than 19.00hrs Wednesday 2nd August - please make sure we know your Forum name.

Have fun!

Working like a charm now thanks

Mine was all mixed in Logic using mainly Waves and Elemental Audio plug-ins. Waves Renaissance compressor with appropriate settings on guitar, sax, bass, kick, drums, trombone, Waves Renaissance Vox on vocals. All treated with various Space Designer presets - vocal plate, guitar room, bass booth, sax chamber, brass plate, big kick, bright drums. then some EQ on bass and drums. master buss reverb - Space Designer Short Plate, compressor - Waves RComp, EQ - EA Equium, Limiter - EA Finis.

--------------------
Music is the only noise for which one is obliged to pay.
(Attrib. to Alexandre Dumas)

James - would it be possible to get hold of a list of exactly which mic was used for each track on the original recording? Just for interest..

cheers
Adrian

--------------------
getting better all the time..

Quote dunch:

---

James - would it be possible to get hold of a list of exactly which mic was used for each track on the original recording? Just for interest..

---

Info a bit patchy but what I know is this:

Drum Overheads - Rode NT5's
Other Drums, ie Kick, Snare, Toms etc - unknown mics, probably more Rode's, AKG's and maybe a 57
Drums pre-mixed to stereo feed (minus kick) via a Mackie Onyx
Bass - 5-string Fender Jazz >> Sansamp DI
Sax & Trombone - clip-on AKG condensers
Guitar - Ibanez Jazz >> DI from out the back of a Polytone amp
Voice - AT4033 >> Joemeek ThreeQ

All recorded directly onto an Akai DPS16 at 16/44.1k

Hi James,

This mix-off is a nice idea - thanks. I've just e-mailed my mp3 to Darren, so hopefully it should appear in the list some time.

For those interested; it was mixed entirely in Logic 7.1, using no third party plug-ins. If you want to know more - then just ask . . .

Tom

--------------------
My Little Project

"Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered" Mix-Off

GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND/OR STREAM ALL THE MIXES!


Participant update:

ITB = In the box, mixed entirely within a DAW
OTB = Out of the box, mixed using analog processing

(NB: Participants - do please provide as much detail as you like about how you mixed and what monitors you used etc and I'll include it here - this is a Music Technology Forum after all and I think folks are interested.)

MIX 1: James Lehmann
OTB/ITB. My overall mix goal - making this production, recorded on very basic equipment, sound as expensive as possible; fixing a number of unwanted technical problems inherent in the raw tracks; preserving the dynamic and feel of the live take as you can hear the band play well together so the mix should reflect that. Firstly each individual track was re-recorded at 24/44.1k by being run out and back through a Metric Halo 2882 via a Speck ASC-T EQ and a Drawmer 1968-ME compressor for warmth, colour and character. Tracks were then edited to remove unnecessary spill and extraneous noise. Further corrective EQ was added ITB with Logic Channel EQ and Metric Halo Channelstrip - the latter was also used for volume adjustments as the resolution is much finer than Logic's and it sounds better. ChannelStrip's compressor was also used to deal with (significant) drum spike and kick problems - frequency-dependent sidechain input was very useful here. Sax and Trombone each required a heavily customised ChannelStrip patch with EQ & compression to warm them up and fill them out, and the Kick required some major corrective surgery to get anything remotely useable. Guitar went through a custom Logic Guitar Amp Pro patch and then a tiny amount of EQ correction with Channel EQ to make it 'sit' with the vocals, Bass I left largely alone. Reverb was a TC M300 set to TC Classic Hall which was patched into the S/P-DIF loop of the MH2882, with some EQ on the return. Volume and EQ automation inserted where needed (ie solos etc). Finally, the mix was summed and again sent out and back through the MH2882 (note: not summed in Logic) via the Specks (fine lo-end roll-off) and the Drawmer (very gentle compression) to create a nice pre-master. Elemental Audio Finis was used to raise the overall volume peak to -0.15dB but no limiting was used (death to the loudness wars!); the resulting 24-bit master was dithered back down to 16/44.1k and converted to a 192kbps mp3 in iTunes. All monitoring done on Blue Sky ProDesks.

MIX 2: "Vinylizor"
No info yet

MIX 3: Band Akai (Guide Mix)
ITB. Very rough guide mix done by the band in their Akai DPS16 with minimal processing so you can hear more or less what we had to work with!

MIX 4: "musicproject"
No info yet

MIX 5: "Hugh"
ITB. Mixed in Logic using mainly Waves and Elemental Audio plug-ins. Waves Renaissance compressor with appropriate settings on guitar, sax, bass, kick, drums, trombone, Waves Renaissance Vox on vocals. All treated with various Space Designer presets - vocal plate, guitar room, bass booth, sax chamber, brass plate, big kick, bright drums. then some EQ on bass and drums. master buss reverb - Space Designer Short Plate, compressor - Waves RComp, EQ - EA Equium, Limiter - EA Finis.

MIX 6: Dave Lewthwaite
ITB. AMD Athlon XP 3200+ 1Gb RAM, Creative Audigy 2 Platinum Ex, 160Gb RAID-0 (Stripe) Project Disks, Behringer Truth 2030A Monitors, Yamaha MG16/4. Mixed in the box with Cubase SX and only included effects, control surface Behringer BCF2000 was also used. My aim (as a beginner) was to keep it as simple as possible, yet still aiming for a pleasing sound. Tracks were split into mono using Adobe Audition, apart from the drums, obviously, and converted to 16-Bit/48kHz to conform with my restrictive ASIO drivers. All that is on there is a little 2:1 compression on the vocals and again over the entire mix and a slight amount of reverb over the entire mix - and thats it! the rest is just level setting and pan. The effects were simply 'VST Dynamics' and the 'Roomworks' reverb. Exporting was a matter of hitting record in cubase to record the stereo output back to another track, then imported into Audition for normalisation and a quick tidy at the beginning and end, the track was then exported as MP3 44.1kHz 16-bit from Audition.

MIX 7: "dunch"
ITB. Mixed "in the box" using Sonar 5. The only non-Sonar plugin used was the free Blockfish compressor from Digital Fishphones.

MIX 8: "stemwinder"
No info yet

"Extraborg" (Awaiting inclusion on site)
ITB. Logic Express

"Mr Tom" (Awaiting inclusion on site)
ITB. Mixed entirely in Logic 7.1, using no third party plug-ins, on Tannoy Active Reveals

"Wonkey Wabbit" (Awaiting inclusion on site)
ITB. 3.0GHz P4 with 1Mb RAM, M-Audio Delta-66, Cubase SX2.2, UAD-1 card, Behringer B3021 monitors (must get something better!), Wavelab V3. I didn't do anything fancy with the tracks like James but I split the files to mono in Waveleb (except the drum track) and converted the files to 24/44.1. I then edited them as much as possible to cut down on spill. Put a high and low pass filter on the kick to cut down on the hat/cymbal spill and take out some of the boominess and then added a touch of compression. I used 2 UAD Realverbs - one for vocals ( based on the wooden room preset which I like for vocals) and one for the brass and guitars (based on the jazz club preset - what else!). Most things had the UAD 1176LN compressor or LA2A limiter on them and I generally used the Pultec EQs on the tracks as well. I used the SX 'Q' filter on some tracks in a cut mode only. A bit of volume automation and that was it.


192kbps mp3 mixes due to Darren at sos@liquidbughunt.co.uk no later than 19.00hrs Wednesday 2nd August - please make sure we know your Forum name.

GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND/OR STREAM ALL THE MIXES!

Have fun!

I'm kind of curious about the monitors used for each mix

Guessing that the huge variation in the mp3's I've listened to might have a lot to do with the monitor/room conditions.

Pretty sure there's an NS 10 (or descendent) owner in there, a HiFi set or maybe even a pair of headphones


I always check mixes on my event 20/20's, then on my midrange computer speakers and finaly on my senheisser headphones to see if they transfer well.

Only three of the current mp3's have passed with flying colors thus far.

Quote Koed:

---

I'm kind of curious about the monitors used for each mix

---

Tannoy Reveal Active in my case - and a pretty poor room acoustically!

--------------------
My Little Project

Dagnabit! I've just seen this with only a couple of days to go. I'm downloading now and I'll give it a bash but I'll decide wether I'm going to actualy enter the fray when I hear what I've come up with.

--------------------
He who feels punctured must have been a bubble - Lao Tsu.

I sent mine in late yesterday evening - hopefully it's got through OK. Only had a short time to mix it as I had only just finished repairing my music PC late Sunday afternoon after 5 months out of action. I used Wavelab to encode it to an mp3 and the first mixes 'jumped' and missed a section. Eventually I got one that seemed to play through OK all the way. Never had that before.

This is my set-up.

3.0GHz P4 with 1Mb RAM.
M-Audio Delta-66
Cubase SX2.2
UAD-1 card
Behringer B3021 monitors (must get something better!)
Wavelab V3

I didn't do anything fancy with the tracks like James but I split the files to mono in Waveleb (except the drum track) and converted the files to 24/44.1. I then edited them as much as possible to cut down on spill. Put a high and low pass filter on the kick to cut down on the hat/cymbal spill and take out some of the boominess and then added a touch of compression.

I used 2 UAD Realverbs - one for vocals ( based on the wooden room preset which I like for vocals) and one for the brass and guitars (based on the jazz club preset - what else!). Most things had the UAD 1176LN compressor or LA2A limiter on them and I generally used the Pultec EQs on the tracks as well. I used the SX 'Q' filter on some tracks in a cut mode only. A bit of volume automation and that was it.

The Ah-Q Arkestra - do they play everything in the key of F?

Ok, a little info about what i've done:

Hardware:

AMD Athlon XP 3200+
1Gb RAM
Creative Audigy 2 Platinum Ex
160Gb RAID-0 (Stripe) Project Disks
Behringer Truth 2030A Monitors
Yamaha MG16/4
Mixed in the box with Cubase SX and only included effects, control surface Behringer BCF2000 was also used

My aim (as a beginner) was to keep it as simple as possible, yet still aiming for a pleasing sound.

Tracks were split into mono using Adobe Audition, apart from the drums, obviously, and converted to 16-Bit/48kHz to conform with my restrictive ASIO drivers.

All that is on there is a little 2:1 compression on the vocals and again over the entire mix and a slight amount of reverb over the entire mix - and thats it! the rest is just level setting and pan.

The effects were simply 'VST Dynamics' and the 'Roomworks' reverb

Exporting was a matter of hitting record in cubase to record the stereo output back to another track, then imported into Audition for normalisation and a quick tidy at the beginning and end, the track was then exported as MP3 44.1kHz 16-bit from Audition.

--------------------
David Lewthwaite, www.lewty.org.uk, dave@lewty.org.uk

Edited by David Lewthwaite (31/07/06 05:20 PM)

He-he! Will be interesting to see if we get anyone to ante up an entirely OTB mix through [gasp] a real analog console and some esoteric outboard!

My set-up is:

- PC, ProTools 7, Digi002 (but mixed entirely ITB due to time constraints)
- PMC TB2s monitors
- PSP Vintage Warmer
- PSP Master Compressor
- DigiDesign DVerb

Darren

So here's a little more info on my mix (Sonar, ITB).

I monitored on Genelec 1029s + 1091 sub, and also a cheap old Sony hifi system.

After I listened to the guide mix I decided I wanted something a bit more intimate, like you were listening to them close up in a small venue.

Drums & Kick I compressed and eq'd till I felt they had a bit more punch and the kick was distinct from the bass.
Bass was slightly compressed to even it out, no eq.
Guitar was slightly compressed to even it out, no eq.
Sax I eq'd slightly to make it a bit less honky.
Trombone I eq'd to thin it out and stop it fighting with everything else, except when it was playing the solo part when I used no eq.
Vocals I used no eq, but did compress a little. Listening back just now I'd like to back off compression a tiny bit.
I added a plate reverb to the vocals (medium plate preset in Sonar convolution reverb). I varied the wet/dry throughout the song - pretty dry at the beginning, wetter as the vocals got louder.
Everything else had varying amounts of room preset, again using the convolution reverb.
I mixed fairly low, peaking the master bus at -4dB. No compression or eq on the master bus.
Exported at 44.1K/16, using pow-r 3 dither from Sonar's mix bus down to 16bit. Topped and tailed then converted to mp3 using lame.

cheers
Adrian

--------------------
getting better all the time..

"Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered" Mix-Off

11 mixes so far and counting!...

GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND/OR STREAM ALL THE MIXES!


Participant update:

ITB = In the box, mixed entirely within a DAW
OTB = Out of the box, mixed using analog processing

(NB: Participants - do please provide as much detail as you like about how you mixed and what monitors you used etc and I'll include it here - this is a Music Technology Forum after all and I think folks are interested.)

MIX 1: James Lehmann
OTB/ITB. My overall mix goal - making this production, recorded on very basic equipment, sound as expensive as possible; fixing a number of unwanted technical problems inherent in the raw tracks; preserving the dynamic and feel of the live take as you can hear the band play well together so the mix should reflect that. Firstly each individual track was re-recorded at 24/44.1k by being run out and back through a Metric Halo 2882 via a Speck ASC-T EQ and a Drawmer 1968-ME compressor for warmth, colour and character. Tracks were then edited to remove unnecessary spill and extraneous noise. Further corrective EQ was added ITB with Logic Channel EQ and Metric Halo Channelstrip - the latter was also used for volume adjustments as the resolution is much finer than Logic's and it sounds better. ChannelStrip's compressor was also used to deal with (significant) drum spike and kick problems - frequency-dependent sidechain input was very useful here. Sax and Trombone each required a heavily customised ChannelStrip patch with EQ & compression to warm them up and fill them out, and the Kick required some major corrective surgery to get anything remotely useable. Guitar went through a custom Logic Guitar Amp Pro patch and then a tiny amount of EQ correction with Channel EQ to make it 'sit' with the vocals, Bass I left largely alone. Reverb was a TC M300 set to TC Classic Hall which was patched into the S/P-DIF loop of the MH2882, with some EQ on the return. Volume and EQ automation inserted where needed (ie solos etc). Finally, the mix was summed and again sent out and back through the MH2882 (note: not summed in Logic) via the Specks (fine lo-end roll-off) and the Drawmer (very gentle compression) to create a nice pre-master. Elemental Audio Finis was used to raise the overall volume peak to -0.15dB but no limiting was used (death to the loudness wars!); the resulting 24-bit master was dithered back down to 16/44.1k and converted to a 192kbps mp3 in iTunes. All monitoring done on Blue Sky ProDesks.

MIX 2: "Vinylizor"
OTB/ITB. My mix was done in Pro-Tools HD, but mainly using outboard vintage comps and eq's as inserts on each channel, through Apogee AD/DA 16X convertors. Monitoring was on PMC AML1's & IB1's. For the vocals, the chain was a Calrec CL1170 compressor (an expanded BBC AM6/17 design) and a Focusrite ISA 85110 EQ (as used in the Focusrite console). Bass went through a Distressor (in opto mode), the guitar went through a Urei 1176LN comp, and again they both went through Focusrite ISA 85110 EQ's. Guitar was quite hissy. I tried both noise reduction and re-amping, but in the end it was always a compromise over what was a pretty good tone, so I left it. You can hear it quite clearly on the intro. Overheads went through a McDSP MC2000 multiband compressor in an attempt to readdress the crash heavy / snare light balance, without it sounding unnatural. They then went through a Tritone Valvetone EQ - for thickening more than EQ'ing. The bass drum track was useless to me, basically because it didn't even sound like the same bass drum you heard in the overheads. In this instance I think it was a case of the wrong mic in the wrong place - it's just all low end thud and no tone - great for rock but useless for jazz. So, I used Drumagog to blend a similar sounding multisampled bass drum in to the bass drum track for the attack and body part of the sound. Without such a tool I'd have left it out entirely. Sax and trombone went through a dbx 165A and another Urei 1176 (can't remember which way round without checking the session) and again through some Focusrite ISA 85110's for EQ. Reverb was an EMT plate setting from Digidesign's ReVibe, and I also used iZotope Ozone3's multiband comp and widener on the 2bus. There's a bit of volume automation on the horn and vocal parts, and also the high end expander in Ozone, but none on any of the sends.

MIX 3: Band Akai (Guide Mix)
ITB. Very rough guide mix done by the band in their Akai DPS16 with minimal processing so you can hear more or less what we had to work with!

MIX 4: "musicproject"
No info yet

MIX 5: "Hugh"
ITB. Mixed in Logic using mainly Waves and Elemental Audio plug-ins. Waves Renaissance compressor with appropriate settings on guitar, sax, bass, kick, drums, trombone, Waves Renaissance Vox on vocals. All treated with various Space Designer presets - vocal plate, guitar room, bass booth, sax chamber, brass plate, big kick, bright drums. then some EQ on bass and drums. master buss reverb - Space Designer Short Plate, compressor - Waves RComp, EQ - EA Equium, Limiter - EA Finis.

MIX 6: Dave Lewthwaite
ITB. AMD Athlon XP 3200+ 1Gb RAM, Creative Audigy 2 Platinum Ex, 160Gb RAID-0 (Stripe) Project Disks, Behringer Truth 2030A Monitors, Yamaha MG16/4. Mixed in the box with Cubase SX and only included effects, control surface Behringer BCF2000 was also used. My aim (as a beginner) was to keep it as simple as possible, yet still aiming for a pleasing sound. Tracks were split into mono using Adobe Audition, apart from the drums, obviously, and converted to 16-Bit/48kHz to conform with my restrictive ASIO drivers. All that is on there is a little 2:1 compression on the vocals and again over the entire mix and a slight amount of reverb over the entire mix - and thats it! the rest is just level setting and pan. The effects were simply 'VST Dynamics' and the 'Roomworks' reverb. Exporting was a matter of hitting record in cubase to record the stereo output back to another track, then imported into Audition for normalisation and a quick tidy at the beginning and end, the track was then exported as MP3 44.1kHz 16-bit from Audition.

MIX 7: "dunch"
ITB. Mixed "in the box" using Sonar 5. The only non-Sonar plugin used was the free Blockfish compressor from Digital Fishphones. I monitored on Genelec 1029s + 1091 sub, and also a cheap old Sony hifi system. After I listened to the guide mix I decided I wanted something a bit more intimate, like you were listening to them close up in a small venue. Drums & Kick I compressed and eq'd till I felt they had a bit more punch and the kick was distinct from the bass. Bass was slightly compressed to even it out, no eq. Guitar was slightly compressed to even it out, no eq. Sax I eq'd slightly to make it a bit less honky. Trombone I eq'd to thin it out and stop it fighting with everything else, except when it was playing the solo part when I used no eq. Vocals I used no eq, but did compress a little. Listening back just now I'd like to back off compression a tiny bit. I added a plate reverb to the vocals (medium plate preset in Sonar convolution reverb). I varied the wet/dry throughout the song - pretty dry at the beginning, wetter as the vocals got louder. Everything else had varying amounts of room preset, again using the convolution reverb. I mixed fairly low, peaking the master bus at -4dB. No compression or eq on the master bus. Exported at 44.1K/16, using pow-r 3 dither from Sonar's mix bus down to 16bit. Topped and tailed then converted to mp3 using lame.

MIX 8: "stemwinder"
ITB. PC, ProTools 7, Digi002 (but mixed entirely ITB due to time constraints), PMC TB2s monitors, PSP Vintage Warmer, PSP Master Compressor, DigiDesign DVerbt

MIX 9: "Mr Tom"
ITB. Mixed entirely in Logic 7.1, using no third party plug-ins, on Tannoy Active Reveals

MIX 10: "DarrenSW"
No info yet

MIX 11: "Wonkey Wabbit"
ITB. 3.0GHz P4 with 1Mb RAM, M-Audio Delta-66, Cubase SX2.2, UAD-1 card, Behringer B3021 monitors (must get something better!), Wavelab V3. I didn't do anything fancy with the tracks like James but I split the files to mono in Waveleb (except the drum track) and converted the files to 24/44.1. I then edited them as much as possible to cut down on spill. Put a high and low pass filter on the kick to cut down on the hat/cymbal spill and take out some of the boominess and then added a touch of compression. I used 2 UAD Realverbs - one for vocals ( based on the wooden room preset which I like for vocals) and one for the brass and guitars (based on the jazz club preset - what else!). Most things had the UAD 1176LN compressor or LA2A limiter on them and I generally used the Pultec EQs on the tracks as well. I used the SX 'Q' filter on some tracks in a cut mode only. A bit of volume automation and that was it.

"Extraborg" (Awaiting inclusion on site)
ITB. Logic Express


192kbps mp3 mixes due to Darren at sos@liquidbughunt.co.uk no later than 19.00hrs Wednesday 2nd August - please make sure we know your Forum name.

GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND/OR STREAM ALL THE MIXES!

Have fun!

Edited by James Lehmann (31/07/06 08:49 PM)

My mix was done in Pro-Tools HD, but mainly using outboard vintage comps and eq's as inserts on each channel, through Apogee AD/DA 16X convertors. Monitoring was on PMC AML1's & IB1's.

For the vocals, the chain was a Calrec CL1170 compressor (an expanded BBC AM6/17 design) and a Focusrite ISA 85110 EQ (as used in the Focusrite console).

Bass went through a Distressor (in opto mode), the guitar went through a Urei 1176LN comp, and again they both went through Focusrite ISA 85110 EQ's. Guitar was quite hissy. I tried both noise reduction and re-amping, but in the end it was always a compromise over what was a pretty good tone, so I left it. You can hear it quite clearly on the intro.

Overheads went through a McDSP MC2000 multiband compressor in an attempt to readdress the crash heavy / snare light balance, without it sounding unnatural. They then went through a Tritone Valvetone EQ - for thickening more than EQ'ing.

The bass drum track was useless to me, basically because it didn't even sound like the same bass drum you heard in the overheads. In this instance I think it was a case of the wrong mic in the wrong place - it's just all low end thud and no tone - great for rock but useless for jazz. So, I used Drumagog to blend a similar sounding multisampled bass drum in to the bass drum track for the attack and body part of the sound. Without such a tool I'd have left it out entirely.

Sax and trombone went through a dbx 165A and another Urei 1176 (can't remember which way round without checking the session) and again through some Focusrite ISA 85110's for EQ.

Reverb was an EMT plate setting from Digidesign's ReVibe, and I also used iZotope Ozone3's multiband comp and widener on the 2bus.

There's a bit of volume automation on the horn and vocal parts, and also the high end expander in Ozone, but none on any of the sends.

After sending a version at the wrong bit rate, hopefully the correct one will have landed by now. Thanks Darren!
Loaded into Cubase SL3 and mixed on a Yamaha 02R. Just used one reverb from a Lexicon MPX550. I cheated a bit and changed some of the music. There's a couple of places where the bass player uses the same note for ages, I pasted another note in to give the speakers (Mackie 824) a rest! I didn't like the way the drums fell in at the start, or at the very end, so I cut them a bit. Also, I know the kick has been slagged off, but I've stuck it in a few extra places just to make it feel wanted. The vocalist- really nice voice I think- had a habit of singing an "a" sound before some lyrics, usually "a- bewitched". Took them out. It was probably a really important part of the jazz feel of the song and I'm going to be sued. Also, there was a wee pop on the first "simpering", so I took that out. I reallly must get out more.....
Oh, and I moved some of the guitarists chords a bit, and a few brass bits.
I do have the TC Electronic Finalizer in the 02R, but as others haven't resorted to mastering, I didn't touch it.
I hadn't turned my studio on for months, so this was good fun.

--------------------
Cubase, guitars.

Edited by Lime ZRX (31/07/06 10:20 PM)

"Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered" Mix-Off

12 mixes so far and counting!...

Just a reminder deadline is tomorrow evening, ie 19.00hrs Wednesday 2nd August!

GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND/OR STREAM ALL THE MIXES!


Participant update:

ITB = In the box, mixed entirely within a DAW
OTB = Out of the box, mixed using analog processing

(NB: Participants - do please provide as much detail as you like about how you mixed and what monitors you used etc and I'll include it here - this is a Music Technology Forum after all and I think folks are interested.)

MIX 1: James Lehmann
OTB/ITB. My overall mix goal - making this production, recorded on very basic equipment, sound as expensive as possible; fixing a number of unwanted technical problems inherent in the raw tracks; preserving the dynamic and feel of the live take as you can hear the band play well together so the mix should reflect that. Firstly each individual track was re-recorded at 24/44.1k by being run out and back through a Metric Halo 2882 via a Speck ASC-T EQ and a Drawmer 1968-ME compressor for warmth, colour and character. Tracks were then edited to remove unnecessary spill and extraneous noise. Further corrective EQ was added ITB with Logic Channel EQ and Metric Halo Channelstrip - the latter was also used for volume adjustments as the resolution is much finer than Logic's and it sounds better. ChannelStrip's compressor was also used to deal with (significant) drum spike and kick problems - frequency-dependent sidechain input was very useful here. Sax and Trombone each required a heavily customised ChannelStrip patch with EQ & compression to warm them up and fill them out, and the Kick required some major corrective surgery to get anything remotely useable. Guitar went through a custom Logic Guitar Amp Pro patch and then a tiny amount of EQ correction with Channel EQ to make it 'sit' with the vocals, Bass I left largely alone. Reverb was a TC M300 set to TC Classic Hall which was patched into the S/P-DIF loop of the MH2882, with some EQ on the return. Volume and EQ automation inserted where needed (ie solos etc). Finally, the mix was summed and again sent out and back through the MH2882 (note: not summed in Logic) via the Specks (fine lo-end roll-off) and the Drawmer (very gentle compression) to create a nice pre-master. Elemental Audio Finis was used to raise the overall volume peak to -0.15dB but no limiting was used (death to the loudness wars!); the resulting 24-bit master was dithered back down to 16/44.1k and converted to a 192kbps mp3 in iTunes. All monitoring done on Blue Sky ProDesks.

MIX 2: "Vinylizor"
OTB/ITB. My mix was done in Pro-Tools HD, but mainly using outboard vintage comps and eq's as inserts on each channel, through Apogee AD/DA 16X convertors. Monitoring was on PMC AML1's & IB1's. For the vocals, the chain was a Calrec CL1170 compressor (an expanded BBC AM6/17 design) and a Focusrite ISA 85110 EQ (as used in the Focusrite console). Bass went through a Distressor (in opto mode), the guitar went through a Urei 1176LN comp, and again they both went through Focusrite ISA 85110 EQ's. Guitar was quite hissy. I tried both noise reduction and re-amping, but in the end it was always a compromise over what was a pretty good tone, so I left it. You can hear it quite clearly on the intro. Overheads went through a McDSP MC2000 multiband compressor in an attempt to readdress the crash heavy / snare light balance, without it sounding unnatural. They then went through a Tritone Valvetone EQ - for thickening more than EQ'ing. The bass drum track was useless to me, basically because it didn't even sound like the same bass drum you heard in the overheads. In this instance I think it was a case of the wrong mic in the wrong place - it's just all low end thud and no tone - great for rock but useless for jazz. So, I used Drumagog to blend a similar sounding multisampled bass drum in to the bass drum track for the attack and body part of the sound. Without such a tool I'd have left it out entirely. Sax and trombone went through a dbx 165A and another Urei 1176 (can't remember which way round without checking the session) and again through some Focusrite ISA 85110's for EQ. Reverb was an EMT plate setting from Digidesign's ReVibe, and I also used iZotope Ozone3's multiband comp and widener on the 2bus. There's a bit of volume automation on the horn and vocal parts, and also the high end expander in Ozone, but none on any of the sends.

MIX 3: Band Akai (Guide Mix)
ITB. Very rough guide mix done by the band in their Akai DPS16 with minimal processing so you can hear more or less what we had to work with!

MIX 4: "musicproject"
No info yet

MIX 5: "Hugh"
ITB. Mixed in Logic using mainly Waves and Elemental Audio plug-ins. Waves Renaissance compressor with appropriate settings on guitar, sax, bass, kick, drums, trombone, Waves Renaissance Vox on vocals. All treated with various Space Designer presets - vocal plate, guitar room, bass booth, sax chamber, brass plate, big kick, bright drums. then some EQ on bass and drums. master buss reverb - Space Designer Short Plate, compressor - Waves RComp, EQ - EA Equium, Limiter - EA Finis.

MIX 6: Dave Lewthwaite
ITB. AMD Athlon XP 3200+ 1Gb RAM, Creative Audigy 2 Platinum Ex, 160Gb RAID-0 (Stripe) Project Disks, Behringer Truth 2030A Monitors, Yamaha MG16/4. Mixed in the box with Cubase SX and only included effects, control surface Behringer BCF2000 was also used. My aim (as a beginner) was to keep it as simple as possible, yet still aiming for a pleasing sound. Tracks were split into mono using Adobe Audition, apart from the drums, obviously, and converted to 16-Bit/48kHz to conform with my restrictive ASIO drivers. All that is on there is a little 2:1 compression on the vocals and again over the entire mix and a slight amount of reverb over the entire mix - and thats it! the rest is just level setting and pan. The effects were simply 'VST Dynamics' and the 'Roomworks' reverb. Exporting was a matter of hitting record in cubase to record the stereo output back to another track, then imported into Audition for normalisation and a quick tidy at the beginning and end, the track was then exported as MP3 44.1kHz 16-bit from Audition.

MIX 7: "dunch"
ITB. Mixed "in the box" using Sonar 5. The only non-Sonar plugin used was the free Blockfish compressor from Digital Fishphones. I monitored on Genelec 1029s + 1091 sub, and also a cheap old Sony hifi system. After I listened to the guide mix I decided I wanted something a bit more intimate, like you were listening to them close up in a small venue. Drums & Kick I compressed and eq'd till I felt they had a bit more punch and the kick was distinct from the bass. Bass was slightly compressed to even it out, no eq. Guitar was slightly compressed to even it out, no eq. Sax I eq'd slightly to make it a bit less honky. Trombone I eq'd to thin it out and stop it fighting with everything else, except when it was playing the solo part when I used no eq. Vocals I used no eq, but did compress a little. Listening back just now I'd like to back off compression a tiny bit. I added a plate reverb to the vocals (medium plate preset in Sonar convolution reverb). I varied the wet/dry throughout the song - pretty dry at the beginning, wetter as the vocals got louder. Everything else had varying amounts of room preset, again using the convolution reverb. I mixed fairly low, peaking the master bus at -4dB. No compression or eq on the master bus. Exported at 44.1K/16, using pow-r 3 dither from Sonar's mix bus down to 16bit. Topped and tailed then converted to mp3 using lame.

MIX 8: "stemwinder"
ITB. PC, ProTools 7, Digi002 (but mixed entirely ITB due to time constraints), PMC TB2s monitors, PSP Vintage Warmer, PSP Master Compressor, DigiDesign DVerbt

MIX 9: "Mr Tom"
ITB. Mixed entirely in Logic 7.1, using no third party plug-ins, on Tannoy Active Reveals

MIX 10: "DarrenSW"
ITB. Mixed ITB using Cubase SL3.0 and no third party plug-ins. Have mixed it a little differently to others I've listened to, tried to stay away from the "Jazz must be almost dry" scenario by adding space i.e. reverb on Vocals; reverb and delay on the solos. Behringer Truth monitors and also little dodgy PC speakers.

MIX 11: "Wonkey Wabbit"
ITB. 3.0GHz P4 with 1Mb RAM, M-Audio Delta-66, Cubase SX2.2, UAD-1 card, Behringer B3021 monitors (must get something better!), Wavelab V3. I didn't do anything fancy with the tracks like James but I split the files to mono in Waveleb (except the drum track) and converted the files to 24/44.1. I then edited them as much as possible to cut down on spill. Put a high and low pass filter on the kick to cut down on the hat/cymbal spill and take out some of the boominess and then added a touch of compression. I used 2 UAD Realverbs - one for vocals ( based on the wooden room preset which I like for vocals) and one for the brass and guitars (based on the jazz club preset - what else!). Most things had the UAD 1176LN compressor or LA2A limiter on them and I generally used the Pultec EQs on the tracks as well. I used the SX 'Q' filter on some tracks in a cut mode only. A bit of volume automation and that was it.

MIX 12: "Lime ZRX"
ITB/OTB (digital). Loaded into Cubase SL3 and mixed on a Yamaha 02R. Just used one reverb from a Lexicon MPX550. I cheated a bit and changed some of the music. There's a couple of places where the bass player uses the same note for ages, I pasted another note in to give the speakers (Mackie 824) a rest! I didn't like the way the drums fell in at the start, or at the very end, so I cut them a bit. Also, I know the kick has been slagged off, but I've stuck it in a few extra places just to make it feel wanted. The vocalist- really nice voice I think- had a habit of singing an "a" sound before some lyrics, usually "a- bewitched". Took them out. It was probably a really important part of the jazz feel of the song and I'm going to be sued. Also, there was a wee pop on the first "simpering", so I took that out. I reallly must get out more... Oh, and I moved some of the guitarists chords a bit, and a few brass bits. I do have the TC Electronic Finalizer in the 02R, but as others haven't resorted to mastering, I didn't touch it.


192kbps mp3 mixes due to Darren at sos@liquidbughunt.co.uk no later than 19.00hrs Wednesday 2nd August - please make sure we know your Forum name.

GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND/OR STREAM ALL THE MIXES!

Have fun!

Edited by James Lehmann (01/08/06 10:53 AM)

Re: My Mix

Mixed ITB using Cubase SL3.0 and no third party plug-ins. Have mixed it a little differently to others I've listened to, tried to stay away from the "Jazz must be almost dry" scenario by adding space i.e. reverb on Vocals; reverb and delay on the solos.

Behringer Truth monitors and also little dodgy PC speakers.

Enjoyed it!

Darren

--------------------
This forum is like Hotel California...
You can log-out any time you like, but you can never leave...

Well, my mix has been sent off!

My Setup:

AMD 2.0GHz laptop, 768MB RAM, Edirol UA-20X and Cubase SX3.

It's been mixed in-the-box using Cubase and its included plugins - Q, Dynamics and Roomworks.

I've tried to keep the whole thing quite clean sounding - I thought the untreated recording sounded pretty good as it was, TBH.

I'm rather annoyed with the situation I found myself in with regards to monitoring, though, so please forgive any glaring bass issues - my KRK fund is still a good month away from completion so this has been mixed on a combination of headphones, my hifi speakers and the Behringer Truth B2030A's in my (cube-shaped, untreated) office at work. Usually I'd have checked this on the Genelecs at Uni, but obviously it's summer so I was stuck with what was to hand.

Looking forward to listening to the rest of the mixes, hope I haven't embarassed myself too horrifically with this one!

Charlotte

Charlotte - look forward to hearing your mix although you may have the rather unlucky honour of being "MIX 13"!

Quote:

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Charlotte - look forward to hearing your mix although you may have the rather unlucky honour of being "MIX 13"!

---

Lol!

I'm sure I can cope with that - my thirteenth birthday fell on a Friday the 13th... you get used to being cursed after a while!

Edit: And this is my thirteenth post! Argh, my brain hurts now...

Edited by CharlotteL (01/08/06 11:01 AM)

Ha! Finally got it together. Missed my pints of Cwrw Haf in the pub, too!

Well, I mixed it a major Neve-equipped studio I luckily have access to. All the tracks were transferred to 2" 8-track tape with no noise reduction, running at 64 ips. Reverb was from three (!) EMT 140 plates and a Cranesong compressor for . . . joking . . . it was mixed in Logic 7.1 on my just-out-of-guarantee iMac – All Logic plugs except some Tritone EQs and a couple of Altiverbs.

Monitoring with some PMC TB2+ loudhailers (powered by a Carver PM 1.5 amp) and a REL Stadium sub.

I didn't mind the drums too much, as they have a bit of that slightly boxy, muffled 'jazz' sound – except the OTT cymbals. The kick needed some work, and I thought the tracks were all phase-inverted, so I fixed that.

The hardest thing was the vocal – there are some nasty compression artifacts and what sound like edits, that spoil it a bit for me, though I tried to cover them with the band!

I just went for a natural-ish sound that I liked, rather than mix 'jazzy' (whtever that is) . I found myself enjoying the mixing, using quite a lot of volume automation in the end. I did no editing or arrangement-changing.

I put on a spot of 'angel dust' in WaveBurner, and converted to MP3.

Now I'll give it a rest, and listen to the others in the evening!

Guy

--------------------
PA stuff on FB

EDIT: PLEASE SEE UPDATED POST FUTHER DOWN THIS THREAD

"Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered" Mix-Off

The reponse to this has been amazing - 17 mixes so far and counting! We should do this more often!

Well done to everyone taking part! I think the 'competitive' nature of this exercise has been largely eclipsed by the general sense of fun and challenge that participants have reported, which is just fine by me. The interest is chiefly in taking part and hearing the other results. Besides I'm not sure I have the heart to ask anyone to sit though 17+ mixes of this and make a selection! But maybe we might do a 'shortlist' of 5 or so (excluding me!) and see if we can scrape up a token prize of sorts from somewhere. Watch this space...

Once again many thanks first of all to The Ah-Q Arkestra, and in particular my mate Dave (band-leader, guitarist and session engineer) for giving permission to use their excellent playing and material for this Mix-Off. And of course to Darren (aka "stemwinder") for his tireless work and generosity in setting up a special website for us and updating it regularly!

Just a reminder deadline is tomorrow evening, ie 19.00hrs Wednesday 2nd August!

GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND/OR STREAM ALL THE MIXES!


Participant update (in the same order they appear on the website):

ITB = In the box, mixed entirely within a DAW
OTB = Out of the box, mixed using analog processing

(NB: Participants - do please provide as much detail as you like about how you mixed and what monitors you used etc and I'll include it here - this is a Music Technology Forum after all and I think folks are interested.)

MIX 1: James Lehmann
OTB/ITB. My overall mix goal - making this production, recorded on very basic equipment, sound as expensive as possible; fixing a number of unwanted technical problems inherent in the raw tracks; preserving the dynamic and feel of the live take as you can hear the band play well together so the mix should reflect that. Firstly each individual track was re-recorded at 24/44.1k by being run out and back through a Metric Halo 2882 via a Speck ASC-T EQ and a Drawmer 1968-ME compressor for warmth, colour and character. Tracks were then edited to remove unnecessary spill and extraneous noise. Further corrective EQ was added ITB with Logic Channel EQ and Metric Halo Channelstrip - the latter was also used for volume adjustments as the resolution is much finer than Logic's and it sounds better. ChannelStrip's compressor was also used to deal with (significant) drum spike and kick problems - frequency-dependent sidechain input was very useful here. Sax and Trombone each required a heavily customised ChannelStrip patch with EQ & compression to warm them up and fill them out, and the Kick required some major corrective surgery to get anything remotely useable. Guitar went through a custom Logic Guitar Amp Pro patch and then a tiny amount of EQ correction with Channel EQ to make it 'sit' with the vocals, Bass I left largely alone. Reverb was a TC M300 set to TC Classic Hall which was patched into the S/P-DIF loop of the MH2882, with some EQ on the return. Volume and EQ automation inserted where needed (ie solos etc). Finally, the mix was summed and again sent out and back through the MH2882 (note: not summed in Logic) via the Specks (fine lo-end roll-off) and the Drawmer (very gentle compression) to create a nice pre-master. Elemental Audio Finis was used to raise the overall volume peak to -0.15dB but no limiting was used (death to the loudness wars!); the resulting 24-bit master was dithered back down to 16/44.1k and converted to a 192kbps mp3 in iTunes. All monitoring done on Blue Sky ProDesks.

MIX 2: "Vinylizor"
OTB/ITB. My mix was done in Pro-Tools HD, but mainly using outboard vintage comps and eq's as inserts on each channel, through Apogee AD/DA 16X convertors. Monitoring was on PMC AML1's & IB1's. For the vocals, the chain was a Calrec CL1170 compressor (an expanded BBC AM6/17 design) and a Focusrite ISA 85110 EQ (as used in the Focusrite console). Bass went through a Distressor (in opto mode), the guitar went through a Urei 1176LN comp, and again they both went through Focusrite ISA 85110 EQ's. Guitar was quite hissy. I tried both noise reduction and re-amping, but in the end it was always a compromise over what was a pretty good tone, so I left it. You can hear it quite clearly on the intro. Overheads went through a McDSP MC2000 multiband compressor in an attempt to readdress the crash heavy / snare light balance, without it sounding unnatural. They then went through a Tritone Valvetone EQ - for thickening more than EQ'ing. The bass drum track was useless to me, basically because it didn't even sound like the same bass drum you heard in the overheads. In this instance I think it was a case of the wrong mic in the wrong place - it's just all low end thud and no tone - great for rock but useless for jazz. So, I used Drumagog to blend a similar sounding multisampled bass drum in to the bass drum track for the attack and body part of the sound. Without such a tool I'd have left it out entirely. Sax and trombone went through a dbx 165A and another Urei 1176 (can't remember which way round without checking the session) and again through some Focusrite ISA 85110's for EQ. Reverb was an EMT plate setting from Digidesign's ReVibe, and I also used iZotope Ozone3's multiband comp and widener on the 2bus. There's a bit of volume automation on the horn and vocal parts, and also the high end expander in Ozone, but none on any of the sends.

MIX 3: Band Akai (Guide Mix)
ITB. Very rough guide mix done by the band in their Akai DPS16 with minimal processing so you can hear more or less what we had to work with!

MIX 4: "musicproject"
No info yet

MIX 5: "Hugh"
ITB. Mixed in Logic using mainly Waves and Elemental Audio plug-ins. Waves Renaissance compressor with appropriate settings on guitar, sax, bass, kick, drums, trombone, Waves Renaissance Vox on vocals. All treated with various Space Designer presets - vocal plate, guitar room, bass booth, sax chamber, brass plate, big kick, bright drums. then some EQ on bass and drums. master buss reverb - Space Designer Short Plate, compressor - Waves RComp, EQ - EA Equium, Limiter - EA Finis.

MIX 6: Dave Lewthwaite
ITB. AMD Athlon XP 3200+ 1Gb RAM, Creative Audigy 2 Platinum Ex, 160Gb RAID-0 (Stripe) Project Disks, Behringer Truth 2030A Monitors, Yamaha MG16/4. Mixed in the box with Cubase SX and only included effects, control surface Behringer BCF2000 was also used. My aim (as a beginner) was to keep it as simple as possible, yet still aiming for a pleasing sound. Tracks were split into mono using Adobe Audition, apart from the drums, obviously, and converted to 16-Bit/48kHz to conform with my restrictive ASIO drivers. All that is on there is a little 2:1 compression on the vocals and again over the entire mix and a slight amount of reverb over the entire mix - and thats it! the rest is just level setting and pan. The effects were simply 'VST Dynamics' and the 'Roomworks' reverb. Exporting was a matter of hitting record in cubase to record the stereo output back to another track, then imported into Audition for normalisation and a quick tidy at the beginning and end, the track was then exported as MP3 44.1kHz 16-bit from Audition.

MIX 7: "dunch"
ITB. Mixed "in the box" using Sonar 5. The only non-Sonar plugin used was the free Blockfish compressor from Digital Fishphones. I monitored on Genelec 1029s + 1091 sub, and also a cheap old Sony hifi system. After I listened to the guide mix I decided I wanted something a bit more intimate, like you were listening to them close up in a small venue. Drums & Kick I compressed and eq'd till I felt they had a bit more punch and the kick was distinct from the bass. Bass was slightly compressed to even it out, no eq. Guitar was slightly compressed to even it out, no eq. Sax I eq'd slightly to make it a bit less honky. Trombone I eq'd to thin it out and stop it fighting with everything else, except when it was playing the solo part when I used no eq. Vocals I used no eq, but did compress a little. Listening back just now I'd like to back off compression a tiny bit. I added a plate reverb to the vocals (medium plate preset in Sonar convolution reverb). I varied the wet/dry throughout the song - pretty dry at the beginning, wetter as the vocals got louder. Everything else had varying amounts of room preset, again using the convolution reverb. I mixed fairly low, peaking the master bus at -4dB. No compression or eq on the master bus. Exported at 44.1K/16, using pow-r 3 dither from Sonar's mix bus down to 16bit. Topped and tailed then converted to mp3 using lame.

MIX 8: "stemwinder"
ITB. PC, ProTools 7, Digi002 (but mixed entirely ITB due to time constraints), PMC TB2s monitors, PSP Vintage Warmer, PSP Master Compressor, DigiDesign DVerbt

MIX 9: "Mr Tom"
ITB. Mixed entirely in Logic 7.1, using no third party plug-ins, on Tannoy Active Reveals

MIX 10: "DarrenSW"
ITB. Mixed ITB using Cubase SL3.0 and no third party plug-ins. Have mixed it a little differently to others I've listened to, tried to stay away from the "Jazz must be almost dry" scenario by adding space i.e. reverb on Vocals; reverb and delay on the solos. Behringer Truth monitors and also little dodgy PC speakers.

MIX 11: "Wonkey Wabbit"
ITB. 3.0GHz P4 with 1Mb RAM, M-Audio Delta-66, Cubase SX2.2, UAD-1 card, Behringer B3021 monitors (must get something better!), Wavelab V3. I didn't do anything fancy with the tracks like James but I split the files to mono in Waveleb (except the drum track) and converted the files to 24/44.1. I then edited them as much as possible to cut down on spill. Put a high and low pass filter on the kick to cut down on the hat/cymbal spill and take out some of the boominess and then added a touch of compression. I used 2 UAD Realverbs - one for vocals ( based on the wooden room preset which I like for vocals) and one for the brass and guitars (based on the jazz club preset - what else!). Most things had the UAD 1176LN compressor or LA2A limiter on them and I generally used the Pultec EQs on the tracks as well. I used the SX 'Q' filter on some tracks in a cut mode only. A bit of volume automation and that was it.

MIX 12: "Lime ZRX"
ITB/OTB (digital). Loaded into Cubase SL3 and mixed on a Yamaha 02R. Just used one reverb from a Lexicon MPX550. I cheated a bit and changed some of the music. There's a couple of places where the bass player uses the same note for ages, I pasted another note in to give the speakers (Mackie 824) a rest! I didn't like the way the drums fell in at the start, or at the very end, so I cut them a bit. Also, I know the kick has been slagged off, but I've stuck it in a few extra places just to make it feel wanted. The vocalist- really nice voice I think- had a habit of singing an "a" sound before some lyrics, usually "a- bewitched". Took them out. It was probably a really important part of the jazz feel of the song and I'm going to be sued. Also, there was a wee pop on the first "simpering", so I took that out. I reallly must get out more... Oh, and I moved some of the guitarists chords a bit, and a few brass bits. I do have the TC Electronic Finalizer in the 02R, but as others haven't resorted to mastering, I didn't touch it.

"CharlotteL" (Awaiting inclusion on site)
ITB. AMD 2.0GHz laptop, 768MB RAM, Edirol UA-20X and Cubase SX3. It's been mixed in-the-box using Cubase and its included plugins - Q, Dynamics and Roomworks. I've tried to keep the whole thing quite clean sounding - I thought the untreated recording sounded pretty good as it was, TBH. I'm rather annoyed with the situation I found myself in with regards to monitoring, though, so please forgive any glaring bass issues - my KRK fund is still a good month away from completion so this has been mixed on a combination of headphones, my hifi speakers and the Behringer Truth B2030A's in my (cube-shaped, untreated) office at work. Usually I'd have checked this on the Genelecs at Uni, but obviously it's summer so I was stuck with what was to hand.

Guy Johnson (Awaiting inclusion on site)
ITB. Mixed in Logic 7.1 on my just-out-of-guarantee iMac – All Logic plugs except some Tritone EQs and a couple of Altiverbs. Monitoring with some PMC TB2+ loudhailers (powered by a Carver PM 1.5 amp) and a REL Stadium sub. I didn't mind the drums too much, as they have a bit of that slightly boxy, muffled 'jazz' sound – except the OTT cymbals. The kick needed some work, and I thought the tracks were all phase-inverted, so I fixed that. The hardest thing was the vocal – there are some nasty compression artifacts and what sound like edits, that spoil it a bit for me, though I tried to cover them with the band! I just went for a natural-ish sound that I liked, rather than mix 'jazzy' (whtever that is) . I found myself enjoying the mixing, using quite a lot of volume automation in the end. I did no editing or arrangement-changing. I put on a spot of 'angel dust' in WaveBurner, and converted to MP3.

"Song Doctor" (Awaiting inclusion on site)
ITB, ProTools LE, with KRK Rockit 5's, and a nice high-back executive chair from OfficeWorks. With my mix, as I've never done anything with jazz, I tried to simulate the setup of a live jazz gig I saw recently. So basically the drums are panned quite left, and everything else spread out 'beside' it. The reverb from the kit and voice etc is panned to the right, as this something I noticed happening at the jazz gig. I have a little bit of overdrive on the guitar, and some compression and EQ here and there. Overall its a bit of an experiment.

"JumpeySpyder" (Awaiting inclusion on site)
Mixed ITB using Sonar 5 and bundled plug-ins. (about 8 hours in total) Alesis M1 active mk II monitors in an untreated 3 x 3 x 3 room. I had lots of trouble mixing this track - I usually play with synth / industrial stuff that I don’t have to worry about sounding unnatural, but I’ve really enjoyed myself. What I’ve done:- I manually stripped out a fair amount of spill - I’m not sure if I’ve done enough but it would be easy to spend a lot of time here. Major EQ happened on kick + trombone. I’ve added a little gentle compression (hopefully) on most of the tracks to even things out and a sprinkling of reverb to vocals and solo parts. I found the point where the brass first came in very tricky and couldn’t make it sit right. In the end, I couldn’t get it right so I tampered with it. It’s still not right - sorry. Also at this point the trombone sounded a little out of tune to me ( its probably ‘one of those fancy jazz things’) I might have meddled with some Autotune if I had it. I also couldn’t resist adding a little edge to the guitar with an amp simulation. I’m expecting to be bottom of the pile, but looking forward to seeing what everyone else has done and hopefully getting some pointers.

"Herewego" (Awaiting inclusion on site)
ITB: P4 2.66, 1 gig ram. Cubase 5, extra plugins were PSP Vintage Warmer, hydratone EQ, glaceverb (free) reverb, and waves rennaissance vox on the vocal. Monitored on Studio Precision Active 8 monitors, Koss headphones and crappy PC speakers. I decided the important thing for me was to get an intimate vocal sound, as it seemed to suit the performance and the song. First - Imported all the tracks and split them into mono, even the overheads. Things I probably should not have done, but they seemed right to me: 1. Tuned the bass first of all - yes all of it. I thought the tuning generally of all instruments was slightly loose, so if the bass was 'right' it might help give a good foundation. 2. Tuned a few vocals bits, nothing major, happy to leave some pitchy moments, it was more some of the passing/grace notes that I tightened up a tad. For tuning I use Melodyne Uno. 3. Fixed the guitarist's 'fluffed' chord in the intro. I think/hope he'll thank me. Kick - hated it, applied some EQ and compression, but I also looked up an SOS article about replacing an audio part with a midi one. Drumagog would have been nice actually! It took an hour, I learnt a new technique, and mixed a midi (JV2020) kick in slightly behind the original to help it out a bit. Overheads - left alone except small compression, some eq to lift the tom/snare range a touch compared to the cymbals. Bass - a bit of compression, some eq. Sax solo - eq to mellow it. Trombone solo - left alone. Sax/trombone (excepting the solos) - I grouped them, a touch of eq on the sax, a bit on the group. Guitar - one eq for the intro section and last chord, another for the rest to leave more room for the bass. Touch of reverb. All the 'band' was grouped and had a touch of reverb, the Glaceverb freebie (it's a bit of an odd plugin, but I like it in some situations and it seemed to work here). Voice - lovely vocal! I tuned a few notes that I felt were probably due to the pressure of doing lots of tracks in quick succession. Rennaissance Vox to compress, plus some eq from Hydratone to brighten and warm slightly, touch of reverb from Glaceverb. Plenty of fader automation, especially raising the level at ends of notes and the lower registers, eg the "dered" of "Bewitched, bothered and bewildered", to try and keep it sounding intimate. Generally a few bits of automation on the faders, and some Hydratone EQ and compression using PSP Vintage Warmer to glue the mix slightly. This is not what I usually get the chance to do, so it presented some unusual challenges for me - which I thoroughly enjoyed!


192kbps mp3 mixes due to Darren at sos@liquidbughunt.co.uk no later than 19.00hrs Wednesday 2nd August - please make sure we know your Forum name.

GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND/OR STREAM ALL THE MIXES!

Have fun!

Quote Guy Johnson:

---

I mixed it a major Neve-equipped studio I luckily have access to. All the tracks were transferred to 2" 8-track tape with no noise reduction, running at 64 ips. Reverb was from three (!) EMT 140 plates and a Cranesong compressor for . . .

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LOL! You had me going there just for a second Guy! Like, just how good could this mix be under those conditions!

Darren usually gets busy updating things each evening so I look forward to hearing your mix hot off the press tonight!

I agree I think the vox was a shade over-compressed on the way into their Akai, but it's not too bad. I found the drums FAR worse of a problem - no matter what level you mix them at they just don't 'sit' right. I often find myself in a minority on this Forum raging against just how poor I think the Rode NT5's are - wrestling with them yet again on this production has done nothing to change my mind!

Is it too late to enter? It isnt too late in Aus, dunno what the time is there, lol. I've sent my mix, so if it's not too late, here is some info:

ITB, ProTools LE, with KRK Rockit 5's, and a nice high-back executive chair from OfficeWorks.

With my mix, as I've never done anything with jazz, I tried to simulate the setup of a live jazz gig I saw recently. So basically the drums are panned quite left, and everything else spread out 'beside' it. The reverb from the kit and voice etc is panned to the right, as this something I noticed happening at the jazz gig. I have a little bit of overdrive on the guitar, and some compression and EQ here and there. Overall its a bit of an experiment :-)

Cheers
Matt

Just emailed my mix!!

‘Bewitched’ by a stunning vocal, ‘Bothered’ mostly by the kick and the trombone &‘Bewildered’ how to make a decent mix.

Mixed ITB using Sonar 5 and bundled plug-ins. (about 8 hours in total) Alesis M1 active mk II monitors in an untreated 3 x 3 x 3 room

I had lots of trouble mixing this track - I usually play with synth / industrial stuff that I don’t have to worry about sounding unnatural, but I’ve really enjoyed myself.

What I’ve done:-
I manually stripped out a fair amount of spill - I’m not sure if I’ve done enough but it would be easy to spend a lot of time here.
Major EQ happened on kick + trombone.
I’ve added a little gentle compression (hopefully) on most of the tracks to even things out and a sprinkling of reverb to vocals and solo parts.

I found the point where the brass first came in very tricky and couldn’t make it sit right. In the end, I couldn’t get it right so I tampered with it.

It’s still not right - sorry.

Also at this point the trombone sounded a little out of tune to me ( its probably ‘one of those fancy jazz things’) I might have meddled with some Autotune if I had it.

I also couldn’t resist adding a little edge to the guitar with an amp simulation.

I’m expecting to be bottom of the pile, but looking forward to seeing what everyone else has done and hopefully getting some pointers.

Edited by Jumpeyspyder (01/08/06 01:05 PM)

Sent mine in last night - great fun! First - thanks again to James for organising this, and Darren for hosting.

ITB: P4 2.66, 1 gig ram. Cubase 5, extra plugins were PSP Vintage Warmer, hydratone EQ, glaceverb (free) reverb, and waves rennaissance vox on the vocal. Monitored on Studio Precision Active 8 monitors, Koss headphones and crappy PC speakers.

I decided the important thing for me was to get an intimate vocal sound, as it seemed to suit the performance and the song.

First - Imported all the tracks and split them into mono, even the overheads.

Things I probably should not have done, but they seemed right to me:
1. Tuned the bass first of all - yes all of it. I thought the tuning generally of all instruments was slightly loose, so if the bass was 'right' it might help give a good foundation.
2. Tuned a few vocals bits, nothing major, happy to leave some pitchy moments, it was more some of the passing/grace notes that I tightened up a tad. For tuning I use Melodyne Uno.
3. Fixed the guitarist's 'fluffed' chord in the intro. I think/hope he'll thank me :-)

Kick - hated it, applied some EQ and compression, but I also looked up an SOS article about replacing an audio part with a midi one. Drumagog would have been nice actually! It took an hour, I learnt a new technique, and mixed a midi (JV2020) kick in slightly behind the original to help it out a bit.

Overheads - left alone except small compression, some eq to lift the tom/snare range a touch compared to the cymbals.

Bass - a bit of compression, some eq.

Sax solo - eq to mellow it

Trombone solo - left alone

Sax/trombone (excepting the solos) - I grouped them, a touch of eq on the sax, a bit on the group.

Guitar - one eq for the intro section and last chord, another for the rest to leave more room for the bass. Touch of reverb.

All the 'band' was grouped and had a touch of reverb, the Glaceverb freebie (it's a bit of an odd plugin, but I like it in some situations and it seemed to work here)

Voice - lovely vocal! I tuned a few notes that I felt were probably due to the pressure of doing lots of tracks in quick succession. Rennaissance Vox to compress, plus some eq from Hydratone to brighten and warm slightly, touch of reverb from Glaceverb. Plenty of fader automation, especially raising the level at ends of notes and the lower registers, eg the "dered" of "Bewitched, bothered and bewildered", to try and keep it sounding intimate.

Generally a few bits of automation on the faders, and some Hydratone EQ and compression using PSP Vintage Warmer to glue the mix slightly.

This is not what I usually get the chance to do, so it presented some unusual challenges for me - which I thoroughly enjoyed!

Quote Jumpeyspyder:

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‘Bewitched’ by a stunning vocal, ‘Bothered’ mostly by the kick and the trombone &‘Bewildered’ how to make a decent mix.

---

LOL!

Entered.

Mixed ITB(aker).

Spec: AMD Athlon XP 1900, Soundblaster sound card being monitered on (decent, old, and well known) Technics speakers (and checked on headphones - haven't been able to burn a copy for the car or other systems). Sequenced in Tracktion using various plugins. Wavelab used for wave editing and transfer to mp3.

I've tried to get a sort of live jazz band feel without being retro. I remember seing footage from the Montreaux festival or somesuch when I was a yout with people like Miles Davis, and I've also got a few live jazz lp's, and that's the sort of sound I've gone for here.

I used Wavelab to seperate the samples that where paired off, and also to normalise them and manualy gate some of the spill and breath from the vocal track (which is how I normaly do vocals - never got on with gates).

Guitar and drums where more or less left alone, just run through Digital Fish Phones Blockfish, with Kjearhaus Audio's Classic reverb on the kick to give it a bit of stereo width. I've kept the drums quite low in the mix, and aimed for the kick drum to be felt when it really hits, but not really heard. Would apreciate anyone's comments on wether this has been successful. The guitar is also deliberately quite low in the mix I also panned it slightly to the right as the vocal had got a tendancy to hang to the left which I can only put down to one of the plugins it was proccessed by . Bass is left alone, with an MDA Limiter to tame it slightly.

For the brass I took a slightly different aproach and wanted to play with the way they sound a bit. I've put the sax through Bojo Softwares BJ Flanger, and then through Blockfish to level out the flangeing a bit. I've tried to keep it subtle and not dissapear into the realms of space jazzz. For the Trombone I used a Big Tick Dual Delay, which gives a nice Rico 'The Man from Wareika' sound, which had to stay in. I also panned the sax slightly to the left and the trombone to the right.

The vocals was the bit I had the most to do to as I wasn't completely happy with the way it sat or the sound. I decided to try and make it a bit more gritty. None of the overdrive plugins I tried made the right noise (I always find them too digital sounding, which is ok sometimes, but not for this.) After rumaging through my vst effect folder and trying all sorts of things I decided on the Palancaware reverb plugin, set to the 'library' preset, and to beef up the bottom end I used the MDA Multiband Compressor - which together warmed it up nicely. It still didn't sit right in certain parts so I put it through yet another instance of Blockfish to try and make it push through a bit more - I know, not exactly best practise chaining compressors like that, but if it works it works, and sometimes it does! This time it didn't work quite enough. The singer was still being a bit drowned out a minute or so in. I looked at the sound spectrum of her vocal using Inspector from Elemental Audio and decided to cut everything else slightly at about 400hz to let her through, this worked nicely in one bit but not another, I tried a second sonic scoop centred around 2khz but couldn't get it to sound right. Eventualy I decided to leave the cut at 400 in and to automate the vocal level throughout, which made a few other parts sit more comfortably. This also allowed me to take Blockfish off the vocals.

This is nowhere near the sort of stuff I normaly do, I usualy deal with hip hop, and usualy use samples and loops - I very rarely have anything to do with individual instruments! It's been an interesting challange, and the sort of thing I've been looking for for a while. I've also just realised that most (if not all) of the plugins I used where freebies, Tracktion was the free version of v.1 they issued a year and a bit back, and my computer's running the dreaded soundblaster sound card! Just shows it's doable on a budget!

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He who feels punctured must have been a bubble - Lao Tsu.

brilliant idea guys my girlfriend jsut got home after a long holiday so i doubt im gonna get to do it before saturday but ill giv it a go then and as for doing it in the future that would be brilliant defo something to help people break out of only mixing their own tracks

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alienware area51m7700 3ghz 2gb(so loud but so powerful) cubase sx3, reason3, soundforge, motu 896hd interface

Well I managed to get a replacement power supply for my Powerbook, but after tweaking my mix slightly further I decided I preffered the original version anyway (which I put together the other day in just over an hour before my power supply blew up! :P).

Mixed in PT, using Liquid Mix and D-Verb. Monitoring on KRK V6's.

Chris

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Freelance Producer / Engineer | www.hernestudios.co.uk | FREE Listening sessions - see www.thelisteninggroup.org

Yeah, I know what you mean Chris. I finished and sent mine off at 5 in morning (having started it in a fit of madness at 2am!) The next day thought I really ought to fix some of the glaring problems which I seemed to miss the previous night, but in the end prefered the original.

I'm definitely up for making this a regular spot. Perhaps SOS could run it in conjunction with the magazine and the best of the last month's entries get a spot about their authors in the magazine and their track on the CD/DVD and on the website. What do other people think. I don't think any prize is really necessary but it would be nice if the mag was able to devote a double page spread to it each month since after all, equipment reviews are important but it's what we do with it which is the most important thing. Perhaps if it takes off then some of the big names you get interviewed could judge a shortlist?

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Music is the only noise for which one is obliged to pay.
(Attrib. to Alexandre Dumas)

Nice idea, but if you get 200 entrants, then some poor soul has got to sit and listen to 200 slightly different versions of the same song. How do you try and compare 200 similar mixes? OK some might be instantly dismissable but if you could bin say 25% straight away, then that still leaves you with 150 to try and remember and compare one against the other. How many times would you end up listening to that track? The will to live would quickly be lost!

Yeah, I guess you're right.

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Music is the only noise for which one is obliged to pay.
(Attrib. to Alexandre Dumas)

But an occasional mix-off like this would still be great fun. Maybe we could have a mix against the clock (say 12 hours) with a much shorter time to turn things round in (fast web server space permitting) - and announced beforehand so that everyone knew it was coming?

Have had fun listening to the results, some nice work there! I sent the wrong file, but I have sent the right one now Must label things better

Interesting how many mixes put the guitar on the right and the brass on the left, like what I did. I feel a bit odd about the brass being opposite sides of the stage . . . the species usually stick together, I've noticed!

Also the production is in two main groups – the band playing live style, which I tried, and the more shiny laid back styles. Look forward to the rest.

Guy

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PA stuff on FB

Just sent James this email.

"Hi James.

I have my mix for you. Oh, and sorry about my extremely harsh comment
i made in the thread (i am i nice guy really!), and sorry about any
offense that may have caused. I would delete it but it spoils the flow
of the thread.

Anyway, i have two versions of it, mainly because the 192kbps version
has a really nasty compressed sound to the high frequency "s" sounds.
I dont know why this is - i converted it using iTunes, which is the
only converter i own, mainly because it's un-lame. I have a 320kbps
version which sounds a lot nicer, but it's still a bit compressed-ish.

http://www.savefile.com/files/3958172 - 320kbps

http://www.savefile.com/files/8781723 - 192kbps

The mix was done in the box in Sonar 5. I wanted to get as sweet a
sound, and as professional sounding as possible. I tried to be sparing
with effects - there was a Sonitus EQ on each track (if i recall
correctly, some tracks may have been left alone), and then a Waves
TrueVerb the sax, trombone, and vox were sent to. The rest of the
mixing was with faders. The guitar was put through a bit compression
to even it out, but the only other compression used was at the end
with a little bit of PSP Vintage Warmer to bring the levels up. There
was also another EQ at the end to give it some spice. This track isn't
mastered, but then again i dont think it particularly needs to be. The
level is sufficient in my opinion. I used Event ALP-5 monitors and the
Bose system in a Mazda 6 to get a range of environments. The computer
was an Inta-Audio Custom Built model, dual 3.2ghz Pentium 4, 2GB RAM.
This track was also mixed wearing sandals, and drinking a glass of
Hoegaarden Whitbier.

Cheers!

Lawrence."

Enjoy!

"Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered" Mix-Off

The reponse to this has been amazing - 20 mixes so far and counting! We should do this more often!

Well done to everyone taking part! I think the 'competitive' nature of this exercise has been largely eclipsed by the general sense of fun and challenge that participants have reported, which is just fine by me. The interest is chiefly in taking part and hearing the other results. Besides I'm not sure I have the heart to ask anyone to sit though 20+ mixes of this and make a selection! But maybe we might do a 'shortlist' of 5 or so (excluding me!) and see if we can scrape up a token prize of sorts from somewhere. Watch this space...

Once again many thanks first of all to The Ah-Q Arkestra, and in particular my mate Dave (band-leader, guitarist and session engineer) for giving permission to use their excellent playing and material for this Mix-Off. And of course to Darren (aka "stemwinder") for his tireless work and generosity in setting up a special website for us and updating it regularly!

Just a reminder deadline is TODAY, ie 19.00hrs Wednesday 2nd August!

GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND/OR STREAM ALL THE MIXES!


Participant update (in the same order they appear on the website):

ITB = In the box, mixed entirely within a DAW
OTB = Out of the box, mixed using analog processing

(NB: Participants - do please provide as much detail as you like about how you mixed and what monitors you used etc and I'll include it here - this is a Music Technology Forum after all and I think folks are interested.)

MIX 1: James Lehmann
OTB/ITB. My overall mix goal - making this production, recorded on very basic equipment, sound as expensive as possible; fixing a number of unwanted technical problems inherent in the raw tracks; preserving the dynamic and feel of the live take as you can hear the band play well together so the mix should reflect that. Firstly each individual track was re-recorded at 24/44.1k by being run out and back through a Metric Halo 2882 via a Speck ASC-T EQ and a Drawmer 1968-ME compressor for warmth, colour and character. Tracks were then edited to remove unnecessary spill and extraneous noise. Further corrective EQ was added ITB with Logic Channel EQ and Metric Halo Channelstrip - the latter was also used for volume adjustments as the resolution is much finer than Logic's and it sounds better. ChannelStrip's compressor was also used to deal with (significant) drum spike and kick problems - frequency-dependent sidechain input was very useful here. Sax and Trombone each required a heavily customised ChannelStrip patch with EQ & compression to warm them up and fill them out, and the Kick required some major corrective surgery to get anything remotely useable. Guitar went through a custom Logic Guitar Amp Pro patch and then a tiny amount of EQ correction with Channel EQ to make it 'sit' with the vocals, Bass I left largely alone. Reverb was a TC M300 set to TC Classic Hall which was patched into the S/P-DIF loop of the MH2882, with some EQ on the return. Volume and EQ automation inserted where needed (ie solos etc). Finally, the mix was summed and again sent out and back through the MH2882 (note: not summed in Logic) via the Specks (fine lo-end roll-off) and the Drawmer (very gentle compression) to create a nice pre-master. Elemental Audio Finis was used to raise the overall volume peak to -0.15dB but no limiting was used (death to the loudness wars!); the resulting 24-bit master was dithered back down to 16/44.1k and converted to a 192kbps mp3 in iTunes. All monitoring done on Blue Sky ProDesks.

MIX 2: "Vinylizor"
OTB/ITB. My mix was done in Pro-Tools HD, but mainly using outboard vintage comps and eq's as inserts on each channel, through Apogee AD/DA 16X convertors. Monitoring was on PMC AML1's & IB1's. For the vocals, the chain was a Calrec CL1170 compressor (an expanded BBC AM6/17 design) and a Focusrite ISA 85110 EQ (as used in the Focusrite console). Bass went through a Distressor (in opto mode), the guitar went through a Urei 1176LN comp, and again they both went through Focusrite ISA 85110 EQ's. Guitar was quite hissy. I tried both noise reduction and re-amping, but in the end it was always a compromise over what was a pretty good tone, so I left it. You can hear it quite clearly on the intro. Overheads went through a McDSP MC2000 multiband compressor in an attempt to readdress the crash heavy / snare light balance, without it sounding unnatural. They then went through a Tritone Valvetone EQ - for thickening more than EQ'ing. The bass drum track was useless to me, basically because it didn't even sound like the same bass drum you heard in the overheads. In this instance I think it was a case of the wrong mic in the wrong place - it's just all low end thud and no tone - great for rock but useless for jazz. So, I used Drumagog to blend a similar sounding multisampled bass drum in to the bass drum track for the attack and body part of the sound. Without such a tool I'd have left it out entirely. Sax and trombone went through a dbx 165A and another Urei 1176 (can't remember which way round without checking the session) and again through some Focusrite ISA 85110's for EQ. Reverb was an EMT plate setting from Digidesign's ReVibe, and I also used iZotope Ozone3's multiband comp and widener on the 2bus. There's a bit of volume automation on the horn and vocal parts, and also the high end expander in Ozone, but none on any of the sends.

MIX 3: Band Akai (Guide Mix)
ITB. Very rough guide mix done by the band in their Akai DPS16 with minimal processing so you can hear more or less what we had to work with!

MIX 4: "musicproject"
No info yet

MIX 5: "Hugh"
ITB. Mixed in Logic using mainly Waves and Elemental Audio plug-ins. Waves Renaissance compressor with appropriate settings on guitar, sax, bass, kick, drums, trombone, Waves Renaissance Vox on vocals. All treated with various Space Designer presets - vocal plate, guitar room, bass booth, sax chamber, brass plate, big kick, bright drums. then some EQ on bass and drums. master buss reverb - Space Designer Short Plate, compressor - Waves RComp, EQ - EA Equium, Limiter - EA Finis.

MIX 6: Dave Lewthwaite
ITB. AMD Athlon XP 3200+ 1Gb RAM, Creative Audigy 2 Platinum Ex, 160Gb RAID-0 (Stripe) Project Disks, Behringer Truth 2030A Monitors, Yamaha MG16/4. Mixed in the box with Cubase SX and only included effects, control surface Behringer BCF2000 was also used. My aim (as a beginner) was to keep it as simple as possible, yet still aiming for a pleasing sound. Tracks were split into mono using Adobe Audition, apart from the drums, obviously, and converted to 16-Bit/48kHz to conform with my restrictive ASIO drivers. All that is on there is a little 2:1 compression on the vocals and again over the entire mix and a slight amount of reverb over the entire mix - and thats it! the rest is just level setting and pan. The effects were simply 'VST Dynamics' and the 'Roomworks' reverb. Exporting was a matter of hitting record in cubase to record the stereo output back to another track, then imported into Audition for normalisation and a quick tidy at the beginning and end, the track was then exported as MP3 44.1kHz 16-bit from Audition.

MIX 7: "dunch"
ITB. Mixed "in the box" using Sonar 5. The only non-Sonar plugin used was the free Blockfish compressor from Digital Fishphones. I monitored on Genelec 1029s + 1091 sub, and also a cheap old Sony hifi system. After I listened to the guide mix I decided I wanted something a bit more intimate, like you were listening to them close up in a small venue. Drums & Kick I compressed and eq'd till I felt they had a bit more punch and the kick was distinct from the bass. Bass was slightly compressed to even it out, no eq. Guitar was slightly compressed to even it out, no eq. Sax I eq'd slightly to make it a bit less honky. Trombone I eq'd to thin it out and stop it fighting with everything else, except when it was playing the solo part when I used no eq. Vocals I used no eq, but did compress a little. Listening back just now I'd like to back off compression a tiny bit. I added a plate reverb to the vocals (medium plate preset in Sonar convolution reverb). I varied the wet/dry throughout the song - pretty dry at the beginning, wetter as the vocals got louder. Everything else had varying amounts of room preset, again using the convolution reverb. I mixed fairly low, peaking the master bus at -4dB. No compression or eq on the master bus. Exported at 44.1K/16, using pow-r 3 dither from Sonar's mix bus down to 16bit. Topped and tailed then converted to mp3 using lame.

MIX 8: "stemwinder"
ITB. PC, ProTools 7, Digi002 (but mixed entirely ITB due to time constraints), PMC TB2s monitors, PSP Vintage Warmer, PSP Master Compressor, DigiDesign DVerbt

MIX 9: "Mr Tom"
ITB. Mixed entirely in Logic 7.1, using no third party plug-ins, on Tannoy Active Reveals

MIX 10: "DarrenSW"
ITB. Mixed ITB using Cubase SL3.0 and no third party plug-ins. Have mixed it a little differently to others I've listened to, tried to stay away from the "Jazz must be almost dry" scenario by adding space i.e. reverb on Vocals; reverb and delay on the solos. Behringer Truth monitors and also little dodgy PC speakers.

MIX 11: "Wonkey Wabbit"
ITB. 3.0GHz P4 with 1Mb RAM, M-Audio Delta-66, Cubase SX2.2, UAD-1 card, Behringer B3021 monitors (must get something better!), Wavelab V3. I didn't do anything fancy with the tracks like James but I split the files to mono in Waveleb (except the drum track) and converted the files to 24/44.1. I then edited them as much as possible to cut down on spill. Put a high and low pass filter on the kick to cut down on the hat/cymbal spill and take out some of the boominess and then added a touch of compression. I used 2 UAD Realverbs - one for vocals ( based on the wooden room preset which I like for vocals) and one for the brass and guitars (based on the jazz club preset - what else!). Most things had the UAD 1176LN compressor or LA2A limiter on them and I generally used the Pultec EQs on the tracks as well. I used the SX 'Q' filter on some tracks in a cut mode only. A bit of volume automation and that was it.

MIX 12: "Lime ZRX"
ITB/OTB (digital). Loaded into Cubase SL3 and mixed on a Yamaha 02R. Just used one reverb from a Lexicon MPX550. I cheated a bit and changed some of the music. There's a couple of places where the bass player uses the same note for ages, I pasted another note in to give the speakers (Mackie 824) a rest! I didn't like the way the drums fell in at the start, or at the very end, so I cut them a bit. Also, I know the kick has been slagged off, but I've stuck it in a few extra places just to make it feel wanted. The vocalist- really nice voice I think- had a habit of singing an "a" sound before some lyrics, usually "a- bewitched". Took them out. It was probably a really important part of the jazz feel of the song and I'm going to be sued. Also, there was a wee pop on the first "simpering", so I took that out. I reallly must get out more... Oh, and I moved some of the guitarists chords a bit, and a few brass bits. I do have the TC Electronic Finalizer in the 02R, but as others haven't resorted to mastering, I didn't touch it.

MIX 13: "Herewego"
ITB: P4 2.66, 1 gig ram. Cubase 5, extra plugins were PSP Vintage Warmer, hydratone EQ, glaceverb (free) reverb, and waves rennaissance vox on the vocal. Monitored on Studio Precision Active 8 monitors, Koss headphones and crappy PC speakers. I decided the important thing for me was to get an intimate vocal sound, as it seemed to suit the performance and the song. First - Imported all the tracks and split them into mono, even the overheads. Things I probably should not have done, but they seemed right to me: 1. Tuned the bass first of all - yes all of it. I thought the tuning generally of all instruments was slightly loose, so if the bass was 'right' it might help give a good foundation. 2. Tuned a few vocals bits, nothing major, happy to leave some pitchy moments, it was more some of the passing/grace notes that I tightened up a tad. For tuning I use Melodyne Uno. 3. Fixed the guitarist's 'fluffed' chord in the intro. I think/hope he'll thank me. Kick - hated it, applied some EQ and compression, but I also looked up an SOS article about replacing an audio part with a midi one. Drumagog would have been nice actually! It took an hour, I learnt a new technique, and mixed a midi (JV2020) kick in slightly behind the original to help it out a bit. Overheads - left alone except small compression, some eq to lift the tom/snare range a touch compared to the cymbals. Bass - a bit of compression, some eq. Sax solo - eq to mellow it. Trombone solo - left alone. Sax/trombone (excepting the solos) - I grouped them, a touch of eq on the sax, a bit on the group. Guitar - one eq for the intro section and last chord, another for the rest to leave more room for the bass. Touch of reverb. All the 'band' was grouped and had a touch of reverb, the Glaceverb freebie (it's a bit of an odd plugin, but I like it in some situations and it seemed to work here). Voice - lovely vocal! I tuned a few notes that I felt were probably due to the pressure of doing lots of tracks in quick succession. Rennaissance Vox to compress, plus some eq from Hydratone to brighten and warm slightly, touch of reverb from Glaceverb. Plenty of fader automation, especially raising the level at ends of notes and the lower registers, eg the "dered" of "Bewitched, bothered and bewildered", to try and keep it sounding intimate. Generally a few bits of automation on the faders, and some Hydratone EQ and compression using PSP Vintage Warmer to glue the mix slightly. This is not what I usually get the chance to do, so it presented some unusual challenges for me - which I thoroughly enjoyed!

MIX 14: "CharlotteL"
ITB. AMD 2.0GHz laptop, 768MB RAM, Edirol UA-20X and Cubase SX3. It's been mixed in-the-box using Cubase and its included plugins - Q, Dynamics and Roomworks. I've tried to keep the whole thing quite clean sounding - I thought the untreated recording sounded pretty good as it was, TBH. I'm rather annoyed with the situation I found myself in with regards to monitoring, though, so please forgive any glaring bass issues - my KRK fund is still a good month away from completion so this has been mixed on a combination of headphones, my hifi speakers and the Behringer Truth B2030A's in my (cube-shaped, untreated) office at work. Usually I'd have checked this on the Genelecs at Uni, but obviously it's summer so I was stuck with what was to hand.

MIX 15: Guy Johnson
ITB. Mixed in Logic 7.1 on my just-out-of-guarantee iMac – All Logic plugs except some Tritone EQs and a couple of Altiverbs. Monitoring with some PMC TB2+ loudhailers (powered by a Carver PM 1.5 amp) and a REL Stadium sub. I didn't mind the drums too much, as they have a bit of that slightly boxy, muffled 'jazz' sound – except the OTT cymbals. The kick needed some work, and I thought the tracks were all phase-inverted, so I fixed that. The hardest thing was the vocal – there are some nasty compression artifacts and what sound like edits, that spoil it a bit for me, though I tried to cover them with the band! I just went for a natural-ish sound that I liked, rather than mix 'jazzy' (whtever that is) . I found myself enjoying the mixing, using quite a lot of volume automation in the end. I did no editing or arrangement-changing. I put on a spot of 'angel dust' in WaveBurner, and converted to MP3.

MIX 16: "Song Doctor"
ITB, ProTools LE, with KRK Rockit 5's, and a nice high-back executive chair from OfficeWorks. With my mix, as I've never done anything with jazz, I tried to simulate the setup of a live jazz gig I saw recently. So basically the drums are panned quite left, and everything else spread out 'beside' it. The reverb from the kit and voice etc is panned to the right, as this something I noticed happening at the jazz gig. I have a little bit of overdrive on the guitar, and some compression and EQ here and there. Overall its a bit of an experiment.

MIX 17: "Itinerant Baker"
ITB. AMD Athlon XP 1900, Soundblaster sound card being monitered on (decent, old, and well known) Technics speakers (and checked on headphones - haven't been able to burn a copy for the car or other systems). Sequenced in Tracktion using various plugins. Wavelab used for wave editing and transfer to mp3. I've tried to get a sort of live jazz band feel without being retro. I remember seing footage from the Montreaux festival or somesuch when I was a yout with people like Miles Davis, and I've also got a few live jazz lp's, and that's the sort of sound I've gone for here. I used Wavelab to seperate the samples that where paired off, and also to normalise them and manualy gate some of the spill and breath from the vocal track (which is how I normaly do vocals - never got on with gates). Guitar and drums where more or less left alone, just run through Digital Fish Phones Blockfish, with Kjearhaus Audio's Classic reverb on the kick to give it a bit of stereo width. I've kept the drums quite low in the mix, and aimed for the kick drum to be felt when it really hits, but not really heard. Would apreciate anyone's comments on wether this has been successful. The guitar is also deliberately quite low in the mix I also panned it slightly to the right as the vocal had got a tendancy to hang to the left which I can only put down to one of the plugins it was proccessed by . Bass is left alone, with an MDA Limiter to tame it slightly. For the brass I took a slightly different aproach and wanted to play with the way they sound a bit. I've put the sax through Bojo Softwares BJ Flanger, and then through Blockfish to level out the flangeing a bit. I've tried to keep it subtle and not dissapear into the realms of space jazzz. For the Trombone I used a Big Tick Dual Delay, which gives a nice Rico 'The Man from Wareika' sound, which had to stay in. I also panned the sax slightly to the left and the trombone to the right. The vocals was the bit I had the most to do to as I wasn't completely happy with the way it sat or the sound. I decided to try and make it a bit more gritty. None of the overdrive plugins I tried made the right noise (I always find them too digital sounding, which is ok sometimes, but not for this.) After rumaging through my vst effect folder and trying all sorts of things I decided on the Palancaware reverb plugin, set to the 'library' preset, and to beef up the bottom end I used the MDA Multiband Compressor - which together warmed it up nicely. It still didn't sit right in certain parts so I put it through yet another instance of Blockfish to try and make it push through a bit more - I know, not exactly best practise chaining compressors like that, but if it works it works, and sometimes it does! This time it didn't work quite enough. The singer was still being a bit drowned out a minute or so in. I looked at the sound spectrum of her vocal using Inspector from Elemental Audio and decided to cut everything else slightly at about 400hz to let her through, this worked nicely in one bit but not another, I tried a second sonic scoop centred around 2khz but couldn't get it to sound right. Eventualy I decided to leave the cut at 400 in and to automate the vocal level throughout, which made a few other parts sit more comfortably. This also allowed me to take Blockfish off the vocals.

MIX 18: Chris Poulter
ITB. Mixed in PT, using Liquid Mix and D-Verb. Monitoring on KRK V6's.

"LDGuy" (Awaiting inclusion on site)
ITB. The mix was done in the box in Sonar 5. I wanted to get as sweet a sound, and as professional sounding as possible. I tried to be sparing with effects - there was a Sonitus EQ on each track (if i recall correctly, some tracks may have been left alone), and then a Waves TrueVerb the sax, trombone, and vox were sent to. The rest of the mixing was with faders. The guitar was put through a bit compression to even it out, but the only other compression used was at the end with a little bit of PSP Vintage Warmer to bring the levels up. There was also another EQ at the end to give it some spice. This track isn't mastered, but then again i dont think it particularly needs to be. The level is sufficient in my opinion. I used Event ALP-5 monitors and the Bose system in a Mazda 6 to get a range of environments. The computer was an Inta-Audio Custom Built model, dual 3.2ghz Pentium 4, 2GB RAM. This track was also mixed wearing sandals, and drinking a glass of Hoegaarden Whitbier.

"JumpeySpyder" (Awaiting inclusion on site)
Mixed ITB using Sonar 5 and bundled plug-ins. (about 8 hours in total) Alesis M1 active mk II monitors in an untreated 3 x 3 x 3 room. I had lots of trouble mixing this track - I usually play with synth / industrial stuff that I don’t have to worry about sounding unnatural, but I’ve really enjoyed myself. What I’ve done:- I manually stripped out a fair amount of spill - I’m not sure if I’ve done enough but it would be easy to spend a lot of time here. Major EQ happened on kick + trombone. I’ve added a little gentle compression (hopefully) on most of the tracks to even things out and a sprinkling of reverb to vocals and solo parts. I found the point where the brass first came in very tricky and couldn’t make it sit right. In the end, I couldn’t get it right so I tampered with it. It’s still not right - sorry. Also at this point the trombone sounded a little out of tune to me ( its probably ‘one of those fancy jazz things’) I might have meddled with some Autotune if I had it. I also couldn’t resist adding a little edge to the guitar with an amp simulation. I’m expecting to be bottom of the pile, but looking forward to seeing what everyone else has done and hopefully getting some pointers.


192kbps mp3 mixes due to Darren at sos@liquidbughunt.co.uk no later than 19.00hrs Wednesday 2nd August - please make sure we know your Forum name.

GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND/OR STREAM ALL THE MIXES!

Have fun!

Edited by James Lehmann (02/08/06 09:32 AM)

Just re-sent my mix hope it arrives safely

It's quite interesting to see what DAW's folks are using too!

So far:

ProTools 4
Logic 4
Cubase 6
Sonar 3
Tracktion 1
Akai DPS 1
Unknown 1

Total 20

Quote Guy Johnson:

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Have had fun listening to the results, some nice work there! I sent the wrong file, but I have sent the right one now Must label things better

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If the right one remains in the ether, just imagine it's 5 db louder, with more top -end and less high-bass!

G

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PA stuff on FB

Ok- a late entry, I just sent Darren my mix.

Another one mixed in Cubase (SX), mainly using the Waves plugins- in particular Rencomp and a couple of IR1 convolution reverbs. I also used a couple of URS eqs, and the Sonalksis compressor gently over the whole mix. I used a fair amount of automation to make sure the mix 'pushed' in the right places.

The mix was done on my Mackie 624s, and cross-checked on my mastering-grade (obviously) Tannoy Reveals. I used an L2 just to bring the highest peaks up to zero.

Cheers,

Adam

i sent my mix off at about 1pm this afternoon but i can't see it on the page yet. did you receive it?

thanks

Jon

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Kasha - Picture a beautiful life

Hello all,

all mixes up and ready to roll... Enjoy!

Darren

24 mixes!!
That's over an hour and a half off the same song
Good luck to the poor person (James?) who's gonna be wading through all that!

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Cubase, guitars.

Quote Lime ZRX:

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24 mixes!!
That's over an hour and a half off the same song
Good luck to the poor person (James?) who's gonna be wading through all that!

---

I bet most of us who've entered have listened to that song for well over and hour and a half already - so the big listen through should be a piece of cake!

I keep meaning to add some further details about my mix - bear with me.

Tom

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My Little Project

"Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered" Mix-Off

PLEASE NOTE: Deadline is now passed, so please stop sending entries - Darren's done enough work on this already! (I guess you could post your own link if you'd like to though.)

Once again many thanks first of all to The Ah-Q Arkestra, and in particular my mate Dave (band-leader, guitarist and session engineer) for giving permission to use their excellent playing and material for this Mix-Off. And of course to Darren (aka "stemwinder") for his tireless work and generosity in setting up a special website for us and updating it regularly!


GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND/OR STREAM ALL THE MIXES!


Participant summary (in the same order they appear on the website):

ITB = In the box, mixed entirely within a DAW
OTB = Out of the box, mixed using analog processing

(NB: Participants - do please provide as much detail as you like about how you mixed and what monitors you used etc and I'll include it here - this is a Music Technology Forum after all and I think folks are interested.)

MIX 1: James Lehmann
OTB/ITB. My overall mix goal - making this production, recorded on very basic equipment, sound as expensive as possible; fixing a number of unwanted technical problems inherent in the raw tracks; preserving the dynamic and feel of the live take as you can hear the band play well together so the mix should reflect that. Firstly each individual track was re-recorded at 24/44.1k by being run out and back through a Metric Halo 2882 via a Speck ASC-T EQ and a Drawmer 1968-ME compressor for warmth, colour and character. Tracks were then edited to remove unnecessary spill and extraneous noise. Further corrective EQ was added ITB with Logic Channel EQ and Metric Halo Channelstrip - the latter was also used for volume adjustments as the resolution is much finer than Logic's and it sounds better. ChannelStrip's compressor was also used to deal with (significant) drum spike and kick problems - frequency-dependent sidechain input was very useful here. Sax and Trombone each required a heavily customised ChannelStrip patch with EQ & compression to warm them up and fill them out, and the Kick required some major corrective surgery to get anything remotely useable. Guitar went through a custom Logic Guitar Amp Pro patch and then a tiny amount of EQ correction with Channel EQ to make it 'sit' with the vocals, Bass I left largely alone. Reverb was a TC M300 set to TC Classic Hall which was patched into the S/P-DIF loop of the MH2882, with some EQ on the return. Volume and EQ automation inserted where needed (ie solos etc). Finally, the mix was summed and again sent out and back through the MH2882 (note: not summed in Logic) via the Specks (fine lo-end roll-off) and the Drawmer (very gentle compression) to create a nice pre-master. Elemental Audio Finis was used to raise the overall volume peak to -0.15dB but no limiting was used (death to the loudness wars!); the resulting 24-bit master was dithered back down to 16/44.1k and converted to a 192kbps mp3 in iTunes. All monitoring done on Blue Sky ProDesks.

MIX 2: "Vinylizor"
OTB/ITB. My mix was done in Pro-Tools HD, but mainly using outboard vintage comps and eq's as inserts on each channel, through Apogee AD/DA 16X convertors. Monitoring was on PMC AML1's & IB1's. For the vocals, the chain was a Calrec CL1170 compressor (an expanded BBC AM6/17 design) and a Focusrite ISA 85110 EQ (as used in the Focusrite console). Bass went through a Distressor (in opto mode), the guitar went through a Urei 1176LN comp, and again they both went through Focusrite ISA 85110 EQ's. Guitar was quite hissy. I tried both noise reduction and re-amping, but in the end it was always a compromise over what was a pretty good tone, so I left it. You can hear it quite clearly on the intro. Overheads went through a McDSP MC2000 multiband compressor in an attempt to readdress the crash heavy / snare light balance, without it sounding unnatural. They then went through a Tritone Valvetone EQ - for thickening more than EQ'ing. The bass drum track was useless to me, basically because it didn't even sound like the same bass drum you heard in the overheads. In this instance I think it was a case of the wrong mic in the wrong place - it's just all low end thud and no tone - great for rock but useless for jazz. So, I used Drumagog to blend a similar sounding multisampled bass drum in to the bass drum track for the attack and body part of the sound. Without such a tool I'd have left it out entirely. Sax and trombone went through a dbx 165A and another Urei 1176 (can't remember which way round without checking the session) and again through some Focusrite ISA 85110's for EQ. Reverb was an EMT plate setting from Digidesign's ReVibe, and I also used iZotope Ozone3's multiband comp and widener on the 2bus. There's a bit of volume automation on the horn and vocal parts, and also the high end expander in Ozone, but none on any of the sends.

MIX 3: Band Akai (Guide Mix)
ITB. Very rough guide mix done by the band in their Akai DPS16 with minimal processing so you can hear more or less what we had to work with!

MIX 4: "musicproject"
ITB. Mixed on protools LE 7.1, quad amd optron 270 x 2 with 002R. My concept was to create a "time machine". Some filters on all tracks to take out the "hi-fi" feel that modern recordings have, inserted a tube vst on the brass, some light overdrive and comprresion on the bass. The vocal was going through a free plug in called "tube booster" wich have some problems with bounce to disk in protools but i managed somehow to print it. plus some urs eq and bomb factory comprresion and a lo-fi plug. Drums was again intreduced to the very nice "tube booster" and comprresed with a psp plug to make it "breath" a little. Panning - oldschool : drums on the right, bass on the left, gtr hard right vocal leaning to the left and brass as a stereo pair. Reverb and depth - using some room emulation on the brass, vocals and drums to get a more "clubi" sound to it and some spring reverb panned to the opposit side on the gtr to get a more deep and open feel to it. Mix buss - went through an amp moddeling plug to get that light grainy thing and then psp's mixprresor to stick it all together. I think in modern terms i totally [ ****** ] up the original tracks, but i tryed to go back in time and imagine how every instrument would be recorded back then and then give it a little polish to ecomedate the stereo field.

MIX 5: "Hugh"
ITB. Mixed in Logic using mainly Waves and Elemental Audio plug-ins. Waves Renaissance compressor with appropriate settings on guitar, sax, bass, kick, drums, trombone, Waves Renaissance Vox on vocals. All treated with various Space Designer presets - vocal plate, guitar room, bass booth, sax chamber, brass plate, big kick, bright drums. then some EQ on bass and drums. master buss reverb - Space Designer Short Plate, compressor - Waves RComp, EQ - EA Equium, Limiter - EA Finis.

MIX 6: Dave Lewthwaite
ITB. AMD Athlon XP 3200+ 1Gb RAM, Creative Audigy 2 Platinum Ex, 160Gb RAID-0 (Stripe) Project Disks, Behringer Truth 2030A Monitors, Yamaha MG16/4. Mixed in the box with Cubase SX and only included effects, control surface Behringer BCF2000 was also used. My aim (as a beginner) was to keep it as simple as possible, yet still aiming for a pleasing sound. Tracks were split into mono using Adobe Audition, apart from the drums, obviously, and converted to 16-Bit/48kHz to conform with my restrictive ASIO drivers. All that is on there is a little 2:1 compression on the vocals and again over the entire mix and a slight amount of reverb over the entire mix - and thats it! the rest is just level setting and pan. The effects were simply 'VST Dynamics' and the 'Roomworks' reverb. Exporting was a matter of hitting record in cubase to record the stereo output back to another track, then imported into Audition for normalisation and a quick tidy at the beginning and end, the track was then exported as MP3 44.1kHz 16-bit from Audition.

MIX 7: "dunch"
ITB. Mixed "in the box" using Sonar 5. The only non-Sonar plugin used was the free Blockfish compressor from Digital Fishphones. I monitored on Genelec 1029s + 1091 sub, and also a cheap old Sony hifi system. After I listened to the guide mix I decided I wanted something a bit more intimate, like you were listening to them close up in a small venue. Drums & Kick I compressed and eq'd till I felt they had a bit more punch and the kick was distinct from the bass. Bass was slightly compressed to even it out, no eq. Guitar was slightly compressed to even it out, no eq. Sax I eq'd slightly to make it a bit less honky. Trombone I eq'd to thin it out and stop it fighting with everything else, except when it was playing the solo part when I used no eq. Vocals I used no eq, but did compress a little. Listening back just now I'd like to back off compression a tiny bit. I added a plate reverb to the vocals (medium plate preset in Sonar convolution reverb). I varied the wet/dry throughout the song - pretty dry at the beginning, wetter as the vocals got louder. Everything else had varying amounts of room preset, again using the convolution reverb. I mixed fairly low, peaking the master bus at -4dB. No compression or eq on the master bus. Exported at 44.1K/16, using pow-r 3 dither from Sonar's mix bus down to 16bit. Topped and tailed then converted to mp3 using lame.

MIX 8: "stemwinder"
ITB. PC, ProTools 7, Digi002 (but mixed entirely ITB due to time constraints), PMC TB2s monitors, PSP Vintage Warmer, PSP Master Compressor, DigiDesign DVerbt

MIX 9: "Mr Tom"
ITB. Mixed entirely in Logic 7.1, using no third party plug-ins, on Tannoy Active Reveals

MIX 10: "DarrenSW"
ITB. Mixed ITB using Cubase SL3.0 and no third party plug-ins. Have mixed it a little differently to others I've listened to, tried to stay away from the "Jazz must be almost dry" scenario by adding space i.e. reverb on Vocals; reverb and delay on the solos. Behringer Truth monitors and also little dodgy PC speakers.

MIX 11: "Wonkey Wabbit"
ITB. 3.0GHz P4 with 1Mb RAM, M-Audio Delta-66, Cubase SX2.2, UAD-1 card, Behringer B3021 monitors (must get something better!), Wavelab V3. I didn't do anything fancy with the tracks like James but I split the files to mono in Waveleb (except the drum track) and converted the files to 24/44.1. I then edited them as much as possible to cut down on spill. Put a high and low pass filter on the kick to cut down on the hat/cymbal spill and take out some of the boominess and then added a touch of compression. I used 2 UAD Realverbs - one for vocals ( based on the wooden room preset which I like for vocals) and one for the brass and guitars (based on the jazz club preset - what else!). Most things had the UAD 1176LN compressor or LA2A limiter on them and I generally used the Pultec EQs on the tracks as well. I used the SX 'Q' filter on some tracks in a cut mode only. A bit of volume automation and that was it.

MIX 12: "Lime ZRX"
ITB/OTB (digital). Loaded into Cubase SL3 and mixed on a Yamaha 02R. Just used one reverb from a Lexicon MPX550. I cheated a bit and changed some of the music. There's a couple of places where the bass player uses the same note for ages, I pasted another note in to give the speakers (Mackie 824) a rest! I didn't like the way the drums fell in at the start, or at the very end, so I cut them a bit. Also, I know the kick has been slagged off, but I've stuck it in a few extra places just to make it feel wanted. The vocalist- really nice voice I think- had a habit of singing an "a" sound before some lyrics, usually "a- bewitched". Took them out. It was probably a really important part of the jazz feel of the song and I'm going to be sued. Also, there was a wee pop on the first "simpering", so I took that out. I reallly must get out more... Oh, and I moved some of the guitarists chords a bit, and a few brass bits. I do have the TC Electronic Finalizer in the 02R, but as others haven't resorted to mastering, I didn't touch it.

MIX 13: "Herewego"
ITB: P4 2.66, 1 gig ram. Cubase 5, extra plugins were PSP Vintage Warmer, hydratone EQ, glaceverb (free) reverb, and waves rennaissance vox on the vocal. Monitored on Studio Precision Active 8 monitors, Koss headphones and crappy PC speakers. I decided the important thing for me was to get an intimate vocal sound, as it seemed to suit the performance and the song. First - Imported all the tracks and split them into mono, even the overheads. Things I probably should not have done, but they seemed right to me: 1. Tuned the bass first of all - yes all of it. I thought the tuning generally of all instruments was slightly loose, so if the bass was 'right' it might help give a good foundation. 2. Tuned a few vocals bits, nothing major, happy to leave some pitchy moments, it was more some of the passing/grace notes that I tightened up a tad. For tuning I use Melodyne Uno. 3. Fixed the guitarist's 'fluffed' chord in the intro. I think/hope he'll thank me. Kick - hated it, applied some EQ and compression, but I also looked up an SOS article about replacing an audio part with a midi one. Drumagog would have been nice actually! It took an hour, I learnt a new technique, and mixed a midi (JV2020) kick in slightly behind the original to help it out a bit. Overheads - left alone except small compression, some eq to lift the tom/snare range a touch compared to the cymbals. Bass - a bit of compression, some eq. Sax solo - eq to mellow it. Trombone solo - left alone. Sax/trombone (excepting the solos) - I grouped them, a touch of eq on the sax, a bit on the group. Guitar - one eq for the intro section and last chord, another for the rest to leave more room for the bass. Touch of reverb. All the 'band' was grouped and had a touch of reverb, the Glaceverb freebie (it's a bit of an odd plugin, but I like it in some situations and it seemed to work here). Voice - lovely vocal! I tuned a few notes that I felt were probably due to the pressure of doing lots of tracks in quick succession. Rennaissance Vox to compress, plus some eq from Hydratone to brighten and warm slightly, touch of reverb from Glaceverb. Plenty of fader automation, especially raising the level at ends of notes and the lower registers, eg the "dered" of "Bewitched, bothered and bewildered", to try and keep it sounding intimate. Generally a few bits of automation on the faders, and some Hydratone EQ and compression using PSP Vintage Warmer to glue the mix slightly. This is not what I usually get the chance to do, so it presented some unusual challenges for me - which I thoroughly enjoyed!

MIX 14: "CharlotteL"
ITB. AMD 2.0GHz laptop, 768MB RAM, Edirol UA-20X and Cubase SX3. It's been mixed in-the-box using Cubase and its included plugins - Q, Dynamics and Roomworks. I've tried to keep the whole thing quite clean sounding - I thought the untreated recording sounded pretty good as it was, TBH. I'm rather annoyed with the situation I found myself in with regards to monitoring, though, so please forgive any glaring bass issues - my KRK fund is still a good month away from completion so this has been mixed on a combination of headphones, my hifi speakers and the Behringer Truth B2030A's in my (cube-shaped, untreated) office at work. Usually I'd have checked this on the Genelecs at Uni, but obviously it's summer so I was stuck with what was to hand.

MIX 15: Guy Johnson
ITB. Mixed in Logic 7.1 on my just-out-of-guarantee iMac – All Logic plugs except some Tritone EQs and a couple of Altiverbs. Monitoring with some PMC TB2+ loudhailers (powered by a Carver PM 1.5 amp) and a REL Stadium sub. I didn't mind the drums too much, as they have a bit of that slightly boxy, muffled 'jazz' sound – except the OTT cymbals. The kick needed some work, and I thought the tracks were all phase-inverted, so I fixed that. The hardest thing was the vocal – there are some nasty compression artifacts and what sound like edits, that spoil it a bit for me, though I tried to cover them with the band! I just went for a natural-ish sound that I liked, rather than mix 'jazzy' (whtever that is) . I found myself enjoying the mixing, using quite a lot of volume automation in the end. I did no editing or arrangement-changing. I put on a spot of 'angel dust' in WaveBurner, and converted to MP3.

MIX 16: "Song Doctor"
ITB, ProTools LE, with KRK Rockit 5's, and a nice high-back executive chair from OfficeWorks. With my mix, as I've never done anything with jazz, I tried to simulate the setup of a live jazz gig I saw recently. So basically the drums are panned quite left, and everything else spread out 'beside' it. The reverb from the kit and voice etc is panned to the right, as this something I noticed happening at the jazz gig. I have a little bit of overdrive on the guitar, and some compression and EQ here and there. Overall its a bit of an experiment.

MIX 17: "Itinerant Baker"
ITB. AMD Athlon XP 1900, Soundblaster sound card being monitered on (decent, old, and well known) Technics speakers (and checked on headphones - haven't been able to burn a copy for the car or other systems). Sequenced in Tracktion using various plugins. Wavelab used for wave editing and transfer to mp3. I've tried to get a sort of live jazz band feel without being retro. I remember seing footage from the Montreaux festival or somesuch when I was a yout with people like Miles Davis, and I've also got a few live jazz lp's, and that's the sort of sound I've gone for here. I used Wavelab to seperate the samples that where paired off, and also to normalise them and manualy gate some of the spill and breath from the vocal track (which is how I normaly do vocals - never got on with gates). Guitar and drums where more or less left alone, just run through Digital Fish Phones Blockfish, with Kjearhaus Audio's Classic reverb on the kick to give it a bit of stereo width. I've kept the drums quite low in the mix, and aimed for the kick drum to be felt when it really hits, but not really heard. Would apreciate anyone's comments on wether this has been successful. The guitar is also deliberately quite low in the mix I also panned it slightly to the right as the vocal had got a tendancy to hang to the left which I can only put down to one of the plugins it was proccessed by . Bass is left alone, with an MDA Limiter to tame it slightly. For the brass I took a slightly different aproach and wanted to play with the way they sound a bit. I've put the sax through Bojo Softwares BJ Flanger, and then through Blockfish to level out the flangeing a bit. I've tried to keep it subtle and not dissapear into the realms of space jazzz. For the Trombone I used a Big Tick Dual Delay, which gives a nice Rico 'The Man from Wareika' sound, which had to stay in. I also panned the sax slightly to the left and the trombone to the right. The vocals was the bit I had the most to do to as I wasn't completely happy with the way it sat or the sound. I decided to try and make it a bit more gritty. None of the overdrive plugins I tried made the right noise (I always find them too digital sounding, which is ok sometimes, but not for this.) After rumaging through my vst effect folder and trying all sorts of things I decided on the Palancaware reverb plugin, set to the 'library' preset, and to beef up the bottom end I used the MDA Multiband Compressor - which together warmed it up nicely. It still didn't sit right in certain parts so I put it through yet another instance of Blockfish to try and make it push through a bit more - I know, not exactly best practise chaining compressors like that, but if it works it works, and sometimes it does! This time it didn't work quite enough. The singer was still being a bit drowned out a minute or so in. I looked at the sound spectrum of her vocal using Inspector from Elemental Audio and decided to cut everything else slightly at about 400hz to let her through, this worked nicely in one bit but not another, I tried a second sonic scoop centred around 2khz but couldn't get it to sound right. Eventualy I decided to leave the cut at 400 in and to automate the vocal level throughout, which made a few other parts sit more comfortably. This also allowed me to take Blockfish off the vocals.

MIX 18: Chris Poulter
ITB. Mixed in PT, using Liquid Mix and D-Verb. Monitoring on KRK V6's.

MIX 19: "LDGuy"
ITB. The mix was done in the box in Sonar 5. I wanted to get as sweet a sound, and as professional sounding as possible. I tried to be sparing with effects - there was a Sonitus EQ on each track (if i recall correctly, some tracks may have been left alone), and then a Waves TrueVerb the sax, trombone, and vox were sent to. The rest of the mixing was with faders. The guitar was put through a bit compression to even it out, but the only other compression used was at the end with a little bit of PSP Vintage Warmer to bring the levels up. There was also another EQ at the end to give it some spice. This track isn't mastered, but then again i dont think it particularly needs to be. The level is sufficient in my opinion. I used Event ALP-5 monitors and the Bose system in a Mazda 6 to get a range of environments. The computer was an Inta-Audio Custom Built model, dual 3.2ghz Pentium 4, 2GB RAM. This track was also mixed wearing sandals, and drinking a glass of Hoegaarden Whitbier.

MIX 20: Giles Parlett
ITB. Mixed ITB (Home built AMD 2500 / 1.5 GB / EMU 1212m / Sonar 3) And used Audio Note Class A Valve M2/PS2Se / Es System to Monitors). Had to drop the kick. Gated vocal and brass, Compressed and Eq'd everything. Added Tube warmth to vocals, guitar and whole mix and plate reverbed everything but the bass. Little bits of fader adjustment through the song for vocals and guitar. Endorphined the lot at the end.

MIX 21: "JumpeySpyder"
Mixed ITB using Sonar 5 and bundled plug-ins. (about 8 hours in total) Alesis M1 active mk II monitors in an untreated 3 x 3 x 3 room. I had lots of trouble mixing this track - I usually play with synth / industrial stuff that I don’t have to worry about sounding unnatural, but I’ve really enjoyed myself. What I’ve done:- I manually stripped out a fair amount of spill - I’m not sure if I’ve done enough but it would be easy to spend a lot of time here. Major EQ happened on kick + trombone. I’ve added a little gentle compression (hopefully) on most of the tracks to even things out and a sprinkling of reverb to vocals and solo parts. I found the point where the brass first came in very tricky and couldn’t make it sit right. In the end, I couldn’t get it right so I tampered with it. It’s still not right - sorry. Also at this point the trombone sounded a little out of tune to me ( its probably ‘one of those fancy jazz things’) I might have meddled with some Autotune if I had it. I also couldn’t resist adding a little edge to the guitar with an amp simulation. I’m expecting to be bottom of the pile, but looking forward to seeing what everyone else has done and hopefully getting some pointers.

MIX 22: Adam Miller
ITB. Another one mixed in Cubase (SX), mainly using the Waves plugins- in particular Rencomp and a couple of IR1 convolution reverbs. I also used a couple of URS eqs, and the Sonalksis compressor gently over the whole mix. I used a fair amount of automation to make sure the mix 'pushed' in the right places. The mix was done on my Mackie 624s, and cross-checked on my mastering-grade (obviously) Tannoy Reveals. I used an L2 just to bring the highest peaks up to zero.

MIX 23: "phatriff"
No info yet.

MIX 24: "Laurent Prod"
No info yet.

MIX 25: Graham Sullivan "LRS"
ITB. The mix was done in Tracktion and also mastered in Tracktion with the Final Mix mastering plugin via my RME Fireface into Quested F11a monitors. I haven't done a lot to the tracks other than to compress the drums a bit plus boost a little in the highs for the cymbals, work like hell on the kick sound with both compression and EQ, EQ the bass slightly to take away some of the muddiness (I'm surprised that it was DI'd because it doesn't sound like a DI'd track but being a jazz player he's probably had the same strings for the last 20 years!), compress slightly and add reverb to the horns as a group plus some group automation, rolloff a bit of bottom on the guitar and boost slightly in the 1K range (also more automation), vocal - already overcompressed I felt, all I did was add a bit of verb - probably a tad too much.


DAW's used: ProTools 4, Logic 5, Cubase 7, Sonar 4, Tracktion 2, Akai DPS 1, Unknown 2. Total = 25


GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD AND/OR STREAM ALL THE MIXES!

Edited by James Lehmann (04/08/06 07:33 AM)

Yes, well done Darren and well done James. Most enjoyable. It even got the wife interested!