I know there are some pretty talented cats here, and I'm wondering if anybody on this board would be interested in mixing some music (paid, of course). My band is wrapping up production on an EP (7 tracks, 37 minutes) that we did with Kevin Moore and are looking for options on the audio mix since our engineer pulled out at the last minute due to family issues. We're an independent band, so our budget is pretty shoestring. PM me if you're interested and we can see what there is to see. The music is largely electronic, but not electronica by any means. It's more electronic in the way that Nine Inch Nails is than something more dance-like. Perhaps trip-hopish at times. A link to one of the demo mixes on our soundcloud page: http://soundcloud.com/inprogressmusic/thunderstorms Thanks in advance to all those who respond.
I'm open to that either way, but do you have any experience? Or do you just want to noodle around with some session stems?
I'm seriously interested if we could sort something out. I'll admit I've worked with mainly rock and pop acts more than heavily electronic stuff, but I have great facilities on-hand to work from - see http://www.univibeaudio.co.uk for more details and PM me if you'd like to discuss it further.
I'd be interested as well. I'll mix a track for free up front if you want to get a feel for what I can do.
From the several responses I've gotten in this thread, I'm going to put together the stems for one of our tracks (not the one linked in this thread so far) and share them out to those interested. It seems ridiculously like The Bachelor: Unknown Independent Band Mixing Project Edition, but what are you gonna do? Thanks so much to those who have responded!
Wow! Such a response! I'll be organizing the session stems tonight and uploading them for you guys to download. I'll include the .log file for anybody who works in Logic. I'll also be responding to those who have PMed me throughout the day, but will do that as I can since I'm at work. I'm really excited to hear what you guys can do! I'm a shitty mixer. >_<
I'm going to run everything though a PSP Vintage Warmer to give it that warm professional tube sound then run it through Izotope Ozone 4 and run the loudness maximiser so hot it'll be melting shit on the way in and to make it bare phat.
make sure you reamp all the guitar with a shitty ass pod preset for that tinny sterile digital amp sim sound, with the fullband distortion that can't be removed.
Oh that's a point, do you have the unprocessed guitar tracks? I can re-amp them through my gash-fx II
thats funny because i spent 3 hours trying to eq the ugly out of an axe fx 2 track that brooks sent me the other day.
i'd be defensive too if i spent 5k on a useless piece of hardware that still isn't comparable to a $200 tube amp in terms of sonic quality.
Play nice you two. I have unmolested audio tracks for everything but the guitar tracks on one song. Frankly, there really isn't a lot of guitar on the EP. And yes, anybody who downloads the stems may do whatever the hell they want with it. Danimal-- who seems like our resident guru-- is going to work on it, so my gut tells me that he'll be the one I'll go with since he's working out of a professional studio (not to suggest that the rest of you guys aren't talented mixers-- I'm not familiar enough with anybody here's work to say, and I suspect you're all better than I am). The rest of you guys, however, can go to town. Maybe we can release a single with the song and then like thirty ridiculous remixes.
stems =/= raw tracks. you send raw tracks to a mixing engineer to be mixed, and a mixing engineer has the option of sending stems to a mastering engineer. stems are already mixed. just trying to prevent a huge miscommunication sometime in the future
` That's a slight simplification of the process, and not entirely accurate. Stems are just the individual components of a mix - whatever you want to pair things down to. I mix with stems all the time, creating them isn't something strictly for the mastering process - it's great to work on individual tracks first, then send things off to a number of sub-groups for further mixing. Great way to clear up clutter on on large mixes. You can indeed make stems out of the raw tracks - not ideal, perhaps, but I've worked on mixes before where all I've been given are four stereo tracks for drums, bass, guitars and vocals, without any processing. That might not happen so often nowadays, and you might say that stereo imaging is a part of the mixing process, but you can still do some pretty creative things with a limited number of stems - a lot of what I'm working on at the moment involves deconstructing stereo files and re-positioning things. It just lets you split instruments, sounds or frequency bands into smaller groups - perfect for a situation where you want to send multiple files to a bunch of different people over the internet to test their mixing abilities, without dumping the entire recording session on them.
there's something to be said for bouncing stems mid-mix as a way of committing yourself to certain processing, but it's unnecessary to do so when you have an infinite number of busses like in a daw. the situation i'm trying to prevent here is someone sending raw tracks to an engineer who was expecting stems.
Fair enough, didn't mean to sound confrontational. From my perspective, using stereo busses in a daw is much the same as bouncing stems, just lets you delay commiting to certain things a little longer. I'm one of the guys hoping to try out mits5k's track - from my experience, I'm used to taking whatever files I get given and figuring out what's what once they're in my daw. Stems can really mean so many different things that I wasn't particularly concerned - I figured it would either be the individual tracks or perhaps a bunch of stereo submixes. Either way, it'll be fun!
ya, you definitely want somebody who is not only extremely good, but has a treated room so they can actually give you a good, balanced mix.
Alright guys, here's your download directory: http://danmax.net/john/Mix/CG/ As of this moment it is only in the process of uploading. It's 10:20 PM for me, and the upload should be finished by about 2:30 AM. All wav files are 24 bit, but all of the guitar tracks were actually recorded at 16 bit. This is the only song for which that is ever true on this EP. BPM is 118. In the download directory is a demo mix of the song and a .zip file for all of the audio files and the project Logic file. The Logic file is pretty much stripped of anything all that useful so as to give you a clean canvas, though, so if that's not your DAW of preference you might not even bother opening it. Up to you. Regarding the vocals, I tend to prefer dryer lead vocals, but on this one I made all of the backing trem vocals sound far away in a large space in my demo mix, which I thought sounded cool. I also dropped most of all the bottom end from them, but whatever works. I try not to be married to the poor ways I've done things in demo mixes. Please let me know if anything here needs to be changed or altered or whatever. I tried to simplify this as much as possible as I'm sending it off. Any elements of my mix have been stripped out, basically. I think the only panning effect still in here at all is in the main backup vocal track where it moves from right to left in a couple of spots that I think sounds cool, but I can take that out if it needs to be more bare. Kevin's tacks are all stereo and have panning settings to them-- nothing I can do about that. Thank you to everybody who is taking a whack at this-- both seriously and for fun!
Wow, it's taken me ages to just get organised with this. Some absolutely beautiful sound design with this track. Anyway I'll give this a go, looks like it could be a lot of fun.
Has it taken you a long time to get it organized because of something I should be doing differently? This is the second most complicated song in terms of layers on the EP (the title track is both longer and more layered). The rest of them are a little more stripped back. Thanks for the sound design compliment!
No, just because there are loads of tracks and I'm putting them into folders and getting organised as well as listening to it and seeing what I want to do with it.
O.o I have spent like twenty total minutes of my life listening to Muse and have hated every one of them.
it's mostly just your, or whoever is singing's, vocal style. v. good stuff. a lot of depth and shit going on in there. i'm impressed. i will def try messin with it.
And that's why the band is called In Progress and not John Progress, dick. I don't understand any of this tech talk, so I am staying quiet, but thanks to everyone/anyone taking a stab at the mix. We've been sitting on this thing for over a year now and are excited to start wrapping things up. Also, as John stated, we are open to any and all mixes, remixes, dupstep mixes, etc. We're really excited to hear what comes out of it!
Any idea what VST Kevin used for those drum sounds? Some interesting sounds coming out of it. I worked on a mix for about 90 minutes and now the damn song is stuck in my head.
Oh well, regardless it's very cool stuff. Lots of mixing possibilities, I've got a few different ideas that I'm toying with at the moment.
Had a listen today at work, and this is gonna be an interesting job. Looking forward to sinking my teeth into it!
I think the vocals need de-essing and at least a little verb/delay, especially when there's only one voice singing. I also feel like the vocals could use some "enhancing" or saturation or something, there's just something that sounds dull in them. I like what you did with the bass automation, how it comes up in the active section of the fourth minute, but it could definitely be more audible than it is (in all sections). The percussion/pads/polyphonic instruments are very well balanced.
Chorus vocals were de-essed and so where some of the verse vocals, but yeah I agree there could be more. There are reverb on all vocals, and there's only a few measures where there is truly one voice singing (other times the doubled track is compressed heavily and sitting lower in the mix). Also agree on there being more bass/low end in general. If they want me to mix the EP for them I will definitely go back and make some more tweaks along those lines, but I can't really spend any more time on it at the moment.
