Here is the post about my approach to mixing the track:
First, a little about my background. I'm a total amateur when it comes to mixing. I've been doing it for 6 years or so, but I've always just done it to get better at understanding sound and to make my own music sound decent. I've never had a paid mixing gig, so take any advice I give with a huge grain of salt.
Okay, so about this track: I started by listening to the song once through with all the faders up to get an idea for what I would be working with. I took note of how the song ebbed and flowed, and I noted which tracks sounded pretty good already (bass, vocals, and to some extent the guitars) and which tracks would need the most work (drums). I also noted that the performances - especially the drums - were a bit sloppy.
I started by soloing and editing the drum timings, using the built-in metronome. I'd never done this before, but I knew it would be important for this mix. I watched a few videos about drum editing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bCnk5kPkKA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0yOsMd2Eu4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIw86ggPISk
and then I got to work.
The ideas from the videos worked well for the snare, toms, and overheads, but I had some trouble getting the kick track to split and quantize properly. More on that in a moment...
Next I worked on mixing the drums. It's important to know how the mics for a drum kit fit together to get a good overall sound. If you struggle with mixing drums (like I did for many years), see if you can find some youtube videos where a mixer solos each drum mic in a finished mix. You might be surprised by what you hear. For this mix, I took a standard approach, using the overheads as cymbal mics, using the shell (kick, snare, and tom) mics to get the attack of the shell drums, and using the room mic to get most of the sustain and body of the shell drums. I also added a stereo reverb to simulate a stereo drum room track, since the supplied room track was mono.
Eventually I realized that I couldn't get a good drum mix with the tracks as supplied. My solution was to "sample" the supplied multitracks. I took the best snare, tom, and kick hits I could find in the track and loaded them into the built-in sampler. (If you pull up the RS5K instances in my project and zoom out on the waveforms, you'll see how I did this within the bounds of the contest rules.) I used the best snare hit to layer with the supplied snare track, and I did a complete replacement of the kick and tom tracks. You can see in my project on the kick track a bypassed "JS: Audio To MIDI Drum Trigger" plugin. I wanted to layer my sample with the kick track, but as I mentioned earlier, I couldn't get the supplied kick track to quantize properly (I think it's because the waveform for each kick hit blooms in a strange way, confusing the built-in transient detection algorithm), so I abandoned that idea in favor of complete kick replacement. I recreated the kick and tom tracks with midi to trigger the samples. By the way, the reason I did tom replacement was because of all the cymbal bleed in the supplied tom tracks. I wanted clean close mics with minimal cymbal bleed to work with. I also replaced a few of the weaker cymbal hits with stronger hits from elsewhere in the song, just by cutting and pasting the overhead waveform.
Once I had all these edits in place, I mixed the drums normally and was able to get a drum mix I was happy with.
Next I seasoned the bass (pretty easy - split it into clean low end and amped high end) and lead vocal (also pretty easy - just compress the snot out of it with the Tukan 76B, EQ it with a low cut and hi shelf, and give it a little delay - this pretty much just always works on vocals) and mixed these with the drums. For level setting, mostly I worked in mono, at low volumes, with an EQ on my monitor FX cutting out <100 and >8k to let me focus on the midrange.
From there it was just a matter of fitting the guitars and backing vocals in with everything else, doing some sweetening on the master bus, and doing some automation (mainly to keep the vocals clear above everything else and to emphasize an instrument part here and there throughout the song). I also mixed the parallel drum track and snare plate into the whole mix, and did a few timing edits on the vocals and the guitars.
I'll admit I spent way too long messing with the guitars, as you can probably tell from all the EQ on them. I'm sure I could have gotten just as good of a result with way less work, but I like to tinker and I struggle with distorted guitars. They're essentially just noise in the high end, and how are you supposed to mix noise into your project in a way that sounds good? That's the struggle. I found with these guitars that an EQ band at 3500 was an "aggression" control and almost even a volume control for them, and for me that ended up being the biggest thing that helped me place them in the mix.
All in all this took about 4 days: 2 evenings for drum edits and 2 evenings for the rest of the mix. I then finalized my mix over the course of the next week by listening to it with fresh ears each day on different systems (including my phone and some $30 computer speakers) and making small tweaks to fix the problems I would hear.
I'm happy to answer any questions y'all might have about the mix.
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Also, here's some unsolicited mixing advice:
1) Reference! There were a number of mixes this month that were really far off in terms of overall frequency balance, amount of reverb, amount of distortion/saturation, and/or amount of compression. Use reference mixes to calibrate your ears before mixing and to check yourself while mixing. Don't try to
match a reference mix while mixing (although trying to do that is a good exercise in sound design). Rather, have reference mixes that establish the bounds of what's reasonable. For instance, here's how I check the bass level of my mix: I have two references that I like the sound of. One of them is really light on the bass, and the other is really bass-heavy. If I think my overall mix sounds good and the bass level of my mix is between the bass levels of my references, then my bass level is probably fine.
2) See if you can find isolated stems for your favorite songs on YouTube. While you shouldn't mix in solo (most of the time), it's enlightening to hear several examples of how stems can fit together to form a professional mix.
3) If you struggle with EQ, check out Hardcore Music Studio on YouTube (
https://www.youtube.com/@hardcoremusicstudio/videos), especially his "Magic Frequences" series. Those videos won't give you everything you need, but they'll take you a long way.
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