Believe (Boz Digital Labs Mixing Contest)

Below is my mix for the contest. This was a lot of fun. I really liked the song they gave us to work with.
 
https://soundcloud.com/god-z/believe-by-i-am-cassettes-bdl-mixing-contest
 
I spent days on this song. I kept going back and changing things all the time. I guess that would largely have to do with my inexperience but I did finally come up with something I am happy with.
 
I stayed true to the song mostly. The biggest change I did was by bringing the Vox pad tracks at the beginning to start the song off. I liked how the acoustic guitars came in as the vox pad tracks started to trail off.
The other big change I did was on the guitar solo near the end of the song. I liked the solo but not the recording of it. The guitar was recorded on the rhythm pickup and just sounded to muddy. So I recorded myself playing the same solo with both rhythm and treble pickups and a cleaner sound. I was able to get that recording to sit better in the mix (I think).
 
I did the usual edits on the tracks. Cut out the crap before and after and applied crossfades. I cleaned up the vocal tracks but cutting out a lot of breaths and cleaned up some plosives and "S"es.
 
I panned all the tracks to where I wanted them and used EQ everywhere to bring out all the instruments and tracks that I wanted in the song. Bye-bye glockenspiel, flute, sections of guitar and vocal tracks and vox pads (at the end of the song). I also deleted the one strings track during the chorus near the end. It really muddied up some frequencies and had too much reverb on it. I added multi-band compression, and stereo width here and there as well as reverb and delay where I saw fit. I als. used a transient shaper and exciter.
 
I wasted so much time messing around with the drum tracks. I used some gating here but found that was difficult as the mics picked up ambient noise as loud as the drum or cymbal it was used on to record. I did sample in another kick, snare and 2 toms to layer over the original drum tracks.
 
I then EQ'd the final mix and used a maximizer to bring up the overall volume.
 
Please let me know what you thing of my mix. And remember, I much rather hear your honest truth. Even if it isn't nice. I can take it. I think? LOL.
 
Cheers,
 
Chad
 
 

god-z
The biggest change I did was by bringing the Vox pad tracks at the beginning to start the song off. I liked how the acoustic guitars came in as the vox pad tracks started to trail off.

A brilliant idea Chad. Well done with that!
 
I agree with the Furry one... It's well worth downloading this track to listen to.
 
A really good mix dood...
 
cheers
 
andy

to get the best sound quality out of soundcloud,
upload full WAV file.....
 
make it downloadable...
 
soundcloud processes it to 128 kbps for streaming....
 
if you put a WAV file up,  the streaming they do to THAT sounds as good as it can with their rip.....
and then the download is full bandwidth,
so the user can choose.
 
putting up a mp3 that has already been processed,
only to get processed a second time by soundcloud,
= fail.

I just want to point out that I didn't do a great job on the drums. They are lost in the song. After hearing the drums in some of the other mixes on sound cloud I am disappointed with my mix on the drums.
 
Chad

Ditto - I liked the vocal pad intro, nice touch.   Overall it sounds like a fairly balanced mix here.

I deleted the song off sound cloud. I sure hope you were right alkie and I haven't blown my chance to enter the contest.
 

god-z
I deleted the song off sound cloud. I sure hope you were right alkie and I haven't blown my chance to enter the contest.
 

well if I`m wrong we`re both screwed as I`m deleting mine and uploading a different version..... but the deadline is in 2 weeks , and they haven`t downloaded any of the mixes yet, you just can`t change your mix after they download it to listen to and can`t have more than 1 mix uploaded at the time of the deadline.