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