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[osumosan]

Totally on the fifths! I almost harmonized the bass for the rest of the song, but as you point out, it's great for the dynamics.

Lovin' CJWall's mix. Is that a low tech or a high tech effect on the head and tail? Classic. It could use a couple drum edits (I should talk). The break's snare could be tweaked when the 16ths come in.

And thanks for the comments PG666. I'm going to dig in myself after this couple a days (work, ya know).

[spoon]

osumosan wrote on Tue, 24 July 2007 12:20

Totally on the fifths! I almost harmonized the bass for the rest of the song, but as you point out, it's great for the dynamics. Lovin' CJWall's mix. Is that a low tech or a high tech effect on the head and tail? Classic. It could use a couple drum edits (I should talk). The break's snare could be tweaked when the 16ths come in. And thanks for the comments PG666. I'm going to dig in myself after this couple a days (work, ya know).

Your mix was my personal favorite.
To me, this was a difficult piece, so I am particularly impressed when someone's mix made it work.
 
Your mix did that for me.  I think there were some others that had more aggressive bass FX that I would have liked on yours, but now I am being picky arent I.

Cheers,
David

[cjwallgor]

osumosan wrote on Tue, 24 July 2007 12:20

Totally on the fifths! I almost harmonized the bass for the rest of the song, but as you point out, it's great for the dynamics. Lovin' CJWall's mix. Is that a low tech or a high tech effect on the head and tail? Classic. It could use a couple drum edits (I should talk). The break's snare could be tweaked when the 16ths come in. And thanks for the comments PG666. I'm going to dig in myself after this couple a days (work, ya know).

Thanks dude!  It's a plugin called Tapestop that can be a bitch to use, but when it works, it's great.  It being free doesn't hurt either..

I agree on the edits and the strange snare sound in the break.  Oh well, two hours into a mix only gets you so far, haha.

Wish I would have had time for a little more automation w/the vocals, all I had was rough leveling between the two.  Oh well, thanks bro!

Charlie

[pg666]

finished my reviews while taking a break from packing (ugh..)
...........................

CJWall: holy shit, that's some bong-rattling bass! snare sounds thin in comparison. some of the overall pumping is fatiguing; did you give this a bit of the 'Vlado the impaler'? not much else to say other than this one rocks quite hard! love the bass; Billy Anderson would be proud!

Fantomas: not sure i dig the delay between the bass signals; there's nothing cementing it in the mix. drums sound pretty strange and paper-y; not sure i would have gone the mono route for this type of rock. vocals sound like a rough mix. kinda neat buildup with the flanger and then it gets thin again in the rockin' part. neat flange on the outro vocal... the rest of the vocals could use some pizzazz like that.

briefcasemanx: the snare sample sounds good and blends in well, but the kick is a little loud and doesn't really fit the rest of the kit. something about the bass is rubbing me the wrong way EQ wise. hey, someone else did the left/right vocal thing, nice! it seems natural with the call and response vocals. distortion sounds stylish on the "melodic" vocal; a little Strokes/Killers-y. i would have done a bit of editing on the drums considering the precise samples you picked, but this is pretty well done!

Juergen: pretty no frills mix so far, except with delay on the DI.. which works ok in some parts but not in others. neat vocal reverb in the break, gives it a nice big climax. good vocal delays in the bridge; though the slick atmosphere it introduces seems a bit at odds with the raw sound of the instruments. it sounds like the music took a back seat to the vocals priority-wise.

[J-Texas]

osumosan

Man oh man!

No offense to ANYONE here... but that was the only mix that I stayed interested in the whole time. Start to finish. That was definitely the coolest treatment in my mind's ear.

Now the bitter beer face. Maybe I was holding on thinking that somewhere in there I might hear the vocals. I was struggling the whole time man. Such a waste, because they were the highlight of the mix to me. That snare was really throwing me off too. I see where you were going with that, but I think you could have used some more time. Little ghost pickups would be at least at a different volume and a little more on time. (The drumming was already off enough) I've never heard a snare overtake the kick. LOL. The delay stuff was excellent. Tweak those things and IMHO... as Jermaine Jackson said... it will tickle my fancy, it will excite my soul.

JT

ps - I'll get to the rest of you guys later  

[chrisj]

Should we have a reviews thread? I'm going to start my usual critical mayhem...

[Ryan Alfred]

This is Ryan, the bassist and, uhm, singer, on the IMP13 track. I haven't gotten a chance to listen to all the mixes, but so far the one that I think gets the point across the best is Osumosan. Seriously over the top, just like the performance needs. Everything's crazy, distorted as hell like it would be live with our 8 speaker system, and the vocals get lost, just like they do when a shitty PA is competing with a band that's not paying attention. Not sure why you took the sweet minor second dissonance out of the last break down, but that's besides the point.

I think a track like this is an interesting study in what makes something sound "right" in recorded music these. As an artist, I am constantly conflicted with the choice to auto-tune vocals (in other projects, obviously), correct slightly off percussion, and the like. Similarly, as someone with a really extensive background in audio editing, sequencing, and synthesis (again, obviously more so in other projects), it strikes me that making records these days has gone beyond simply recording what a given band of musicians sounds like, and can be though of as a way of perfectly manifesting an idea.

With the advent of technology, including everything from recording with a click track all the way to autotuning a lead vocal, we can push and pull and fiddle with audio until it's perfect, and we can do it in ways that are only subtly noticable to the pros themselves. This sets an impossibly high standard for any band that wants their records to measure up as "professional".

I personally view this in the same light as I do a lot of other parts of our culture that are geared towards outward perfection through artificial means, like breast implants and face lifts. It's a shifting of emphasis from what something is onto what we think it ought to be. It seems to me that the essence of a thing is lost when it's identity is "corrected". Fake breasts look great under a shirt, but they feel SO weird.

It's a taste call, though. Some guys like Maxim, and some bands are going for perfect, the aesthetic idea of that perfection being more important and more intrinsic to the nature of their art than capturing a performance. I've done a lot of dance music in my day, and one of my idols is BT, the king of obsessive time correcting.

The idea of this band was to flip off the norm, in the spirit, though not the classic sound, of punk rock. The norm we were raging against wasn't anything political, rather, it was against the fact that nowadays even so-called hardcore bands time correct and auto-tune and edit their music to perfection, while still trying to pass off the "Fuck you, we don't care about your standards" attitude. Our response was to really not care, to make music so we could have fun and scream our heads off and not have any of the pressures of our other "serious" bands. We barely wrote lyrics, we rarely rehearsed, and we recorded just like we played: one shot, whatever comes out. With this in mind, it seems a strange and inappropriate thing to attempt to clean it up and bring it up to modern standards because feeling trapped by these modern standards is why we made this band in the first place.

Do the edits in some of these mixes make us sound like a better band than we are, like a Wonderbra ? Absolutely. Would anybody listening know the difference ? Never. Would the edits make it more listenable for a wider audience ? Probably. Do these questions miss the point of the artist's purpose ? Depends. For me, for this project, definately.

It's classic. Butch Vig made Nirvana a record they hated, and Steve Albini made them one they liked. Knowing that, I still like "Nevermind" better. But is it up to me, Vig, or even the millions that probably agree with me to decide that ?

Thanks for indulging my thoughts. I look forward to listening to all of them.

[maxim]

maybe, this belongs in the "philosophy" thread, but the END point of the artwork is the audience

as a songwriter, i'm happiest with my songs BEFORE they are written, whilst they are still an emotion

everything that follows that impulse, imo, is clunky and inelegant in comparison

i don't care that kurt had issues with "nevermind', i also prefer it to "in utero", but someone else might not...

that's where it gets tricky, 'coz there's no standardised "audient", so all you can do is put your "audient" hat on and push on

that's what i tried to do with this track

i tried to imagine what i would like to hear if i WERE a fan of this outfit

by no means do i have the skills or the attention span to pull it off, but this is what the imp's are for, innit?

[J-Texas]

Isn't this all a bunch of contradiction?

You say you like the "over the top" thing, but that took "over the top" mixing. I'll bet that's not how it really would sound live (even on a sh&tty PA).

It would probably sound like it did... a garage recording. I didn't mean that to be a stab. You guys might have been doing this as an F.U. type of thing, making it sloppy and in your face. But how was anyone mixing this project supposed to know that?

We mixed it as we thought it should sound. And frankly, I thought it should sound better than it did, so I did it that way. Moving some parts, masking sounds, controlling the vocals.

I agree with most of what you are saying about music these days. Read some of the other arguments that I've made. It would be totally to your liking man. Putting out a jokingly shitty track and berating people for wanting to change it, or help it out (not knowing that it's a joke) is crazy.

THIS IS WHERE THE PRODUCER PART COMES IN.

I guess I didn't speak up about this before, J. I would have said during tracking: "man let's do this one more time... I know you've got it in you." or "great track, let me just punch that intro and it will be great."

You think you would get angry at an outside party... a potential audience... your first audience, letting you know that something was off? This is where the ratio gets askew and what Major Mike said about caring.

Yes, I could collect $200 after passing "go", but would either of us be satisfied? Probably not.

I've heard some really good mixes of the original tracks, but they are not my favorites. I did what I thought was right.

DO I SOUND LIKE VLAD?

OH NOOOOOOOOO! (insert the McCaully Caulkin picture here)

Once again... must be the wine talking.

[M Carter]

URGH.  

I had a bunch of reviews written and then I hit the wrong button on damn firefox.  I'm just going to go through some highlights then.

First, mine. This was a really hard mix for me because our first time through this project was such a thoughtless project.  We found a delay that sounded like screetching children, threw the bass through 4 or 5 amp sims and it all just kind of gelled. The first time I tried to go for the scissors in Nuendo, I was told "absolutely not, that's SO not what this is about".  This time, I was stuck on trying 'do what I had done, but make it better' and don't feel that I got what I wanted.

I agree with Ryan as far as osumosan nailing it.  The drums in this mix make me want to walk down my block punching out car windows.  The vocals are a bit extreme, but I'm alright with it because everything else is so balls.

Audiogeek is my number 2 fave on this mix.  If the bass matched the vocals, it'd be damn near on the mark.  

Juergen's mix feels close to where I wanted mine to go.  

My philosophy towards record making is pretty aligned with Ryan's (although I think In Utero is far superior to Nevermind).  We both have a background in 90's hardcore and those early Wu Tang records are some of my all time favorite records, with the flammy snares, the off beat gun cocks for upbeats, and samples that don't quite loop right. It's ok that shitcopter misses downbeats, because the music slaps you in the face so hard that it doesn't matter.  Listening to music like this for that kind of tightness is like listening to Kenny G because you like the vocals.  

[M Carter]

J_Texas -

It's a funny thing, the 'mixing without any prior knowledge'.  I do realize that in some people's worlds, that's how things are.  But I'm also aware that most engineers that work like that are hired for THEIR sound.  

On the contrary, there are a whole lot of engineers that are with projects from start to finish.  Most of our clients are like that.  
 
That's what makes IMP tough AND interesting, the lack of direction.  It's also what drives the discussion.

And live, shitcopter was pretty fucking off the wall.  8 speaker cabs and guitar/bass amps with a bunch of pedals and a sick blues guitarist playing drums like animal from the muppets.  

[osumosan]

Wow, I'm glad a bunch of you like my mix. Maybe contradiction is what it's about. As a client, what you think something should sound like and what it really would sound like given a certain set of circumstances are almost always different. The mixer's audience is the artist and the end listeners simultaneously. I've had years of trying to interpret my singers "intent" and Ryan's language reminds me of him.

I definitely had a leg up here because this kind of stuff is where I come from, so I was not confused about the intent. Not to say that everyone else was confused, but people were thrown off and were mislabling the track. I'm new-ish here, so let's see how I drown in the Burt Bacharach context.

I edited and fixed some things and I thought I could have gone further but I only did it to not call attention to certain clams insted of thinking of it as polishing. As an aside, some freaky stuff happened during the mix where the voices and the bass were creating a totally electronic sounding ghost part.

Anyway, I wanted the drums to kill so I pushed the compression hard which is not at all what it would sound like literally through a PA, but if you were in front of the PA, your ears would totally compress the sound.  At the same time, doing that to the overheads could make the cymbals wash and phase too much, so I kept those more (but far from completely) clean. I liked Jason Thompson's mix where the bass kicked in during the responses to the vocals and I'd want to ride that some. Like kicking in a boost pedal.

I also stuck the vocals together which maybe helped the live feel a bit, but I lost the minor second that way. Also, I thought everything had to be as one unified thrashing, which is probably why the delays are pushed back too far.

Thanks for the feedback. Can't wait for IMP14.

[chrisj]

The IMP 13 Horrible Trainwreck Critique Thread

Okay, so this tune is a mess! Not only that, I don't think it's much of anything if you cleaned it up and made it precise. So for this one, it's a bit like the ol' "A&R ten second trash bin crit" in which if it doesn't grab you in ten seconds it's trash-binned- except it's over a longer period, and the ONLY concern is, does this make the tune somehow cool?

No logic about it, no attempt to justify- it's gonna be a sloppy trainwreck of a crit that hopefully will describe what the tracks seem like, and whether they RAWWWK. This will depend entirely on how things are conveyed because there's practically no tune or performances there to work with.

With that understood, we start with...

Briefcaseman- feels like it's trying to be serious. You get the sense that someone in here is 'steady' or 'solid', and lines pop out like they were intended to be that way. Something is lost

iCombs- ratty much? Oh my God, this is awful. Giving this full range is just fatal. Pretty hi-hats like glitter on a corpse. Sorry man, you need to work with nice music, not this I think you'll find this track worked better if you forgot about fidelity and just made things scream in the midrange.

Jason Thompson- yeah, MIDRANGE, exactly what I was talking about! It still feels a little like it's trying for 'fi' but this makes me want to bang my head and make The Horns a lot. It's got that explosive quality and the roar I need to hear from this track in order to dig it. My GOD this is a fucking mess. It's a train-wreck and I'm loving it. This man understands this sort of noise in fact, this is what I was wanting to do and didn't. YEAH.

TomC- Pretty much the same thing but not as much. It's rawer, dryer, and that makes it less gloriously horrible. I'm also noticing that understanding the words isn't making me like the vocals more- I'm getting a very good picture of the performance but it's not lifting me, I'm sort of scrutinizing it, like it's pinned onto the song, in the manner of some kind of strange bug Yeah, I definitely don't like the vocal being too separate here.

IMP13 FINAL 1 320kbps- I'm not critting you because it said to use 192K and you're the only dude who insisted on using 320K, which didn't actually help your mix. Laters

Andrew Brierly- Whee, got the bombastic thing going on! This one's CREEPY which is kinda neat. Reminding me of the Cramps, that kind of alarming presence on disturbing people. The drop-out and slow build is an interesting move which seems just as good as the way it's originally done, and I don't often feel that about big arrangement changes. I think this is good, I like, though it's a bit too scarey for me to listen to for pleasure

Baddo- "Alll aboooard!" Wait, this isn't 'Crazy Train'! Well spotted, though! This feels immediately plausible- some kind of huge monstrous over-the-top rock mayhem akin to the worst of the Stooges. Interestingly, I like this better- in the sense that it doesn't creep me out in spite of the backwards foolishness. Must be the way the vocals are handled, they seem friendlier. Something's wrong in that slow build, the raw tracks felt more driving somehow. Timing in the drums seems just different somehow. Mostly I like it but there are times when I don't.

carefulcollapse- I recognize somebody else who didn't fix drums! Some of those falling-down-stairs moments are very familiar to me... By the same token there are places where I thought the original drums had this wonderful amateur bashingness and here it is retained completely. Also, it's interesting how natural and organic the voices sound. I'd be interested in the vocal chain on this mix. In general this doesn't impress me in a big way but it's LIKEABLE in a big way, particularly the way it clings to the human outbursts and madness of the artists

ChrisJ- sux LOL I R INVENTING PLUGZ. True that the drums are awful dry. I do like a lot of the sounds. Very pointy, impacty version without going all treble-fry. Voted most likely to blow your MIDRANGE horns while killing you with loud

Greg Dixon- Dry as a Saltine cracker. Boy, I can sure hear everything, but why doesn't it feel more roaring and distorted? This is totally a punk band when they went into a studio and it had THREE ADATS DUDE. Everything crisply delineated. I like all the sounds, they just refuse to form a stew for me. In fact it's very cool how reasonable troublesome instruments like the drums sound here, there's just that dryness. I'm going to guess Greg doesn't add a lot of fake digital distortion to things and is mixing ITB? This is one case in which that's a hard path to take. Oh, and correct me if I guessed totally wrong so I can straighten myself out

juergen- Hey, this sounds kinda big! I'm thinking things are being fixed. The drums sound like the real thing but it still fits. The vocals are swimming around in a big hall but that's OK. This is an interesting one, very listenable, for better or for worse there's virtually none of that 'let's fuck around and play really loud' quality, it sounds like a professional show. That's decidedly a double-edged sword with this band but you carried it off

pg666- Weird, it's like the mix isn't really sure what's the important track, so everything sort of politely takes turns and nothing gets too out of hand. Which is kind of a 'yikes' with this band. Actually some things like the bass are stepping out with a bit of personality- but it's bugging me. This mix sounds like almost everything it was seen as a problem and hated. As a result it feels really inhibited and stifled. I guess if I'm reading that right, the lesson is to not mix stuff that you hate too much

Scott Oliphant- Wow! Holy SHIT! Okay, dude, you LOVED this too much. It's cracking me up- holy shit, who knew this stuff could be that much more obnoxious and violent? MASSIVE PROPS for just the sheer audacity of it. There's a problem in that it kind of hurts- it's not making me want to keep listening, I kind of want to turn it off, but OMG does this ever convey the  manaical intensity of the tune. This is AWESOME even if it's about 50% too much. I particularly like the way it hangs together and doesn't leave any parts left out or bland. FULL SCALE ASSAULT. RESPECT SIR. phew, it stopped, and now I never have to listen to it again

ATOR- Ow, kinda ratty. What a nutty snare! Sure fills up space. There's a fine line between this and really painful and unpleasant to listen to... definitely in the 'mixer is a third band member' school, it's harshly sculpted so you can't ignore the presence of the knob-twister. Reminding me strangely of Nine Inch Nails. Hey, flanges! I want this either to come down a notch or go up a notch (but pull all the tracks back a bit while making them more tonally extreme). Props for including the vocal stupidity at the end!

garret- I'm getting the feeling 'pretty straight'. It feels like what was on the tracks, except there's a spring reverb there. This differs from some of the other versions in that the mix isn't getting into the spirit of the thing. It's neither cringing in horror and trying to make the music go away, or cackling and cranking on knobs, so it comes off like they put up some mics and that was it. Don't think this worked, for this music.

maxim- Wow, what's with the bass? There's a sort of crackle, and the drums are fading out. This feels lightweight. If you only have pounding sloppy drums and a bass, and you take out the pounding of the drums and the bass of the bass, WTF? This would have to be a lot more crisply played for this approach to work, and it's not. Sorry

osumosan- LOUD! So this is what the band had in mind? It sure is big! The loudness prevents there from being any more focused impacts like in Scott Oliphant's. i think I 'get' the vocal balance here, and it's an interesting judgement call- the vocals ARE the missing guitars. It's like they're not there to be present as vocalists, they're just rasping screams. That's cool, and it totally works and makes sense, but I just don't find it as appealing as bringing out the vocals as people (OK, bad, SICK people, but people). This is basically the definitive BIG NOISE. A band like this, all the songs would sound like that, you couldn't tell them apart, and their gigs would be empty except for one dude and for him it's the best concert EVAR. ...and maybe that's the point. Doesn't bother me, I get to want different things than the band if it pleases me, and I do. I want more personality and charisma. I've spent enough time in really LOUD PRACTICE SPACES, I know what that sounds and feels like and don't need more at this point. Give me some different angle that makes it more than just THAT SOUND. There's more to life than THAT SOUND. Okay, not much more, but still

audio~geek- Now here's someone who's happy twisting knobs. This one feels like someone was having fun twisting them knobs, there's a bizarre organicness. Like ATOR, you're very aware of the mixer, but audio~geek seems a bit more to be jamming the sound WITH the band rather than in spite of the band. A lot of this is pretty cheesey stuff, but so's the song, it hangs together somehow. I know a band that is just the way this feels, and they're crazy, funny bastards this turned out to be one of the mixes where I liked the people making that horrible racket.

Fantomas- Hard to know what to say (getting kind of tired...). Snare's weird. Things are going up and down in volume. I think what's happening is that this mix is sound oriented, and it's pulled some worthwhile sounds out of its pocket but having done so, they kinda sit there and the other parts aren't helping them. This mix feels confused, like it's trying to go somewhere but it's stuck in the quicksand of the original song, and there's too little that's inspired (in a NORMAL sense) to latch onto. Compare with Scott, or Jason Thompson- in this track, if you couldn't love the very obnoxiousness of it, you were pretty screwed

J Hall- Why am I thinking STRAIGHT? I wouldn't have guessed it but J seems to be one of the guys trying to find the stadium rock heart of the track. Maybe that's not so unexpected. I hear competence in the way things keep switching around to create interest, but it's the same story as Fantomas in an infinitely better-crafted way. I don't like the band that much in this mix. They're not good enough to respect and they're not flipped-out and demented enough to love. The craftsmanship is really good, really really good, but it just isn't making me LIKE these guys. Characteristic- editing out that really stupid obnoxious part with the voice at the end, that went on forever. WHY? I can see that anybody would draw the line SOMEWHERE but man... so few of you saw anything in that, and it was so hilariously, gratituously, UNPRECEDENTEDLY retarded

M Carter- Somehow I'm thinking 'eighties', maybe it's the reverb, or the intensity of the vocals. I'm warming to this, because of the amount of character pouring off the vocals. There's little details popping up and they're the right flavor of obnoxious- vocal echoes spiraling upward, silliness like that. This isn't lighting me on fire, but all the same I find it likeable. OMG, and WHY am I totally not surprised that this dude ran with ALL the vocal idiocy at the end, up to the 'GOODBYE!'? M Carter, I love you for that. I didn't even go that far myself

CJ Wall- Whoa, this sounds different. Hardcore sounds, slamming. Are you a metal guy? Not a big timing-fixer, that's for sure- the tracks are extremely unquantized. It feels like power music, but without so much of the humor value- it sounds like these guys are very serious, but failing. Making them seem convincingly serious is pretty cool, actually, though it falls into that trap where I'm not finding them that likeable and not cool enough to really respect. Even the vocal stupidity at the end is turned ominous. You MUST be a metal guy

macbraddy- raspy, pounding- I like how this is just off-kilter enough to not force me to take it as Very Serious. It's wonky, stuff's all over the place in stereo, and highlighting the vocals without making them too manly and testosterone-laden. There's a certain plainitive wonkiness in the vox that can be taken away somehow, and here it's sticking around.

I FINISHED! WHEW!

I'm going back to listen to: mine, a bit, in the light of all my critting, Jason Thompson's, and some of Scott Oliphant's

(and he did!)

[cjwallgor]

chrisj wrote on Wed, 25 July 2007 01:42

CJ Wall- Whoa, this sounds different. Hardcore sounds, slamming. Are you a metal guy? Not a big timing-fixer, that's for sure- the tracks are extremely unquantized. It feels like power music, but without so much of the humor value- it sounds like these guys are very serious, but failing. Making them seem convincingly serious is pretty cool, actually, though it falls into that trap where I'm not finding them that likeable and not cool enough to really respect. Even the vocal stupidity at the end is turned ominous. You MUST be a metal guy

LOL.  Awesome call dude, I am indeed a 'metal' guy per se' but I love to write/mix/work with a lot of different genres.  I'm just partial to very modern, slamming sounds

My first IMP has gone fairly smooth!  wooooo, haha.

[ryst]

Hey guys, mine has been up for a bit but no one has given it a listen/critique yet.  It's named "IMP13_Ryst.mp3".  

I will be posting my reviews later today.