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Alright, now we have our submissions. Now it's time for us to pick a song for Mixerman's MixFest 2001.

For those coming in late, in a nutshell, anyone that wishes to participate will mix a song. Everyone will mix the same song. This is not a contest, but a Festival for the purposes of entertainment, education, and experimentation. Once the mixes are completed participants will then have the opportunity to listen to all the differnt mixes.

If you're planning on participating in Mixerman's MixFest 2001, then you should voice your opinion. Vote for the song you would want to mix out of the submissions. Don't worry about format, we'll make that work. First thing's first. We need a song.

Below are 5 choices. We will not be mixing midi drums. There were some great submissions with midi drums, but for this particular exercise I feel it's important to use real drums.

If you would like to participate, please listen to the songs and cast a vote as to which song you think would be best for this exercise.

I will give you all some time, but when times up, it's up. So don't procrastinate. We are all very busy, trust me on that, so set aside the time, and listen.

Mixerman

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Mixerman Tue, 08/28/2001 - 21:38

Here are the 5 choices for Mixerman's MixFest 2001. Which song should we mix?

1. http://www.mp3.com/productdotcom “London Town”

2. http://www.mp3.com/ilyarock "Blatchford"

3. http://www.mp3.com/rosavelt "Here Again"

4. http://www.mp3.com/ajja "UFO"

5. http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/19/evan_frankfort.html “She’s the Man”

I picked these 5 for a variety of reasons. First, I think they're all really good songs. There were some great songs with midi or electronic drums, but I scrapped them because of that. It's just not condusive to this exercise to have midi drums. Second, they had some interesting things going on in the productions.

I know what I think we should mix. What do you think?

Pick one, and post it here. If you don't post, you must not be participating. I'll give it some time. And if someone is on vacation, or on their death bed and they can provide a plane ticket stub, doctors note, or a casket order form, well then, I may be forced to make an exception.

Just pick one.

Mixerman

Logan Wed, 08/29/2001 - 04:25

Hey I'd love to play but at present my connection is not up to downloading the tunes. I use an old 586 for internet purposes and each tune is about a 25-30 minute download then the box hasn't enough processing to play them so I have to zip the suckers onto floppies and move them to my audio machine, all in all at least a days work. I am in the process of changing my internet machine but it's at least a week 'til I'm ready, have we got that long?
Love to compare my humble system to some the stuff you big guys get to play with. So I'm in if I can have a week to get the new box up and running so I can listen to the tunes. take care Logan

Mixerman Wed, 08/29/2001 - 08:08

It's OK if you can't place your vote. I was semi-kidding. I just want to get an idea of how many people are going to be participating in this Shindig.

I'm going to make an official announcement in the next couple of days, where people can sign up. In the meantime, if you can listen to the songs and put up a vote that would be fantastic.

I realize that for people with slow connections it's an arduous process. So if you can't put in a vote, don't sweat it.

I'm going to give it about a week (or more) anyway. There really is no hurry. We have much larger hurdles to overcome than listening to 5 songs. Transferring the selected song to all the different formats is a mammoth one. Putting all the mixes onto CD's and setting up a network to mail them out to everyone, that's another. And I can't and won't do all of this alone.

I'm going to need volunteers to make this happen. Don't volunteer now. I want to keep this process as unconfused as possible. Once we have a song, we will start setting up the network in which to make this happen. It doesn't happen if everyone involved doesn't pitch-in anyway they can.

Listen if you can, post a vote on the songs you think are most condusive to MixFest 2001.

To the people that have one of the 5 remaining songs up there. Please inform me what format they are recorded on, and exactly how many tracks there are.

Thanks,

Mixerman

k.w.blackwell Wed, 08/29/2001 - 13:10

Originally posted by Mixerman:
It's OK if you can't place your vote. I was semi-kidding. I just want to get an idea of how many people are going to be participating in this Shindig.

You know I'm interested, as we discussed the idea of doing something like this even back before the "ultimate idea" thread, and even before you got this forum going. I can't review the mp3's without going to a *lot* of trouble, but I'll trust your judgement. Just choose one that won't drive us newbies crazy. I'm be eager to participate and learn as much as I can.

I do have one other concern, however. It should be glaringly obvious, but.... You haven't mentioned yet that the chosen song is going to need to be redistributed in raw multi-track format to all participants. So the submitter needs to have all the original tracks handy. Some bands might not like having the raw tracks so "exposed", though it's probably not a real issue, just something for the "submitters" to make sure about. The only reason I'm pointing out the obvious is that the copyright owners have to agree to this little explosion of "derivative works".

I think the most common denominator of distribution formats will be data CD-R's, with at least maximum-resolution WAV format files for the various tracks. (That would certainly suit me best.) Can anybody who plans to participate *not* handle that format? If someone is working all-analog, then I can't even guess what they'll need. But since the selected track has already been mixed once and made publically-listenable in that form, you might as well also include that original mix with all the raw tracks (unless there are too many to fit on a single data CD-R).

Notice that this same sort of thing is already happening on the "Mastering" forum, where participants will try their hand at mastering a stereo mix. The plan is to use both audio and data CD-R's in that case, where the all-analog guys will just use a decent CD player for the source signal. There, the participation is less than 14 or so people, but I imagine we'll have quite a few more here.

All the submitted mixes for this effort should be sent back out to everyone via a compilation copied to audio CD's so we can compare and critique each other's work. At 3:30, I suppose you can only fit 22 or so mixes on a CD. Think we'll exceed that? If we have to use multiple CD's either for the tracks or the final mixes, the shared cost will go up considerably. If we can keep each on one CD, then perhaps we can keep the cost well under $10 per participant. This is far better than having everyone post their results as mp3 files somewhere, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Oops, sorry, was I rambling? :-)

Guest Wed, 08/29/2001 - 14:07

depending on what the original is on...im thinking SDII or WAV files transfered through some decent converters would be best, that way it can easily be ditributed via cd.

I think most can get a DAW into there room and transfer to whatever they want to work off of.

So im picking.....GOD DAMNIT!!! I make a decision and then bounce to the other one... now I know what my girlfriend means when she yells at me for not making up my mind heh.

Guest Wed, 08/29/2001 - 14:18

Ok so I was stuck between Here Again and UFO.

I really dig the vocals and drums in Here Again.
however I think UFO has a cool feel to it and has plenty of elements to work with so that we will get alot of unusual mixes.

I think I have to go for UFO, but whichever one isnt picked or if neither are picked I still would like to take a stab at these two...

Question.....

What are the limits to this thing? can we add tracks? do a bit of rearranging? or is it strictly mixing with what we get? Also what about the final product, does it get turned in raw with no mastering?

Peace

audiowkstation Thu, 08/30/2001 - 01:02

Track one grows on you, lots of work could be done to that one to take it to a whole different level.

Tk 3 would be easy to fatten up and vibe, track 5 is a good one too.

After careful consideration...my vote is for the hard one. London towne track 1.

Sounds like about 18 chs...but hard to say...depending on tracking. It is a good tune...grows on you. reminds me of some Level 42 that was before their hits...

The vox effects would be fun...and the acoustic guitars could really get on with the program...wide dynamics, and plenty of room for creative control. Very diverse track

Tom Cram Thu, 08/30/2001 - 07:34

I'm in. How about UFO? I really don't have a pref, all the songs represent different and interesting challenges.

Downloading from a server is going to severely limit the participants. Are a couplethree CDR's with .wav's or .sd2's out of the question? Or how about DVD RAM? DVD RAM would definitely be my format of choice.

Mixerman Thu, 08/30/2001 - 20:51

Not to throw a wrench in the works, but maybe we should mix all five songs. Stick with me here.

I'm not saying we each should mix 5 songs. We each should mix 1 song. But perhaps 40 mixes (probably more) of 1 song is a bit overkill. Can you imagine yourself listening to the 40th one? You'd be about ready to kill yourself.

How about if we break it up into 5 groups of 8 mixing each song?

Then everyone will be able to mix the song that they dig the most, which is always beneficial to getting a great mix.

The more I think about it, the more I think this is probably the best way to do it.

So whaddya think? You guys like that idea?

Mixerman

tubedude Thu, 08/30/2001 - 23:06

My idea wasn't so much for the sake of listening to 100 different mixes of one song, but mainly comparing my mix and edits to a few "big names" and seeing where I differed and where I lack and could've been better and maybe helping each other with issues, opinions, and improvements. I think it would be best if we all worked on the same ones at the same time, but I would just love to do all 5, to be honest. Love this kinda shit. I'm down with doing at least 3 if not all of em.

anonymous Fri, 08/31/2001 - 08:32

It would be nice re - mixing of one of these song. They are all very good songs (I really falled in love with UFO!). I'm sure my mix will suck but comparing it to some others could teach me a lot of useful things. I would like to partecipate if you accept someone from minor (really minor) league.

Alberto

Evan Fri, 08/31/2001 - 08:51

She's The Man is 31 tracks: 1-9=(Kit 1) 1.Kick 2.Sn 3. Hat 4.Rack 5. Floor 6. OL 7. OR 8. Room 9. Room EFX 10-17=(Kit 2) 10. Kick 11. Sn 12. Hat 13. Rack 14. Floor 15. OL 16. OR. 17. Room 18 Bass DI 19. Bass Amp 20. Piano 21. Synth 22 Gtr 1 23. Gtr Dark Double 24. Gtr 2 25. Chorus Gtr 1 26. Chorus Gtr 2 27. Wurli 28. BVX 1 29. BVX 2 30. BVX Low 31. Lead Vox

The song was recorded @ 24 bit/48khz on Pro Tools with SDII files and I'm fairly sure there was a partrige in a hair pie,

XXXOOO