Hello Roberto! Havng just listened to it, I must say I like it. It sounds fresh and very raw, direct and unpretentious. Though I can be quite a big fan of very elaborate compositions with lots of pomp, this is a welcome and refreshing break from it. perhaps it can even help me find the balance and get back to some music of my own. :-) The only thing I of course have to critisize are the drums. It's a pitty you didn't change the pattern in the different parts. But perhaps it even helps this raw and direct impression along. Like we used to say: And the little Japanese is playing the drums. It's not an insult, it's a sentiment of the times. So please keep on sharing. Mixing wise it compares verynicely to your first track. Teh mix sounds much better, much more balanced in the frequency domain and the stereo panorama is well filled. Warm regards Julien -------- Music was my first love and it will be my last (John Miles) ======== FIND MY WEB-PROJECT AT: ======== http://ltsb.sourceforge.net the Linux TextBased Studio guide ======= AND MY PERSONAL PAGES AT: ======= http://www.juliencoder.de

On Wednesday 01 June 2011 15.55.50 Roberto Suarez Soto wrote: ... I have finished the mix and have used a lot of editing beside the mixing. Kudos to Roberto for being brave and letting the audio file be available for (re)mixing. I have some criticism, nice words and mostly some dry talk when talking about this project. This is a rather long posting, hope you don't mind about that. Let's start with the nice stuff: Heavy Head do have a lot of cool riffs, chops and melody lines that triggers my imagination and when I was listening to it and reading the posting, I could not resist take Roberto's offer and go for mixing. I don't know what you will do further with the song, but it's many good ideas there. Now, some criticism - or should I say comments and explanations? - I promise you: -I have done the same mistakes that I'm going to talk about several times, and it took way to long time before that I realized that I had to stop with them if the final result shall be good: -In order to make a great recording and mix, it starts with the sources. It's very many playing mistakes here, from bad timing and missing notes in bass to a lot of mistakes on the guitar playing. My guess is that you are not used to play to a metronome or drum machine and that the recording situation is new for you? I hear a lot of talent in the guitar playing, so I believe you are much better than what I hear on the tracks. Please, don't stop playing, do more practicing to metronomes and you will rock! And I'm absolutely sure that you will deliver great results! Here is the final result: (ogg/mp3/mixbus project file): http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11909204/xouba-heavy_head/HeavyHead.ogg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11909204/xouba-heavy_head/HeavyHead.mp3 http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11909204/xouba- heavy_head/Xouba%20-%20Heavy%20Head.ardour Some of you may wonder why I upload the mixbus project file, but you can open it in any text editor and see exactly what I have been doing. My intention with the mix war to try to be a loyal as possible to the original mix while doing a lot of editing in order to tighten up stuff. As I wrote on a posting, I had a plan on how to do this project and I sticked to it. Other people may have other methods, but this is the way I like it and here is the big picture of what I did: -I opened everything in Ardour (Roberto's project i an Ardour project) and cleaned up every track a little bit and also imported the whole song (the MP3 file) into the project in order to make sure that everything was in place). I then inserted a CD marker (range) in the project and exported every track. -I decided to use Mixbus (this is the DAW I know and prefer) and made a new project. The drums was not recorded, only synced with the Hydrogen Drum Machine. When I mix, I allays make sure that every MIDI instrument are recorded as audio into the DAW, so the first thing I was planning to do was to record the drums into Ardour/Mixbus. Here I discovered the first real challenge, the drum kits HI-Hat did not have any mute groups (that means that an open hh don't stop to play when a closed one is hit, or even more correctly: when the pedal is going down), so I started to edit the drum kit. Finally, I could record kick, snare, hi-hat and cymbals into each own tracks in the DAW. After that, I imported the previous generated wavs into the project and could start mixing. Mixing is all about making space for every instruments. The first thing I do is to use an HPF on the track I'm working on. A lot of things happens in the bass and lo mid area and it should generally only be the kick and bass that are doing something there, but even they get a dose of the HPF (generally at around 40-60 Hz with 12 dB). The problem with the bass here was it it's very muddy, and I had to remove a lot of the lo mids in order to make it clearer. The bass recording do have lots of timing problems and some missing notes, so I made a new bass track and pasted good notes into it, but more or less sticked to the original playing. I could not do it to perfect, because then other timing problems became clearer. The guitars are often a challenge and in this case, it was 6 of them fighting in the same frequency area, that's quite normal, but it was another thing that made it more difficult: The guitars already had a lot of echoes and reverbs, so i decided to not ad any of them here - everything you hear is from the recording. In general, I did an HPF cut at around 260-300Hz, then, the bass automatically became clearer. Then I found the frequencies I liked best for every guitar and accentuated them (or lowering the other frequencies). Also here, I was copying and pasting in order to cover recording mistakes. I also used a deesser for reducing som load finger glitches. I used compression very little, only on the kick and snare in order tight yp the sound and limiting the bass on order to thame it. Finally, the master bus got som minor limiting in order to control the levels. The final stereo file got some treatment from the TAP scaling limiter and then normalized it. I could have done much more with this, but hey, I got a life too! :-) A final note: I believe it's allways best to export a full length flac file for every track in a project, then one can open it in any DAW. I have a lot of more stuff to talk about here, but just ask if you wonder of something. I hope that this is useful to someone. Roberto: Thanks for being so generous and uploading this, I think you are brave and I'm looking forward to hear a lot of great music from you in the future. Jostein

Roberto Suarez Soto wrote: I, too, thought it might be interesting to have a go at trying to mix this. Thanks for the files, Roberto: it's been an interesting experience (and practice) for me as I have never mixed anything other than my own work before now. Here are the audiofiles: FLAC [19.0 MB]: www.quirq.ukfsn.org/HeavyHead_Q-mix_19-06-11.flac OGG7 [3.9 MB]: www.quirq.ukfsn.org/HeavyHead_Q-mix_19-06-11.ogg MP3 [7.1 MB]: www.quirq.ukfsn.org/HeavyHead_Q-mix_19-06-11.mp3 I purposefully didn't read Jostein's posts until just now (sorry about that!) as I didn't want to be influenced in any way. I agree with what he said. (I just saw enough to be tipped off about the mute group issue with the drums though, so I sorted that out. I don't normally use the randomisation features in Hyrdrogen, preferring to humanise things in the way that I programme them, but for speed I just dialled up the knobs, which means there are some odd bits of emphasis here and there.) I didn't bother doing any editing to tighten up the performances and compensate for the fluffed notes and timing issues as it would have taken a lot of time. I'd do that sort of thing on my own music as a matter of course; I know how to edit, but mixing practice always comes in useful. I can't say I'm particularly fond of the drum kit used, on close listen the samples sound quite noisy. I found the project difficult to mix because of the effects already on most of the instruments, but that didn't stop me from adding more anyway! I just did what I would normally do and it's not often that I print effects. I'm not totally happy with my mix as it's a bit too wet, with the recorded delays, my delays and reverbs all piling up. I found it hard to work on for any length of time as there is a lot of high frequency energy, which soon tired my ears. There was more HF than I'm used to working with, I can only assume that this was added my the effects processing that the parts were recorded through. Personally, I think there was too much distortion used on the guitar parts, some of which could have done with being cleaner, in my opinion, without being detrimental to the style of music. I think this probably added to all the HF energy. Some cleaner passages would also have added a bit more variety to the overall arc of the piece, certainly in the way that I've mixed it. I strayed into a few areas of production: I added a hi-hat count in (not entirely sure I actually like it, but I left it in), moved the guitar slide, ditched a rhythm part that I felt was cluttering up one section a bit and performed some edits (using automation) on the drums at the end. I've also uploaded my Ardour session for people to look at (172 MB). You'll need LV2-enabled and the Invada plugins and EQ10Q in addition to more common plugins like TAP and (IIRC) some SWH. www.quirq.ukfsn.org/Heavy_Head_Q.tar.bz2 Thanks again Roberto for giving me some much-needed mixing practice. And keep on rocking! Q -- A musical collaborator: "Lethargy, hm really? Then it will be time for me to get over there and just accidental idea the $h!t out of you"