 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Welcome back to Fix My Mix, episode number 23. Amazing, amazing that we've come this far together. This show of course is the show where we will be listening to mixes from the community in an effort to exercise our ears, our critical thinking and to help the people out who are sending their mixes in to get them closer to release. Got to say a big thank you to the sponsor of the show who is DistroKid. If you follow the link in the description for DistroKid you will get a little discount off of the price of signing up. I'll get a little kickback for that as well. Thank you very much in advance and you will get your music out to the world, the universe. Who knows? I don't know, maybe they've got Spotify on Mars or something. I'm talking rubbish already. It must be something to do with the guests that I've got on the show today. He is back like a barmy boomerang. Pete Johns is here on the show. There he is. Yeah, I think they have Spotify on Mars. I think it's title but no one listens to it so no one knows. Oh, that title sponsorship just went down the tube. Hey Mike, how are you? Talking about sponsorships you maybe you must be feeling very sponsored today like an AA meeting or something. I know it's that thing where you turn on the thing it's who's sponsoring me today. I'll just look at the top of the screen and find out. It was BandLab about five minutes ago. It's DistroKid now. It's going to be some one of those games, isn't it? One of those mobile games next week. Have you got the email? Rage Shadow Legends. Yeah, oh my. I can't even I get two minutes into a video and they're like but before we give you the information we just got to thank Rage. There's new champions and I'm just like I could not care less and I click off. So no, the chance of me being sponsored by a mobile game fairly slim. Click off. I click off. That's a wall. Let's just click off. Just click off. Just click right off. No, I have very low tolerance for doing that but doing that that's relevant. If I'm watching a video about how to tune a guitar and suddenly I'm being told to play a mobile game with microtransactions that are going to nickel and die at me. I'm going to pass. I'm going to find a different video. So that's it. But each of their own. Some people probably don't care and that's fine too. I don't care that they don't care. We go off and catch it so quickly. We should probably do some music at some point. Let's let's say hi to some people who are here. Very good. You probably know some of them. Let's say hi to Happy Ron here for a start. Happy Ron. Two great tastes that taste makes us sound like some sort of sauce or something. Anyway, here we go. Oh, yes, that reminds me. Jingles need vocal harmony. Just say Jingles. Jingles. Pete, I've created a monster and nobody wants to see monsters no more. No. What do you want? What do they want? Jingles? I don't know. Yes. So look, I don't need much encouragement. A few people I think could take or leave the Jingles. But one person said they like it and I'm all in because one person said they like it. You're just lazy. You don't want to make any new DistroKid videos. So I'll just do it on the fly. Why not? So look, folks, I'll pop this up on the screen. I've got I've got tickers. I've got tickers, right? This is this is give us give us a key and a random word for I improvised DistroKid Jingle folks. That's pretty cool. That would be helpful to us. I'm just asking in advance. Dave, you got you got your guitar ready. Have you Pete? Uh oh, oh, I was going to try some keys today. I thought uh we would uh we would do something a little bit different. So awesome. I want the key. I want the key signature to be E flat then. Oh, there's an E flat. That's all I know. Just use the transpose button on the keyboard. That's what I do every time. Oh, yes. Good stuff. Nice to see Jade star in here as well. Hi Jade. I don't know what's not coming up. I'm clicking on it. Click it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm not sponsored by ReStream. Alright. Uh we should get on with this. Doug is here. Thank you Doug for being here. One of our moderators in here. Nice to see uh uh Thomas Christian here is one of your moderators. Yes. Pete uh always a good contributor to your channel. I see and of course Mimo Japan. Yeah, I wouldn't be a show without me, you know. Yeah. Now, I met one of our moderators this week a few days ago. Saw that. Yeah. Yeah. We hung out. I went to her house. Uh Pete, this isn't something you'd understand because it's to do with woodwork and things. Uh but manual things, right? No, no, no idea. Yes. Uh anyway, so went around there and the desk was being put together at the time which was based upon my plans. It's a bit scary because my plans for my desk were never really intended to to help other people build a desk and there was an actual workman who had been following them and I was like, oh no, oh no, I'm sure. I didn't check all the measurements. Okay. It was actually a little mishap with it while I was there. Oh and you had to fix it. I think I I think I lent a little helping hand. Anyway, Pionra's getting her studio together. She's watching all the channels, right? All the channels. She's watching my channel, your channel, Dan, Ed, Marlon, others, lots of others, right? She's gathering all the information so if she doesn't produce a hit song out of it, it's our fault. It is. It is good. You can yeah, you can either have responsibility if it goes well or yeah, you take the blame if it doesn't. So as the artist, yeah, you can thank us if it works or you can curse us if it doesn't. Hey, I've just seen someone in the chat. Uh I think they may have one of my favorite uh uh usernames of all time and uh they're from Hawaii. Toto's Life Toto Chicken. Is that one of your fans or? No, I've never seen that but I love that name. That that's only second to second hand watermelon as my favorite new uh screen name that I've seen in the last uh last few weeks. Toto's Life Toto Chicken and it's a picture of a Chihuahua. So if you're confused, is Toto a dog or a chicken? Is it about his life? Does he like to eat chicken? Uh there's more questions and answers. Is that a Chihuahua? I thought it was a kangaroo with lazy ears. Oh it could be I don't know. Chihuahua or kangaroo but back your vote here in the chat. Chihuahua or kangaroo. Who's right? There's no Toto. Yes. Oh, it's gonna be one of those shows. So folks, we haven't seen any key signatures or any. Look what I want for for lyric suggestions as well is just random words okay. In fact, let's just look we've got a big moose. I don't know. Big moose or big mouse? Is that a big moose or a big mouse? It's just a mouse. Suddenly my dyslexia kicked in. Alright, I'm just going to put make a note here. Lyrics later on. A big mouse. A big mouse. I think we should have a rule that we can't rhyme that with house. Okay. Yeah. What's I'm going to start thinking now. I'm going to use my mouse to find another word. Alright and we've got a key signature of C minor there. Thank you from Dino. Lovely. Lovely. It's a bit dark, doesn't it? It does. Alright, we've got a G minor there as well, but we might do that for the second jingle. Alright, a big mouse C minor. I think we need one more lyric. Some reason Mimo said Santa Claus. It's not Santa Claus, Mimo. We can't Santa Claus? Yeah, we have to start doing accents and I've been banned from accents and and voices so you can't do it. If you're one, we'll get a mouse. You need to talk to Santa Claus. Tell me about getting banned with accents. What went on there? Tell me about that. Oh no, there's a wonderful gent who you've had on the show and his name is Patrick from the GarageBand Guide. Yeah, oh yes. And I may have a couple of times attempted to impersonate Patrick and yeah. You've done some Scottish. I've tried to do some Scottish but I don't do it well. So the joke is now that as soon as I do an accent I'm just like oh hang on, it's my lawyer. Yeah, he's told me that that I'm being sued again for terrible accents because I'm really bad at them. I was involved in a little chat on the GarageBand forum this week on Facebook. Yes, I'm a member over there. I'm a member and I've used GarageBand exactly three times. I'm a member of the cakewalk group and I've not touched cakewalk in here so it's all it's weeks of roundabouts mate. Yeah, you remember the best cakewalk group? I thought it was the only cakewalk group. I thought you'd crushed all other comers. That's why we're on the street. Did you say comers? Let's move on to the first song. Well, I've got a stuck note. Hang on. I'm going to get rid of that. Your stuck note just went into one of my ears, not the other. What's going on there? That's very weird. The first song is from a regular actually on the show. Where are we? This is going under the name of House Merlot. The song is called I See You Delirium but actually the creator of this is a chap called Dennis Baptista who we see sometimes in the chat. He said I'm submitting this recent recording because I actually like this one. It's the first mix I've done that seems to come off. It seems to come off. Hang on. It seems to come off on tiny cell phone speakers, car stereos and big home systems with subwoofers equally well. He's built it up a little bit, isn't he? What are we fixing about this mix? He's better to set expectations low, Dennis, I'm saying. The psychology is not. Anyway, he says and he's hoping you guys can help me with some constructive criticism for moving forward from here. Well, first of all, first constructive criticism set expectations low, okay? In life. Not just with music in life. The song is one. Mike's been telling his wife that for years. The song is 100% MIDI. Five tracks of free VSTs. I like this. Now the psychology is going the other way, you see. This is a reverse psychology because everyone's going, oh, he's used three MIDI VSTs, must be rubbish. Number one, he's spitfire quiet. Number two, he's ampoule guitar M light. Oh, it's a bit of an old classic scene on my channel many times. Three keys on classic piano. Another one he must have been watching my channel. Number four, ampoule bass, P light, can't really go wrong with that in my opinion. And number five, VR 08, virtual TR8. I don't know that one. And it was mixed on a pair of Yamaha H5s that I found at a yard sale for $20. It was mastered with the free. It was mastered with the free band lab app. Absolutely. So basically, in the spirit of home recording, Dennis has used cheap gear here and free plugins. Let's have a listen and see what we can make of this and see if we can help them out with the mix. Short and sweet. Sharp and shiny. Yeah, that was a bit of delirium going on. That had the feel of the title, didn't it? Yeah. Oh, that was yeah. It was very mysterious. Swimming around there. Yeah. Swimming around there. So what do you reckon, Pete? I'll let you go first. You're the guest. Yeah, so it was, I only had about five notes because it was over before I was just getting into it to start to listen. But overall, I mean, I'm a sucker for a cool chord progression. I love a cool jazzy chord progression with a little bit of minor and maybe some seventh chords and stuff in there. So, yeah, really dug the, really dug the cool progression, liked the jazzy swingy kind of nature of it. So, yeah, really interesting. It had a bit of a music quality. I don't know if that's an insult or a compliment, but it sounded a little bit like the sort of music you'd hear in an elevator in David Jones in the 1990s, if you were like out shopping. David Jones, the department store, by the way, J.C. Penny would be a good translation, maybe. And I don't know, again, I don't mean that as an insult, but an instrumental song like that. Or it almost sounded a bit like a video game. Did you play a lot of those Lucas arts video games like Monkey Island and those sort of games back in the day? And I think that was mostly the MIDI instrument. So, in terms of not criticism, but in terms of things that I think stood out to me, it did sound all a little bit artificial. And I don't know whether that was the choice of instruments or whether it was everything seemed very on the grid. They didn't seem to be any human element. And I think for a track like that that's trying to swing, it's almost like it felt like it was trying to swing, but it wasn't quite swinging because everything seemed very low and up on the grid. And if that's the effect you're going for success, but I think sometimes when you're using a lot of virtual instruments, the tendency is that you end up with something that sounds too robotic and too precise and sometimes adding in and I don't know, in Cakewalk, I'm sure that the quantization has some humanization or some some slipperiness that you can throw in there, something like that, I think would really work. And the drums, the drums just did the same thing the whole way through. And again, it was kind of like you got an organ from the 1970s hit the boss and over button and then just let it play, which again might sound harsh, but I actually like that. There's a lot of good songs that actually use a very basic drum section, but for this song, I would have loved to have heard some like swinging brush kit style drums, some real jazzy like Yeah, an 808 is an odd choice for this style of music. It just stood out a little bit, I think. Yeah. So and an odd choice would be sort of to me, it's like if it's going to be an odd choice for the genre of music, it needs to be kind of very obviously odd. If you know, I mean, like you're trying to push the boundaries with a new sort of blended genre. I want to address something here, which was sort of fairly obvious to me right off. Thanks for your input, by the way, Pete. I think you agree with you on everything there. I think I'm familiar with most of these instruments, okay? One of them is the one I'm not is the VR, the 808 emulator there. Rest of them, I'm very familiar with. I know they can all sound really human. They're all capable of that, but there needs to be some care putting in to make that happen. It's mostly in the performance. The one thing I'll pick up on and I'm going to just play the beginning of the track again is the acoustic guitar. This is ample sounds, acoustic guitar. We have to do that whole thing again. Right, so what it sounds like, all that guitar sounds like this. Very like hard attack. And what happens is is with that, with a lot of those, with ample sounds, acoustic guitars, if you play the, if you do the velocity like really, really hard, it'll have that snapping sound as if someone's actually pulled the string rather than just play it normally. So that would, I think this track would actually be improved enormously if you addressed that issue, Dennis. I would start off by grabbing all of your velocities and dragging them down a bit as uniformly to get rid of that unless you want that snappy string sound. And I don't know if you should want that. So, yeah, I do that. And I don't know if there was much, there was probably not, me and I was just said, no dynamics in it. Yeah, there was no dynamics in that guitar part as well. And to make virtual acoustic guitars sound like real acoustic guitars or close to it, you definitely need to use a lot of variation in velocities, as you do with drums as well, as Pete was saying there. So the key is variation in timing and velocity a lot of the time as well as playing within the limits of the actual instrument that the virtual instrument's based upon. Pete, you look like you're about to say something. No, no, I'm just agreeing with you. I think it through. I'm trying to think, yeah, how would you sum that up? Because I don't want us to come across as like super harsh because I think the good thing about that song is that it has a really good basis. Like it's not a terrible song. It's just got some, like it's a really good chord progression. It's a really cool jazzy number. And it just, yeah, it needs some help. And I guess in terms of the mixing, it's more, like you say, it's more the application of the instrumentation and the quantization. That's a lot of Asian words. But yeah, less artificial sounding instruments, more variety, and it all comes down to dynamics. We need some louts and some softs. And the 808 didn't do it for me. I want a jazzy drum kit to play along with that. I think that alone would improve it about 20% for that. OK, Konnichiwa. There's another Asian word. Just had to get it. I've been waiting to say that the whole time you've been talking. Konnichiwa. That's a trick. Anyway, the thing I did want to address though before we finish on this one is the actual, the balance of the mix. It's pretty good. I thought it was pretty good. So in terms of the reason we're here, the mix itself, I didn't have too much of an issue with it. But when we talk about the mix, I'm talking about levels, primarily, maybe that guitar was a little bit loud. But I think when you address the velocity things, and it's not quite so harsh sounding, it won't sound like it's too loud then as well. I actually think the volume of it was fine. And the frequency across the board, I didn't, I felt this was a good mix. There was nothing stood out to me as well. Too bassy or too probably or anything like that. Yeah, I think the only thing was, yeah, the treble sound of that guitar because it was that plucking sound, that was a little bit grating. But yeah, everything else sort of sat nicely. And yeah, the 808 to the bottom end. So yeah, if you swapped out the 808s and if you reduce that plucking, because everyone needs a little bit less plucking, then yeah, I think you'd be fine. Do they really? All right, ladies and gentlemen, I could play a little pre-made video now about the wonders of DistroKid. Also wonderful. And they are wonderful. Me and Pete use them. I think all the guests on the show use them. And I think a large part of the community seems to use DistroKid now. And that's because you get, they get the job done pretty well. Don't they, Pete? Maybe that could be the theme of our first jingle, getting the job done well. The job done well. All right, it's got to be in C minor. All right. And we've got to get a big mouse in there. Let's work on this. Okay. I think we can we be in sync? I don't know. Is it worth trying? It feels like we are. Can we just click our fingers together? Can you click your fingers? Is that a skill you have? Yes. One, two, three. Four, one. No. We're not in sync at all. What's going on? One, two, three. No. No, we're not in sync. There's a delay. There's always going to be a lag. So it's going to be a cuff. So I think what we'll have to do then is you take the first jingle. I'll take the second jingle. Okay. I have to see minor. Okay. All right. I've got to suck you again. It almost sounds like a lirium. Yeah, there you go. All right. So what do I have to do? It's got to be a mouse. You've got to get a big mouse in there. A big mouse. And what else did you say? You said something else just before that. Oh yeah, I forgot. The one is a distro kid. The one is a distro kid. One is a distro kid, big mouse. And can you hear my keys coming through there? Yeah, it's beautiful. The mix is beautiful, man. Nice. All right. I'll give you a little bit of reverb too. A little bit of verb up there. When you live in a house. No, it couldn't be a house. And you have lots of mouse. And you want to release a song on all of the places. The one place to go when you've got not much dough. For just $19.99 per year. If you've got a lot of mouse. Distro kid is really gross. They can release to every platform. In the world. That's all I got. I'm going to take away Mark's for using house. I know, I lost it. But I'm adding Mark's. Now's was too obvious as well, really, to be honest. But Grouse, I'm adding Grouse was good. Really good. I didn't have anything though. I couldn't finish it. No, I'm going to add some more points in though. Because I thought it was only going to be a two chord progression. I thought he's gone only two. But you added a third in towards the end. But you didn't finish cadence at the end. I know. I left it hanging. I did the high school debate thing where it's just like blah, blah, blah. And that's it. No closing arguments here. Just that's it. Goodbye. Good stuff. Thanks Pete. Oh no. I'm glad it's out of the way. That's always the most nerve-racking thing. When Mark's like you want to come on the show I'm just like got to do a jingle song now and it's not going to be good. That's right. I can do the next one. And yeah, G-flat major would be a great one for me. I think no. I think somebody said G, didn't they? I'm sure someone said G. G minor. School going to be very sad today. No, how many jingles are actually written in minor keys, by the way, just quietly. Oh no, I'm not sure district you're going to thank. They're just like oh, this sounds very dreary. That's one, John. Research shows we've had a lot of sad customers sign up recently. Yeah, the amount of gloom and death metal bands are signing up is off the charts. It's amazing. Okay, now I was in a garage band debate a little bit. I think Patrick Baird was in there and Ron Ward was in there as well because somebody came in and I'm pretty sure they had this voice when they talked like this. They had a complaint about the number of cover songs that were being posted. Oh, I saw this. Yeah, I hope they did. So they said, please don't post cover songs in our group. Only original songs, please. And I did respond to someone who was in the comment. I've got to say, I don't know who the someone was, but they were being pleasant about it. But they said, oh yeah. But and I said cover songs can be a good way to learn about composition, arrangement and recording. And they said, yes, but a better way would be to create your own original music. And I replied, well, you know, the Beatles and Bob Dylan started off by playing covers and I guess they did okay. Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't have to say anything because you know my answer is why I scrolled past that one because I'm like, I don't need to have this conversation again. But yeah, each of their own for starters is like, if you don't want cover songs, don't listen to cover songs and you do you. You do you, Boop. But no, I actually scroll past. I fundamentally disagree because I think that some of the best ideas you can get since two and a half years ago, since the big lockdowns all happened, and I've been doing a weekly happy hour show. I've learned something like 100 new, probably more than 150 new cover songs. And I've taken a lot of those things. I'm like, oh, I've never tried going, adding a B7 when I'm in C major. That's a cool idea because it's in a song. And then it actually enhances it. So you learn core progressions, you learn how to do things, you learn different song structures. There's actually nothing bad about it. I guess the only bad thing could be is if you only ever do that and don't ever create anything. But even that, there's plenty of, like look at the people with million subscribers that do cover songs on YouTube. They're doing just fine and dandy. Thank you very much. So you doing first, you were afraid, you were petrified, right? Well, just today, thanks to BandLab, not sponsored at the show. Yeah, like, because when I thought about what do I do for this thing, I'm like, it's a lot easier for me to do a tutorial when I'm playing a song that everyone knows and that I know as opposed to something brand new and backing up on the spot, like we just did there. As you see, when you fail, when you try to do your own original material, if I had pre-written a district hit song, it would have been fine. So my thing is, I've written songs since I was about nine or 10 years old, okay? That's a long time, folks. That's many, many decades. It's like 60, 70 years. I love the art of songwriting. I really do. I love that you express yourself. I love trying to find a different lyric, a way of saying something, a lyric that perhaps no one's used before. On the other hand, exactly as Pete says, when you go about sort of actually playing cover songs especially, you'll go, oh, there's a chord I never use, ever. And then you put it in your next song and you've had the influence then. It's great for expanding your narrow experience of music. Absolutely. I have to agree to agree, Mike. Yes, absolutely. Let's do that. Let's agree with each other. The world's full of so much conflict. I think everyone should just agree with me and then everything would be fine. Now, moving. Just stop. I do, Mike, just for peace. So, man, it's a lot of you feel like you've won. That is all that is right. The basis of every good marriage. The basis of every good marriage. Toto's chicken's leaving. Sorry, Toto's life. Toto's chicken is leaving. Hey, Toto, thanks for being here. You take care. And yeah, was it Kangaroo or? I don't know. We never quite got there. We hope your Kangaroo mouse or Chihuahua is doing well. And we look forward to seeing you again soon. We never will. Before we move forward, folks, don't forget a key signature and a few words for my version of a jingle for DistroKid. Now, I don't have the advantage of reverb and things, of course, like Pete. I have my coming box to switch on to be honest. Anyway, we are going to move on to a cover song next. Oh, I think it was actually a reason for it. You're a genius. You didn't realize it was a segue. You see all the best segues. You don't know they're a segue. Anyway, this is a Lost Covers. Hang on. Oh, yeah, the band, the group, the artiste, is called Lost Covers. Nice. The song is called Pounding. Mark sent this in. Hi, Mark. He says, I recorded Mixed and Mastered Distract recently, Pounding in Cakewalk as a part of a fan tribute album to the British band Doves. I'm not familiar with the band. I have to admit. I'm sorry. Yeah, never am I really. You're going to Google it now, aren't you? Well, no, there's one Dove song that I remember because I've, yeah, but no, I wouldn't be able to tell you. OK. The project is to raise some money for Mental Health UK and support the band after they canceled their first tour for a decade due to frontman Jimmy's mental health struggles. I normally record my own songs and write more songs than I have time to produce. So this mixing tends to be, so the mixing tends to be compromised. You reviewed a song of mine a few months ago and the verdict was good song, but need some work on the mixing and dial back on the reverb. With this, I put more work into mixing. Doves are renowned for their complex deeply laid and textured arrangements. Much of their work seemed too big for a challenge, for a challenge, whatever he says to me. I'm sorry, Mark. My reading ability is quite poor and there's quite a lot of reading to do here. I'll skip to the last paragraph. I would love some critical feedback as this is the most effort I've put into a mix so far. OK. This should be interesting, I think. Let's have a listen to this. I haven't heard the original. I probably won't listen to the original. I'm just going to listen to this as a mix and see how we think Mark has done. Lovely. Rock and roll. I'm going first on this one. I was going to offer you to go first because that's just some kind of gentleman I am. I'm a little torn with this one. I really enjoy the track, by the way, just right up my alley as a piece of music. I know yours as well, Pete. Now, the reason I'm a bit torn is because, for me, this sounded like a live recording in a way, like this could have come off of a mixing desk at a live recording. In many senses, it wasn't very perfect, and that's what I really liked about it because I could have almost been at a gig there jumping along. So there was a sense in which a few things were not very refined. Even the things that we would normally pick up on somebody was saying about the bass wasn't punchy enough or something like that, and even the fact that that was a bit out, really sort of worked for me. Yeah, it wasn't perfect. The vocals got a little lost here and there, the sort of way in which if this was a studio recording, you would be definitely writing the vocals, you would be using automation, you'd be using compression to keep them on top, but just like a live gig, just when the band kind of really kicked in, they got a little lost, and I liked it. I liked it. I don't know if I'd want to change that because there was lots of energy in this, and it's very hard to get energy into studio recordings, very, very hard indeed in my opinion. So yeah, now in terms of some overall stuff, I think people were mentioning phasing with the drums. I can see what they're talking about, especially you could pick up on the cymbals. I could pick up some oddness in the vocal a little bit as well, by the way, nice vocal. I don't know why I could be wrong about this, but I reckon this has happened when they've exported it as an MP3. It sounded like a bit rate thing or something, it got that streaming nastiness about it. You're nodding your head there, Pete, I'll let you take over. Oh yeah, no, that was the number one thing for me. I've listened to so many bad quality MP3s for so long that I think if that was an MP3 or an M4A file, it was probably a bit rate issue because there was something around, and it was almost like a high-frequency kind of artifact crackle that was when the vocals were hitting hard, and it's almost like the overtones in the vocals, somewhere like one kilohertz or two kilohertz, it was just this kind of sound that came through. And yeah, it didn't ruin it, but it was obvious and it was there. And I don't know, I'd love to hear the solo of that vocal and just see if that's actually in the vocal recording because maybe it was something with the microphone or maybe it was some digital clipping or something like that, the preamp was up too loud. But yeah, it sounded more like compression artifacts from an MP3. Absolutely. So to Mark who sent this in, you are well in the ballpark in my opinion in terms of the mix. I think that I'd be interested in a way to hear the original song about how close it is. I did a recording with Susie once, which I decided not to release, which was really, it was a cover song and I probably listened to the original way too much and I ended up replicating it, right? Right across the board, really. And I decided for that reason not to release it. But in the process, gosh, I learned quite a few things about mixing a complex song because I kind of had something to mimic, if you like. Yeah, I had the finished product there. I still built it up from scratch, played all the instruments and everything myself. But then I ended up releasing it. I think that's a valid way of learning. And I suspect, I'm expecting if I heard the original of this song that the similar thing might happen. Maybe it's really, really similar. Yeah, I think so. Because when I started sort of thinking about my feedback and I'm like, oh, there wasn't a lot of variation in the drums, like that one in three snare is really, really good. But changing it up a little bit would be cool as well. Like in one of the sections, because it was very repetitive, I guess. But that may be the vibe of the song and that may have been exactly what they were going for and more power to them if they were. So I know a lot of people comment on the drums and I sort of agree with you that they were big, they were big stadium drums. Like that's what it was. It was a big stadium drum sound. And I thought they did a good job with the dynamics of the drums. So there was a little pre-chorus bit where it did go down a little bit. But then it hit in the chorus so hard that exactly as you said, if you were trying to make those vocals kind of sit more in front, you'd want to automate those up or maybe use a little more compression just to make sure that they were poking through the mix because they did get lost a bit in the choruses. Sounded really good in the verses as soon as everything kicked in. But the guitars were really nice. Guitar tones sounded great. I thought there was no issues with that at all. And yeah, again, I like the little intro bit. That came with it, I'm assuming, the bit where they were like, yeah. Yeah, I was wondering about that, whether they nicked that off of one of the originals gigs. But yeah, again, it got you in the mood for saying, hey, this is going to be like a live show. And I think at that point, you kind of forgive a lot of those things because you want it to be raw and have that energy. And I'll take energy over perfect compression and perfect mixing and perfect balance every day and twice on Sunday. So yeah, I'm a fan of that kind of live rock and roll sound because rock and roll shouldn't be perfect. And exactly as we said in the last one, everything shouldn't be on a grid. A little bit of human touch here and there. Absolutely. Really helps. So talking about imperfections and things not being on the grid and sound in live, let's let me do it. Yes. Was G Minor was your key, was it? Bollocks, yeah, I forgot that. Okay, let me. You're going to capo up to G. I'm going to capo, of course I'm going to capo. So it sucks that we've got crappy interior in Australia where we can't be in line with each other. I'd love to be able to play some drums. Get a nice brush kit like I was saying before. I know, I know. Let me just turn this microphone around. I've turned my gate off. I use a gate normally. Because there's some sort of signal noise. I'm getting interference on the signal noise between. You don't need to know the details. I'm just waffling. That's fine. All right, what was the... Adding for time. Have we got some words in there? Have we got some words in there? I haven't seen Coolest Jingle Time. No, everyone's just talking about that. Great energy. Everyone's talking about the energy. Maybe you should put energy in there. All right, let's get energy in there. Yeah. Anyone else? Throw some other ideas here. Lumberjack, energetic lumberjack. It's got to be about that. Cactus, cactus. Cactus energy. God, lumberjack cactus. Sandwiches just come up as well. Wow. Cactus sandwiches. What's the word that has no rhyme? Orange, isn't it? Isn't it orange that has no rhyme? Possibly. Orange. Yeah. I'm seeing spaghetti, beer. Everyone's hungry. It is nearly lunchtime here. I'm getting a bit peckish. Breakfast time for Mike. All right, I'm going to shut up now and over to the wonderful talents of Mr. Mike Encho. I'll soon get to the point. I'm sorry, the voice cracked up. I'll go to Distrocute. So eloquent, I'm starving now. I'll sing a song about a walrus. I'm also very Beatles. None of this is any good. It's just it's not usable, is it? It's not usable. Distrocute, we're singing in G minor about some beer and some sandwiches. It all looks very purple and a little bit orange. It costs me $19.99 almost all the time, except when I use the link. Well, now it's still $19.99, but Mike got some dollars out of it, which was a nice thing for you to do. Oh, Distrocute, I really could work on that one. I felt there was no rhymes in that anywhere. No, it was very Bob Dylan. It was just a stream of consciousness stuff going on there. It was really. And you will save yourself 7% off the first year on any Distrocute plan if you use my special link down below. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I'm not happy with that. I'm not really happy with that at all. I'd give us both solid 6 out of 10s here today. I definitely, we didn't hit it out of the park, but we gave it a red hot go, and I think effort is underrated sometimes. Gotta give things a try. I think what we might do next time is actually work on an actual composition. We'll have a little songwriting session. There you go. If only there was a platform like BandLab that allows you to collaborate online in real time. What we could do is write a song with suggestions from the audience. We'll do a songwriting session, and then we'll record it on BandLab, on your show. Okay. Cross over, mate. We'll then fix the mix on this show and we'll release on Distrocute. Oh, wow. There you go. Yeah. That's an idea. That'd be beautiful. Yeah. That's all we YouTubers folks. That's why we're creators, content creators. We've got the ideas. Not always. Good ideas. But their ideas are all the same. That was fun. Gotta have fun. Music should be fun. People take it far too seriously, like cover's bloke. Just need to relax a bit. Cover's bloke. Cover's bloke. That's his name, yeah. Cover's bloke. Yes. Yes. Well, he'd be very annoyed with me now. All right. Okay. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's go for the third song, and the person who sent in this song is actually in the live chat. That's if they stayed. I don't think that they were here earlier. They'd make it through that song. They were here earlier. And they're quite often here. They go by the name of, let's just bring up their name here. You can read it out. Oh, it's music, life, crypto. No one really listens. Well, if you're talking about cryptocurrency, no, no one really listens to this. If you're that guy that's just like, oh man, do you see the USM as NFT? Man, how many dogecoin do you have? I'd be like, no, sorry. Did I just insult before they'd even heard a note I insulted their name? You may have done. I'm sorry. Crypto, music, life, crypto. I got the name wrong, didn't I? I misspelled it the first time they were on the show. I don't know if you're on that one, Pete. There was a typo. We got it right this time. Can I call you music, life? I don't want to call you music. Music? Oh, to the moon. See, they get it. They're self-aware. They're not a crypto bro. I like it. Music, life, crypto says we love your feedback on what can be improved or fixed. Story behind writing this song is was listening to Bill Meyer. Bill, was it Bill Meyer? Mayer, isn't it? You say his name. I've got mixed emotions about Bill. Sometimes I like stuff he says and sometimes I think he's a bit of a dick. Anyway, I don't even know who he is. I've got no idea. He's an American comedian, talk show, hosty guy, Bill Ma. Is it? Oh, oh, yeah. Okay, yeah, no, I just like that guy. He's not picking off. I don't think so. Anyway, I was listening to Bill Ma when he joked about how he only listens to music on CD and to artists that win Grammys. Oh, the joke was a pretense that the only ones that are good enough are on a record label and the rest of us on the web or YouTube will suck. Not good enough to be on CD or on a record label. I don't concur with this opinion. Well, most people would trial him by tweeting and writing nasty things to him on Facebook. I thought, why not just write a song about it and make a video? This is my best way. Yeah, there was a video that came with this as well, which I'm not playing. Oh, sorry. Oh, sorry. Music by Crypto. He made life hard for yourself somehow. Like, I could have just played his video. I could have just played his video. I had to spend an hour and a half rendering this yesterday. He says, however, being an unknown, most likely the song will go into oblivion and no one really listens. That's the story behind the song. I feel sad. I feel a little bit sad. You know, let's have a listen and see what advice we can give to MusicLife Crypto about this mix. Oh, no. Technical hits there. Technical hits. I always get terrified when I just see my own face only come back after my expression buttons. It never ends well. I was enjoying that track so much there that I forgot to get my buttons ready. Anyway, yeah. Pete, you can go first again. Cool. I love it. I love the backstory. I love the pretext. And then, as Thomas Christ said, I was already in love with the idea and the concept of the song before I even heard it. And then the bass just gets you excited. It gets you ready for it. Like, the bass tone and the bass riff just sounded awesome. And then, yeah, when that vocal came in, it's like I couldn't put my finger on the vocal. I kept listening to it trying to work out who it sounded like. And I worked out at the end, it's like a Peter Gabriel Sting Andrew Gold sandwich. It's like that 80s synth wave, but also a bit rocky kind of sound. And, yeah, the drums with kind of the bit of that gated reverb sound on the drums as well. And then the backing vocals, like all of the stuff up front was really, really good. But what made this, what gave this a texture was those backing vocals that were out nice and wide and that delay on the last word have come with it. Just that swimming around. Like, you know, we said before, everything else was a little bit too on the grid and didn't have enough variation. Like with that, you know, all your stuff down the middle, but then you just had this beautiful soundscape sort of echoing around on the outside, which wasn't distracting, but really complimented the sound. I was at the end there trying to find things I didn't like about it. Only thing I could find is that at the start, the bass was a little bit at a time. So I think there was a couple of hits that were just not quite in time. I can forgive that on a bass sound like that because it sounded really cool and groovy. Yeah, vocal tone was good. Mixing was good. Quality of it. Didn't hear any artifacts or any phasing or any clipping or anything like that. Yeah, I'm a fan. I thought that was really cool. I dug it. Cool. Good. You know, somebody stole one of my talking points here already. I'll just pop it out there. Darren Jones, I really like the fact this definitely sounds original. Yeah, that's what I was really digging about. This part from the bass line was really cool and a few things were really cool about this track actually. But I kept thinking to myself, this is a difficult one to completely pigeonhole, in one genre or another. There was something about it was almost like electronic sounding at the beginning and then it wasn't. And then that guitar came in. It sounded really nice. There was some unusual tones. There weren't typical tones. The vocal was recorded in a way for me, which was it was actually quite dry. And there was an element of it where I was like, I wish that that vocal was a bit more wet. But then again, it was adding to the original feel. I think often when we talk about fixing mixes, we're talking about norms in mixing, balances and things which are not. It's actually quite tricky to be original in mixing, to push the boundaries a little bit. I think you could with a piece of music like this. I think in some way there was bits of it which were not the normal kind of way you might mix it. But there was something very original going on. I liked it a lot. Music Life Crypto. I don't know your real name. You've got a good vocal. That's something you've got there which is you've just got something about your voice which I really, really like. It's not perfect. I think it got up and down a bit in the mix here and there. There was some parts of it where it was a little bit in your bass, so to speak. Yeah, there could be a little bit automation still, automation work and things done on the vocal, I think, and a few other things. It wasn't a perfect mix. It was, I would be thinking automation for this mix. It was just, it was going in and out of balance, right? Ah, yeah, me. Now my thought, I'm going to just throw myself out here on this one. There was a little chat going on my Facebook group. There's a link for that in the description, by the way, one of the best Facebook groups you'll come across. And somebody, well, I was looking for some new ideas the other day and someone said, well, how about on Fixed by Mix? You actually get hold of a mix and work on it a bit yourself, Mike, or you and your guests. And there's some technical issues in that. For me anyway, I know Pete does this sort of thing all the time, but yeah. So Music Life Crypto, I would like to suggest that I was looking for a song, actually, to play with this idea. And I think I'd like this song to work on. I think it would be fun. I'd like to work on this mix, perhaps on a live show or something, or on two or three shows. I don't know. But anyway, so if you wouldn't mind hitting me up on the email again, Music Life Crypto, if you'd like me to do that, then I think that would be fun because I was thinking when this was suggested, and I think it was suggested by Mimo Japan, is I don't want to work on just any old song. It has to be something that I feel, yeah, I'm into that. And I'm into this. I'm into this song. I really like it. The vocals especially, yeah, and the bass there. Yeah. So let's let's try and do that. I think yeah, whenever I've done that in the past, it's always been really interesting because people record things differently and you know what your tracks look like and sound like and act like and feel like and then when you grab someone else's stuff, if you don't do a lot of mixing of other people, it's a great idea even if you're not running a YouTube channel, like do some mix swapping, like share some projects with other people and see under the hood of what other people do and they can do the same for you. And yeah, different ideas come out of it and you may mix it completely differently. That's the whole remix culture that we have in the world is that some people will mix things completely differently, take the exact same source audio and make it a completely different song which can sometimes be a lot of fun. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Let's have some fun with that. Expect that to see, I don't think it's going to happen next week or anything like that folks, but we'll, me and Music Life Crypto will take a look at that and I'll see about the technical issues I need to resolve. And yeah. I'll give Mike a lesson. It's all about the mix minus, that's the biggest pain in the part, trying to get your audio from your door and your own audio separate, but the same on the same stream. Absolutely. You'd think it would be simple, but it's actually a pain in the rectum. I'm going to have struggle with that, but we'll get there. We'll figure it out. Great show Pete, really enjoyed having you on. What's out for you for the rest of the day? You got a day off or? Yeah, so I get a little bit of downtime. It's the last day of the school term here just from inside baseball stuff. So the kids finish early because they punish us by starting holidays, by starting even earlier than usually on a Friday. So I'm going to go and enjoy some lunch with my wife and then go pick up the kiddos. And then it's two weeks of family time, but of course we'll have plenty of time to do stuff over on Studio Live today. So we've got your music live coming up. We've got the happy hour and all the usual weekend stuff going on over the channel. So drop on by if you're new, if you haven't come over before. I know many of you have come on over. It's a lot of fun. Awesome. I am going to be, I'm going on a walk after this. Bit of a shout out. Well, it's sort of to yourself because whenever I've ever spoken with you and when we're not on a show, you're always walking somewhere. Yes. He's a walker. Complete and utter walker is what Pete is. Yeah, he texted me that the other day and he got one letter wrong and it was just really inappropriate. I'm like, tell me what you really think, Mark. But a shout out also to Chris Slem a few weeks ago I had a chat with him about his daily routine and he was saying that he starts every day off with a morning walk. And I was like, how do you do that and run a successful YouTube channel at the same time? Like I always, I always felt like I don't have time for anything. There's no time for things like walking or eating proper food or anything like that. And but given that I'm the age I am and I thought, I wouldn't mind living a little bit longer. I decided now was the time. I am not in any way like a fitness fanatic or anything like that, folks. Not whatsoever. But for about the last 40 days now I have been walking every single 40. No, that might be like 35 days or so. I've been walking every day very inspired by Chris on this and I go out about six in the morning for that pee. It's cold outside. People can't believe it gets cold in Australia. It's freezing. Oh yeah. But you get pretty hot by the end. Now in the meantime as a reward after I'd done it for 21 days I bought myself a Oh, there you go. You know, wait, you're supposed to do 10,000 steps, right? That's a lot. You have to do some walking to get 10,000, don't you? Oh yeah. You do that, don't you? I do. Yeah. How many steps do you do? 16,000 is my is what I set myself out now. Yeah. Yeah. But I walk. Yeah. I walk a couple of hours a day. But again, I'm a mobile internet creator. So I just take my phone with me and I'm walking along the river and either talking to you or or I'm answering comments or I'm getting video ideas together or I'm editing in LumaFusion on my phone. So mine is kind of work and walking at the same time. You've got to stop that, Pete. You've got to stop that. You've got to be in the now. Oh, I do. That's on my work days, on my days off, as you know, unless I'm talking to you. I'm down walking. I'm playing Pokemon Go because I'm apparently a 12-year-old boy. And yeah, listening to podcasts and listening to tunes and yeah, I have a good old time. But yeah, I could sit on my ass and do all those things, but the power of mobile. Audiobooks, podcasts, like there's ways to entertain yourself and get out there. But yeah, I think, and it all series is it doesn't really help both your mental and your physical health and what you're saying before of working yourself 100% of the time, you'll find that you're only working at about 50 or 60% of your capacity. And if you're mentally tired and physically tired, you're not, you can work 12-hour days, but you might as well be working a six-hour day at 100% capacity and then spending that other time with family, relaxing, walking, exercising. You're going to get just as much done and you're going to feel 10 times better. What I've found is it does, I've stuck to it no matter what's been going on. It's been quite busy in this household in the last two or three weeks. But I've done it anyway. I've prioritized that this will happen every day no matter what's going on. And I've got to say, I feel that I've been working under difficult circumstances the last couple of weeks, but I still feel that it's been really beneficial for my state of mind. It sort of clears the decks. It sort of gets you going. Become predictive in a good way. It's a good thing to be addicted to. You don't feel right. Like my wife knows, she knows if I start getting edgy and stuff, she's like, can you please just go, leave for like an hour and I'll see you when you're back when you actually got your head back straight. And the good news is, the good news is, when I walk to McDonald's, I don't feel so bad about it when I get there. Well, that's the good thing. When I get back and I crack a beer at five o'clock on a Friday night and I've walked for, I've done 16,000 steps, so I feel a little bit vindicated. I don't feel quite as bad about it. I bet you'd walk 500 miles and you'd walk 500 more. I would walk 500 more. Yep. When I'm havering, I'm out there havering with the best of me. But hey, here for him. Here for him. Oh, no. No access. No. For myself. I bet Patrick from the GarageBand guide does some havering. Oh, it's good to resist it. You sound like Mrs. Doubtfire. He plops at that. All right. Thanks for joining us, folks. We've had a lovely time here today. We'll see you next week on Fix My Mix. Don't forget to send in your mixes. We'd love to hear them. Don't care what genre of music. Don't care if it's instrumental. Don't care if you've just started or if you've been doing it for 30 years. It's the big I Don't Care show. Send any of your mixes in. Don't mind. Listen to them at any level. Thank you so much, Pete. Don't forget, folks, to check out Studio Life Today Peach channel. The link for that is down in the description. And we will see you next week.