mixes that blow your mind.....

[Slider]

I'm going to throw Queen - bohemian rapsody in there.
I had this in my MP3 player the other day and I was amazed that they could make this thing on 16 tracks with no automation.
Some serious hard work must have gone into this record.

There are beatles records I like better, but Sgt. Pepper is mixed really well.
It sounds like they worked really hard getting the sounds on that record.

I also think Talk Talk's Spirit of eden record is balanced and perfectly ambient. Beautiful.

[leftoverking]

the who-quadrophenia

one of my favorites

[xSALx]

Elliot Smith - From A Basement On The Hill
Beach Boys - Pet Sounds
Beck - Sea Of Change
Green Day - American Idiot
Fiona Apple - When The Pawn...
Jay Z - 99 Problems
And Of Course...
Radiohead - Amnesiac, Ok Computer, and KID A

[leftoverking]

ok one more...
captain beefheart-clear spot

[Verboten]

Echo and the Bunnymen - Porcupine (remastered version)

The Cure - Disintegration (and the Top)

Flaming Lips - Soft Bulletin

The The - Mind Bomb

Bauhaus - The Sky's Gone Out

The Beatles - White Album

Joy Division - Closer

Marvin Gaye - What's Goin On (natch)

David Bowie - Low

Gang of Four - Solid Gold

John Lennon - Mind Games (& Plastic Ono Band)

Jaques Brel - Just about anything

I'm sure I've left out a few dozen

[LeedyGuy]

I didn't check to see if this was up here yet, but

Mutual Admiration Society

if you havent heard this, check it out. basically 4 people in a circle in a garage with Ethan Johns and some guest musicians here and there. sounds like theyre in a circle in a garage! the space is beautiful.

[mjau]

There's so much out there, for whatever mood I'm in...so I'll just list what lately has been some great mixes that really hit me the right way:

John Frusciante: Shadows Collide with People - the whole album, absolutely incredible
Pedro the Lion: Hard to Find a Friend - minimal and open
Logh - Swedish band that got some amazingly intimate sounds, including the best instance of a recorded Fender Twin I know of
The Album Leaf - anything

[KennyLusk]

Walking into Clarksdale - Page and Plant

Forget About It - Alison Krauss and Union Station

Life For Rent - Dido

Animals - Pink Floyd

Rage For Order - Queensryche

Train - Train

Matchbox 20 - Matchbox 20

[Fieryjack]

Animals - Pink Floyd

Have to disagree on this one....I love Floyd, but Animals (to me) sound muddy, maybe the worst PF mix I've ever heard. Drums sound awful.

I hope someone pulls out these masters and mixes in surround......

[JohnDavisNYC]

i think that nigel godrich pretty much rules my world for mixing... air, radiohead, beck, etc... it all kills... also, i think that the last coldplay record, a rush of blood to the head, has fucking perfectly awesome mixes, regardless of what you think of the music. hmmm... and achtung baby. wow.

john

[KennyLusk]

Animals - Pink Floyd

Have to disagree on this one....I love Floyd, but Animals (to me) sound muddy, maybe the worst PF mix I've ever heard. Drums sound awful.

I hope someone pulls out these masters and mixes in surround......

I wasn't asking you what you thought about "Animals". I was making the statement that I love the mix.

Whether you like it or not is inconsequential.

[takeout]

...im not blown away from 100% accurate sounds, but rather, sounds that fit the band. I mean you wouldnt have Justin Timberlake go through the same compressors as a Deep Purple harmonica solo

Maybe you wouldn't...

I will submit the same stock entry that I use every time this thread gets rehashed: Eric Matthews' The Lateness Of The Hour and It's Heavy In Here. The mixes are like a warm blanket, and sound like nothing else. Not to my admittedly unworldly ears anyway.

Every Bad Brains record through Quickness still manage to hold my interest. More a function of the band than the engineer, but still...

Anything Tom Waits has done since he figured out how to shove a mic inside a coffee can...

[Fieryjack]

Kenny,

What is it that you like about the mix in Animals?

[KennyLusk]

FieryJack,

the acoustic guitar tracks are just "out of this world" and were tracked very creatively. You can hear how Gillmore played at least second and third tracks on "Dogs" and is deliberately playing-to and out-of-sync- with the Left track. I know it's been done before and he'd used that trick before, but man, they really did it well on "Dogs".

The reverse drum effects here and there are totally effective and huge.

Some of the electric guitar sounds are just amazing. Especially when Gillmore break out the talk box on Pigs Part 2.

The drums are a little over-compressed for the most part, but isn't that a London signature thing anyway? I think that album was tracked in London. I could be wrong. The darkness that enshrouds the drums on that record seem to be fitting to the mood and content of the record itself, I think. In context, I think the drums are perfect.

The vocal tracks are perfect. Perfectly compressed for beautiful effect. Precise fading of vocal tails into heavily modulated synth tracks. Cool stuff.

All the delay effects are really well-done.

The keyboards and synthesizers are phreakin amazing on that album. Huge sound and the expert use of the vocoder on the Leslie to program the dog-barking sounds was very creative. Vocoders are rarely used like they were intended to be used any more. We associate vocoders with Cher instead of re-programming an analog sound to emulate a dog barking.

Just stuff like that.

[bdp]

Mine's a fairly standard list I think, most everyone else has already mentioned most of these, but hey...

Thomas Koener - "Aubrite"

Soundgarden - "Superunknown"

Peter Gabriel - "Us"

Metallica - "Metallica"

Metallica - "St. Anger"

Page & Plant - "Walking Into Clarksdale"

Pink Floyd - "The Division Bell"

Emmy Lou Harris - "Wrecking Ball"

Deftones - "Deftones"

The Icarus Line - "Penance Soiree"

Ministry - "Filth Pig"

Massive Attack - "Mezzanine"

Isis - "Oceanic"

Chris Whitley - "Terra Incognita"

Sigur Ros - "( )"

Joe Henry - "Fuse"

Smashing Pumpkins - "Siamese Dream"

"Solaris" Soundtrack

Boards of Canada - "Music Has The Right To Children"

Led Zeppelin - "I"

Fear Factory - "Archetype"

The Verve - "Urban Hymns"

Beck - "Sea Change"

Bjork - "Dancer In The Dark"

And yeah, I know nearly everyone hates St. Anger but I love the production on it... what can I say?

Cheers,

bdp