I’ve actually thought about that as well. Seems like a good non-MBC-competition indeed.
You can make your own with a bit of work around with the Multiband Send device. It works.
Yup, neat stuff. Cool that you did that @TNT !
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@_kara Sweet! You’re back. I think you’re mostly posting here with the MBCs. So good to see you again. Your track is wicked! Dark and scary. It feels like something is disintegrating in a dark, empty universe. As if Venetian Snares and Autechre met up in a cool, dark place, took a bunch of hardcore drugs and proceeded to have a shared bad trip. Lovely, lovely stuff.
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Ah yes, that’s a good idea. Here’s the song by @Fabrice including mono bass:
MAKEAWISH-Space_Travelers MbT.xrns (546.7 KB)
And I also took care of the crackle at the beginning. Of course it’s still not perfect, but let’s leave the finish to Fabrice. It’s his song and he knows best what he wants to achieve with the sound. There must be a reason for a constant flanger and a filter that opens and closes continuously. I just tuned in because I like the track and obviously some basic mixing was missing, and you just have started talking about the mix. 
Anyway, glad you’ve had some fun. That competition was made for @slujr, his contribution sounds exactly like any other of his tracks, maybe with a tad less sound quality. The other mister, @corb, also delivered some good stuff, but he missed the goal because his song is bigger than 1.4 MB. Musically @highway_rehab matches my taste the most, but @Fabrice 's track is the most catchy one (so far) and can easily get stuck in the head.
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The other mister lol. Thank you for listening. I thought we were going off of the low resource tool though
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Idk, I’ve downloaded your xrns and its size is 1704 KB. That’s bigger than 1440 KB. The link above shows 1.6 MB, and according to your picture it’s 1475 KB. Nevermind, it’s about the fun.
That woman is very attractive. Is she your gf?
Correct, the low resource tool is what we’re going off. The XRNS file size is unimportant.
@encryptedmind no, I don’t know those people. They are just some stock models from a t-shirt printing company. To test your design on. Wouldn’t surprise me if they are ai generated.
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Is mp3 allowed in the instruments? It will be a space saving device instead of wav or aiff. Nice compo idea 
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Yes, use whatever you can to save space. I don’t know though if Renoise doesn’t convert the mp3 audio to flac in the background when saving.
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Am I mistaken, or does Stereo Expander not do this by sliding the width all the way left to mono?
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Yup, you’re correct. The Stereo Expander can make things mono. Combine it with the multiband send device I mentioned earlier and you’ve got control over which part of the frequency spectrum you want adjust the width of.
At the cost of some phase distortion/dispersion… Which may be desirable in some cases, or unimportant in others
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tldr: If it sounds good, it is good. With the caveat that you have a decent monitoring environment to make that observation.
20+ years ago I started to pay attention to technical details like that. “Don’t boost eq, only cut. compress this, not that, oh no, phase issues, you ruined us all”. I thought I was doing good and getting better. But that stuff held me back much more than it helped me.
Don’t get me wrong, learning “the rules of proper mixing and engineering” is valuable knowledge to have. But I found chucking them out of the window and going with “this feels good vs. this doesn’t feel right” much better.
Yes. By and large composition makes the biggest difference between great and shite. The technical aspects are important only relative to “standards.” In some cases they matter not at all, in other cases, quite a bit.
Personally, I enjoy the technical challenges, but ears and vibe are the ultimate arbiter of quality
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It does, but always the entire frequency spectrum. If you want to monoize only a specific part of the spectrum, in case of low ends from 0 to 200 Hz, the stereo expander has to be combined with another device like the multiband send, just like @eretsua already has mentioned. If you do it that way, you’ll need another track you can send the monoized signal to. But a native monoizer would be nice, despite the fact that for example GMonoBass also does the job quite well for free.
So you have to be round about 10 years ahead of me. You must be a master now. 
I slowly started dealing with it in the year 2012, before that time I didn’t care about mixing and mastering techniques at all. I just mixed by ear, but all I did is what I’ve ever done from the beginning of music creation, and that’s to adjust the volumes of the instruments. I didn’t use filters, EQ and of course no compressors, limiters or whatever as well. But I’ve learned most of what I know and what I’m doing today in terms of mixing and mastering in the recent 5 years. If you don’t believe it just compare my tracks from 2018 with current tracks. Big difference! Nevertheless I think mixing by ear is most important and always to prefer, BUT if you consider basic mixing “rules” (like cut all low ends in every track except bass and kick) you will get much better results either way, no doubt about it! Your ear will tell you!
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If i was to mono the low end elements as i go, kicks, bass, etc. Would i then need to do it again on any busses or on the master? You seem to want to isolate the bass from everything else after the fact - or is it for basses with a lot of high information? Genuinely curious, any pointers would be appreciated.
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Well, it kind of depends on how you’re working. In my case I use mono samples for my Kick and my basses, and if I want to add stereo information in the instrument FX chains, I do. Mostly by using a multiband send to isolate the mids and highs in a separate effects chain with some stereo processing, usually via reverb, or sometimes the stereo expander, or sometimes a time-based DSP unit. That way I know my low end is mono throughout the signal chain. I high pass everything else besides Kick and bass elements. So, below roughly 200 HZ everything is mono.
If you’re using vsts, it’s likely easier to handle the monoing of Bass in send tracks, much as TNT has described. Check out the mixing thread for a good review of how to do this. Namely by using a stereo expander to mono the low frequencies on the side/low send track, or by eliminating them altogether
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@BriocheBaps
It’s always about monoizing the low ends of the entire song, which means usually you’re having a monoizer in your master track. But you COULD also set a monoizer in every single track like kick and bass, but that doesn’t make sense because it means more work without any improvement in comparison. So IF you’ve placed a monoizer in your kick track and the low ends are monoized, then you don’t have to do it again at another place regarding the kick. Every signal ends up in the master track anyway.
Jup. Mostly below 150 Hz is recommended, but personally I prefer 200 Hz. Anyway, it has to be between 150 and 200 Hz. It’s right either way.
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lol yeah, i’m not gonna lie, I’ve been super busy and haven’t been on the forums as much as I’ve wanted to since joining. just enough to read and learn a little, and haven’t really posted other than in these threads, unfortunately… the only reason i even knew this MBC was going on right now is because a fortune cookie told me about it, lmao.
Also, I actually made two tracks, ill post the other in that track sharing thread sometime, but this one checks more boxes so its what im going with… all samples over 3 secs, no single cycles, etc. even managed to keep the fractal in stereo, yay! (yes i know there’s no bonus points for that, but i’m proud of myself for keeping it in stereo anyways, ok? lol.)
but i really appreciate your comments about the track. was going for dark and psychedelic, almost liminal sorta vibes. so, thank you, it means a lot! Everyone here has made some amazing fucking music, but i’m saving my comments for voting.
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