Originally Posted By: Knife
Just for fun, here's a mix I did a few weeks ago.

Far From Home Cheap Knife Mix

Someone (I don't recall who) upthread was talking about doing stuff all on the cheap and that got me thinking. I set out to do the entire thing in my free time, at work, on my office desktop, with nothing but free-ware - just to see how far you could go in a crappy environment, with a cheap system and free tools.

The entire thing was done on a plain Dell office desktop PC with 726k of memory and onboard sound. Speakers were little desktop Harmon Kardons (not even a "gaming" system, with a subwoofer). The DAW I used was Cockos' "REAPER" (which I was so impressed with, I ended up sending them the $40 "registration fee"). All plugs were what comes with REAPER. No 3rd party plug-ins, at all.

This was all done in my spare time, between real work tasks, at my office. I imagine the total work put in is a couple of hours. I have never even monitored the mix on any other system.

I initially considered doing some major work to the arrangement and/or adding some instruments, as Jeff E and Brent did (spectacularly IMHO, I might add), since the tune lacks a bridge and kind of just goes on and on, but ultimately, I agree with some of the other folks' sentiments: that if this is really about the MIX, we shouldn't be adding new tracks and the like.

I did create some harmonies and I moved some of the guitars and drums around, but I even stopped doing that, eventually.

I honestly don't care about the "contest" aspect of this. I'm a really bad "mixer" and it was fun to just work on someone else's tracks for a bit, just as a diversion and an exercise.



Hi Knife,

Nice job. Your approach (doing it with free stuff on a laptop) is refreshing and has a lot of merit. It's interesting to see what can be pulled off in different environments. Reaper is definitely a software to "watch"... developing at an astounding rate.

Thanks for posting this. Yeah... things could sound better/different... but for this application... it doesn't really matter.

Thanks for sharing.

AK