First mix ever :) Bash it to the ground, FINAL update

Hahahah nailed it! :slight_smile:

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Whoa I wish my first ever mix sounded this good! :slight_smile:
I was going to give you a detailed info on the mixing strategies for this kind of music, being that Iā€™ve grown up with metal, played in metal bands, and started my mixing career as a metal mixer, BUT @blairhall1974 did such a good job of it Iā€™m just gonna let him handle it :slight_smile: Seriously, he made some great and valid arguments which you should really implement in your mixing.
Best of luck and keep up the great work :slight_smile:

Cheers @VirtechStudios ā€¦ Iā€™m a lifetime metal guy myself! \m/

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Guitars sound great! I mostly listened to the second mix, and my biggest complaint is the the snare seems way too contained - more transients leaking out could be good. Have you tried lowering the attack on the compressor?

If this is your first mix, I canā€™t wait to hear your second project.
Drums are a little contained, might want to back off on the compression settings slightly.
Overall this is kicking ass.

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Hey guys,

Thank you so much for the comments, but I havenā€™t got much time at the moment ! working on my house :slight_smile:Iā€™ve read them all and will get back to ya on the specific subjects oneā€™s I get some time for mixing again :slight_smile:

Thanks for your time ! and see ya soon !

Yeah, Iā€™ve bin a bit to entousiastic with all the eqā€™s and stuff. Like Iā€™ve said, I followed the manuel, but on every thing I went a bit to drastic I think. Its like I kept hearing mud, and wanted to kill it all, but forgetting that it would take all the life out of it as well. Somewhere I gotta find the ballance I guess. But thats gonna take some practice I guess :slight_smile: Probably Iā€™ll get lucky here and there in the next couple mixes where I get it some what right, but before I can realy say I KNOW how to get it right all the time will take a lot of mixes I guess :slight_smile:

I used Bias fx. But Iā€™m not super happy with it. Maybe Iā€™m to demanding, but for a software that Ā± costs 150ā‚¬ I expected more of a difference with podfarm then it actually does. Iā€™m still looking for that super tight chunky sound, that still is warm (omg, Iā€™m a warm-word user) and full, with a lot of body or something :stuck_out_tongue: I probably has a lot to do with the guitar as well. Iā€™m not that fond of my emgā€™s in the Ibanez I recorded this with. But I had to use it, cause its the only one with a fooating bridge, and I need it for an effect in the last riff. If you listen carefully, you here a drop bend, that is done on the lowest note. Currious if you know how I did it :stuck_out_tongue: Its no rocketscience though.

Youā€™re absolutely right on this one. Iā€™m not realy happy with it. But again, I might have gone to far on some freq-cuts. I went with Erminā€™s suggestion on going 3 tracks in the first mix, and 2 in the sec mix. 3: DI, amp, dist. and 2: DI and amp.
Not quite ready to mix in a heavy distorted track. Wasnā€™t happy with the result. But I still need a lot of experimenting in the order of aproach, cause now I have a sort of limiter style compressor on all bass tracks to cut some peaks, and an eq to, like you also said, dedicate the roll of each track. DI high cut up to 250Hz, etc. then all true a buss, and used in the following order -compressor-compressor-eq-eq-multiband compressor-brickwall.

Frankly I was tired of mixing :stuck_out_tongue: I didnā€™t do any automation either, cause I kinda did the whole mix in a day, and wanted to have at least some what of a decent total sound. And if you have to get a manual next to it, and cross referencing shit cause your learning, you want to get further and further, faster and faster, and try this and that, and start with guitars , but the bass aint finished and so on and on :stuck_out_tongue: so yeah, that is definitaly something I need to do, cause I also noticed a buildup there. Good tip though ! But still gotta figure out how sidechaining works :stuck_out_tongue: I donā€™t mean the concept but how it actually is diald in :slight_smile:[quote=ā€œblairhall1974, post:19, topic:1071ā€]
I think youā€™re definitely on the right track for a first mixā€¦ welcome to the never ending world of second-guessing yourself and always trying to figure out how to make it sound better! :smiley:

Thanks for sharing, and I hope some of this makes sense! Cheers!
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Thanks a lot :slight_smile: I hope I can keep going in the right direction. Got a lot of studying to do, and experimenting ofcourse, but atm Iā€™m also building a house, so donā€™t have all the time I want. But oneā€™s its done, beware :stuck_out_tongue: hehehe.
But indeed, it is realy never ending. A year ago I thaught I had a pretty good understanding of how all this stuff works, but what Iā€™ve learn in the last few monthā€™s from reading manuals alone is incomparable to what I knew before :slight_smile: quite sick.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to write such an extensive response :slight_smile: It is well apreciated !

Greetings

Well, I donā€™t know if its cheating or not, but I have bin a bit bussy with editting and eqā€™ing, guitars for quite a while now, but thats about it. plus it doesnā€™t realy stand in a mix if you donā€™t know how to do the rest so it was just a bit of fideling around :slight_smile: But still, I read a few manuals and thought about it a lot before I gottan the chance to do an actual mix so maybe that made a bit of difference. Or I just got lucky :stuck_out_tongue: might as well be the thing :stuck_out_tongue: haha.

No problem, @blairhall1974 indeed was quite thorough with his response, but thanks for even thinking about doing it :slight_smile: Iā€™m a big metal fan for years now, and I must say there is some SERIOUS competition in the mixing world in this genre. I guess in every genre, but if I may be so bold, I think to make such dense mixes like metal mostly brings, so light and digestable, where every instrument has his place and doesnā€™t disturb others, while not sounding small on there own quite impressive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YR53xBVfAI
The guitars on this one sound so freaking tight !

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:slight_smile: Thanks mate, as soon as I get some time I start on the next one!

In this one its all a little bit to contained, not only the drums :slight_smile:

Greetings

Āµ
Yeah, this is one of the biggest issues I found myself as well. I went to far with wanting to clean the dirt, but yeah, now it sounds quite dead :slight_smile:

Not a lifetime fan here, cause I just didnā€™t know it until I passed my 15, 16y. But I must say it fits perfectly with what I used to listen when I was very little witch was classical. For me, metal is the classical music of this age. At least how it is often written.

And Im glad there are some metal fans out here, was a bit scared there werenā€™t any and my mix would go unbashed :smiley: So muchos graccias ! :slight_smile:

Remember: there is no such a thing as ā€œcheatingā€ in mixing - if it sounds good it IS good. Iā€™ve listened to some tuts and podcasts where the mixing engineers were talking about ā€œcheatingā€ in their mixes, and at the end, all of them at certain points of their career did replace ALL of the drums with sampled ones, ALL of the guitars and bass lines with either re-amped ones, software based ones, or just played the whole damn riff by themselves on their fav guitar/amp/cab/mic/pre setup. I personally have done reamping and using bass synth instruments to augment/replace the poorly played lines. Sometimes the recordings you get are that bad that you just cannon fix it, and the only solution left is to ā€œcheatā€. 95% of the time I use drum samples to augment the real thing. 90% of the time I use sine wave to replace the bass bottom. I wouldnā€™t call it cheating, those things have been done for decades now and no one is complaining :wink: So throw at it everything you got, donā€™t be afraid to experiment, and most of all, just use your ears and common sense (and a ton of referencing) :slight_smile:
Mixing in general is a very very very competitive field, not just for metal. But imho, it is a great thing at the start of your career to determine the style of music you love mixing the most, and aim to be the best at it that you possibly can. Rarely you find guys who mix exceptionally well in all styles, from classical music to grind core. For you mix to sand out from the crowd, you will need to do a lot of listening, comparing and evaluating professional mixes, a lot of trial and error while mixing, and when you finally get good at it, applying your own fingerprint, what ever that may be - something unique to you, that can be translated as your ā€œstyleā€ of mixing. Hint: go find some multitrack stems of metal songs, they are all over the internet, and listen to the instruments in isolation, Iā€™ ve learned a ton on mixing just like this (I remember Lamb of God released multitrack stems of their Sacrament album, which I studied in great detail, how the mixer applied different snare reverbs at different parts of the songs, the creative usage of some guitar bleed, and every little subtlety that you canā€™t really hear when you listen to the songs, but contribute immensely to the overall sound).
So yeah, great to have some metalheads too on here, @blairhall1974, to add to the diversity of the group :slight_smile:

Listening on some cheap Sony cans at workā€¦ the guitars sound pretty darn good. The first two things that popped out to me was that the drums seemed kinda thin and brittle sounding. Somehow not full enough. Also seemed that the bass could be brought up some tooā€¦ but then again maybe itā€™s the 'phones.

You got another metal fan here, brother. Iā€™m not huge on the whole ā€œcookie-monsterā€ vocal style but in some instances I even like that! :slight_smile: ā€¦ So itā€™s good to see metal posted for bashing. Thanks for sharing it, and good luck.

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Hi Skua,

Thanks for the bashing mate! I guess its confirmd then if more people notice it :slight_smile: the drums need life, and the bass more presence. As soon as I get some more time, Iā€™m gonna tackle that shit :stuck_out_tongue: Found a new guitar tone while fiddling around today, that Iā€™m gonna try on the track. this time its back to podfarm. A bit pnshier.

Well, It took myself about 3 years to get used to, AND to find good singers, the grunting and screaming, but now I love it, IF DONE right ofcourse :slight_smile: A lot of boring stuff around.

todeloo :slight_smile:

Just got a chance to listen to Mix 2. Sounds muuuuch cleaner in the mid range but the bass still seems burried. Am listening via flat refference mons so I canā€™t hear the punch but I donā€™t seem to be able to undestand what itā€™s doing. Maybe giving it a little more presence around the 1.5-2.4 ish would help it cut a little so it can have some deffinition within the guitar. A nice little trick also is to creat a bass bus, without the low end but around the mid, mid-higher end with some drive. That helps fill in a lot those empty spaces and gives the bass a little more presence. The drums, as mentioned by @skua are a little week compared to those sweet powerful guitars and have a little more siblance than what you would get from being in front of a drum kit itself. I would recomend maybe a little more sidechain compression (hard compression) and an overall eq to tame the brittle end. For this, I would recomend a Pultec type eq and for compression, there are different approaches. I personally like to use a Teletronics LA-2 on certian channels. You could try individual CLA-2ā€™s to get a defined taste on each drum or you can go New York style compression, it all depends on what youā€™re looking for.
Great mix man, keep it up!

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True story, with a LOT of international stadium and Grammy/Billboard winning bands! I have found that mixing the original drums with the samples is always great in order to get the closest possible to the real thing. Phase is the only headache sometimes.
Itā€™s as you say. Practice and master your art. Donā€™t try to be good at everything, try to be great at one!

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Thanks mate :slight_smile: I appreciate the time taken !

The problem is, I cant relate all those styles of compressors and eqā€™s into the digital stuff.
Do you by any chance know the fabfilter C and fabfilter Q ? Maybe you could reference them for me :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: Cause Iā€™m kinda clueless if you start talking about cla-2ā€™s and la-2ā€™s. The fabfilter C has a lot of different styles of compressors build in, but its more named like vintage and classic, like that.
Or do you know where I can find good information about those kinds of compression, but also related to the digital compressors like the fabfilter ones?

Oh and I just googled pultec EQ, I donā€™t have it :stuck_out_tongue: lol
Why would this be better then the graphical ones ?

I redid the guitars just now, but I need to redo the bass from scratch, as for the drums. I think I went to anal on all the eqā€™ing :slight_smile: Gonna check those frequenties out to see if it pops out a bit more.

Thanks for the your time :slight_smile: !

Added a 3d mix, I think Iā€™m gonna keep it with this one for now and use it. I guess there still is a lot of space for improvement, but you gotta stop at something sometime, and get to the next I guess :slight_smile:

Have fun bashing !!!

Hey there!
I understand your situation. Here are the reasons why I would highly recommend these two hardware emulations is by the algorythms that have been put into them and the way they respond when you drive them hard. Kinda like the original hardware itself.

The CLA-2 from Waves (most accurate in my opinion) or even Avid, Bombfactory or Digi (donā€™t quite remember which exactly), donā€™t over a regular compressor is as mentioned above, the hard clipping tube emulation that it has when you give it a good even gain/reduction setting. It really brings out the thump and definition of the kick/snare without coloring it but must be done in small steps due to the very easy overcomping because of this.

The Pultec type EQ is highly recomended by the broad band and the way it really smoothens out the frequency range you are targeting. The changes are subtle and itā€™s a passive eq which is much smoother than most other eqā€™s which are based on standard active eqā€™s. The overall main reason that makes this eq stand out for certain situations is the attenuater. Probably the reason why this type of eq is still so sought after. Another good EQ that could get a similar effect is a standard M-EQ (Mid EQ). Joe Meekā€™s Meequalizer is a great mid eqā€™s and is standard in most pro tools bundled buys.

Good luck and my best to ya!! Rock on!

My best

I see I forgot to reply to this one :slight_smile: woops. I did check them out though, (i mean read about it) but I havenā€™t got the time yet to try them out. Thanks for the info :smiley:

I also mad a little more tweaks, if you want the update :slight_smile: its the 4t mix up top !

Greets