The Well Tweaked To Death Version

[andrew0v]

Ya I purposefully didn't mix the vocals at all cause they were pretty bad but I did a lot of work on the guitars I was going for a very natural sounding sort of djent tone sort of like meshuggah and the tone that Keith Merrow uses I actually used a lot of processing and multiband compression with mid gates and vocoding on the guitars so im not sure how it sounds like I just turned the guitars up with the faders im pretty sure that wouldn't be many peoples approach to mixing I really struggled with the snare so ya I think that needs work lol and the cymbals and overheads are pretty lacking in my mixes as well

Thing is, you can't really all it natural either, unless your amp really sucks or you just have a really muddy tone, this isn't what you would associate with the word natural. Keith and Fredrik's tones don't really sound like this either, on that front all your fancy processing got nothing done. Sorry if it sounds harsh, believe me I've had the same problems in the past. Remember this, Keep It Simple Simon, alot of times an overly complicated processing chain will give you this result and make your tones sound muddy and undefined so, remove all your plugins from your DI guitars and start over.

For the next version limit yourself to this chain: 1. Overdrive emulation: Volume cranked, Tone Cranked, and Drive on 0 2. Amp Sim: just any high gain amp sim will do, I like the Nick Crow Labs 7170 and 8505 sims for a 5150 kind of tone and even the Van51 in Guitar Rig 5. 3. Cab Sim: Grab Rosen Digital's Pulse plugin, this includes a free cab sim and allows you to add your own cab sims to it and blend between the 2 cabs. I personally like Catharsis Fredman Cabs, Redwirez 1960a V30 loaded cabs, and the Metallica IR Pack by BGelais but really most of the IRs out there are great. 4. Eq: start out with a High pass at 100 Hz and a low pass at 7 kHz, from there scoop out that muddiness at 400-500 Hz, don't go too extreme or the guitars will sound really strange and hollow. Just enough so that you get abit of definition. Try a boost around the 1.5-2 kHz area, this can give you a good bit of cut out of the guitars but if you're not careful can end un making them super harsh, follow that with a cut in the 2.6-5 kHz range. In that range guitars start to have a weird white noise kind of sound that really makes a mess of the top end. 5. Multiband compression: Set it up so that your comp triggers at 250 Hz, use a -26.5 dB threshold, 16 ms attack and a 25 ms release. I'm not really sure on a ratio (I use Waves C4, there isn't a ratio, it's just a range control which controls the maximum amount of gain reduction) so I assume an 10 oe 15:1 ratio. 6. Limiter: Throw on a limiter as the last thing in your chain just to keep everythin nice and tight. I used Waves L1 (as I like to call it JoeL Oneisack) but really any limiter will do (a free version of L1 exisits called W1 if you don't hae it and it works the same way), just set it so it pulls 6 dB of reduction and the release is 4.84 ms.

This should get you a more full fat metal tone that's easier to play with and an easy to repeat (If you have Reaper just save it as an effects chain) sound. Don't give up on this track, it took me a good few hours to get where my mix is and I'm still trying to get it right. Also, if the rest of your mix is in order the vocals should pretty much drop in with some eq, compression and some automation. The biggest problem with them is that there's alot of proximity effect from the vocalist being too close to the mic, it's as easy to fix and high passing at 200 Hz. I know you can do it.

Cheers,
Doug

Oh I did not use the di's that were given I just mixed the distorted recorded guitars by the way it would probably sound a lot better without them and the di's through bias fx or something I may try that too lol