Magician's Nephew - Get Out Of Bed [OctoOnFire]

[FytaKyte]

I was using "Get Free" from The Vines during mixing to readjust my ears, mostly because of the aggressive sound of that song. It has a lot of energy in the mids (not so much on the hi-mids) and still sounds pleasing. but I'm afraid it's due to the tone of the guitars and the voices. It's a great mix, and that's obviously a factor.
I've been also listening to Mastodon's Emperor Of Sand, which has INSANELY distorted drums, just to see if I could go for something similar (considering the different genres, ofc). BTW, the drums seem to have "zero" punch at some parts of this album, It's weird and even some would say wrong, but I dunno, it got my attention. Check 'Scorpion Breath' or some sections of 'Clandestinity' and let me know what you think.

Yeah, for me, I think The Vines mix is a good one to reference for this style. There is a lot of nice punch to the drums

The Mastadon mix I'm not so keen on, so this may be partially a taste thing. To my ears, it's pretty much a big angry ball of distortion without a lot of definition... and true enough, the drums are lacking in transient punch too.

Here's the thing though: The Vines mix has relatively sparse instrumentation, so there is room for the drums to punch through. Whereas in the Mastondon mix, the guitars and bass are this big, dense, fuzzy wall of sound that hogs pretty much all of the frequency spectrum, so there is little real estate for the impact of the drums. Basically all that is poking through is the sustain portion of the drum hits, which kind of makes sense in that context (even though it wouldn't be my solution to that mix issue).

On the other hand, The Magicians Nephew track is even much sparser than The Vines track - a good percentage of the time, it's only drums bass and vocals, so there is definitely room for the transients to punctuate the mix and be heard...

Ultimately, I guess in the end it's down to an aesthetic question, but on a slightly less subjective level the fairly uncontrolled sustain on the snare drum is messing with the rhythm of the track to my ears - somewhat like a too-long reverb tail can do.

Could you be more specific about that harshness? like, where is it coming mostly from? The voice, the quitars or drums, the center or the sides...? Is it top top end or more around 5-7KHz?

I'm hearing it mainly in the drums and the vocals & yes, around that 5-7k range. Specifically the cymbals and hihats on the drums are suffering from compression-induced distortion. One way to combat that when you are "smashing" room mics is to shelve down the high end of the room mics.

Regarding the vocals, because the vocalist has quite a peaky voice around the 6k mark, the additional distortion in the top end tends to add to the harshness.

Overall, I'm hearing too much mids and high mids, with your low mids really scooped around the 400-600hz mark.

When I downloaded your mp3 and did some quick and dirty eq moves with your mix by shelving some highs above 12k, cutting some high mids at 3.7k & 7.2k & boosting fairly broadly and significantly around 590hz, I started to hear some transients on the drums again! I could hear that lovely "boing-y" trashy sounding hyper-compressed snare and it really suits the track!... maybe it's mainly a case of too much "smiley-face" eq!