Great song, great shouter, good riffs - was a blast to mix =)

[Blitzzz]

Hey Guys,

just finished "Femme" today. I love the energy of the guitars and the vocals (the shouter sounds exactly like Barney from Napalm Death!).

This mix was some sort of testing ground for me because I recently switched from Cubase to Studio One. I also "forced" myself to use VMR for Gain staging, EQ and Compression on almost all tracks which drastically reduced the search for the "right" plugin.

Overall I wanted to keep this mix natural yet powerful and stayed away from boosting too much highs or cutting mids. The mix also stays within the boundaries of the K-14-scale and was just slightly boosted and compressed with Slates FG-X. I´m not a mastering engineer so if you want to make it louder you have to turn the volume knob =)

[takka360]

Nice mix Blitzzz drums sound fantastic
Real good work.

[pauli]

Well, Blitzzz, this is a thing of beauty, isn't it? Nice and clean, well defined, but still punchy and meaty where it wants to be.

Guitars are muscular but not abrasive, and you really feel them hit. It's a great performance and you've really done well finessing the balance while letting the emotion come through.

The kick drum cuts nicely in a way that makes perfect sense for the genre... not so much low end that it mires up the bass guitar, but I still feel it in my chest. Vocals come through as clearly as can be expected but without much sacrifice to the guitars... if I remember right I had a bit of trouble with that. Stereo imaging is also in the pocket... love the wide wall of guitars.

I'm listening on decent range monitors and the bass guitar sounds fantastic, but I'm questioning if I'd be able to hear it at all on a smaller system. Having said that, it's probably not that often that Wall of Death's target audience listens to this music on equipment that can't handle it? You mentioned on my thread that death metal often calls for a bass that's felt more than heard and you've certainly accomplished that here... it's getting along with the kick pretty flawlessly, too.

Do the toms have a little too much low end, or maybe just ring a little too long in the low end? The only real imbalances to my ears are the occasional tom fill that seems a to rub up on the bass/kick for a moment or two. To me it makes sense for the toms to be more about attack than tone with all the double-kicks and deep bass guitar... maybe?

During the guitar solo section, could the mix have a bit more movement? This is a very small, highly subjective and purely non-technical niggle, but that section changes the color and rhythmic intensity of the music, and the balance remains mostly static. I can't really pin down what I'm wanting to hear there specifically, but a little automation could add to the drama IMO.

A lot of the time I feel like metal is seriously overcompressed, and as such is lacking in bass, with harsh guitars and drums that seem to alternate between having their transients flattened or sharpened into lethal weapons, but I don't hear any of that here. In fact, this was very comfortable listen, but with no sacrifice to the feel and emotion present in the music. Great work

[Blitzzz]

Oh, thank you guys. In terms of EQ - as you see in the picture there is little to no eq on most of the tracks in this mix. Slates VCC is doing a good job at refining the original sound of each track and 90% of the EQ moves are hi and low cuts. There is zero EQ on the snare, the kick and the guitars. I also don't cut away the mids from the guitars if I can avoid it. I think that's why most mixes end up with a very bright and harsh sound.

50% of the sound comes from my bus setup. I´m using 4 busses (Low, Mid, High and Air) with different saturation, compression and tape settings for each bus.

[pauli]

I've gotten good results from time to time bussing tracks based on frequency range/musical contribution like that, but most often that seems to turn out a confused sounding mix when I try it, probably because I mostly use stock processors out of necessity. You've got pretty nice plugins, which probably makes processing big chunks of the mix a lot easier... I'm afraid to process my entire midrange with one instance of ReaEQ

Your mix is proof of concept for what I've been trying to explain to some of the newbies here lately, that they should be doing most of their mixing with the faders and pan pots and easing up on the plugins, at least with good recordings.

If you're not EQing the kick, is it the buss processing that's sitting it so well with the bass? Sometimes I wonder about using the "mix glue" concept people use on the master to a kick/bass buss when there's double-kick craziness like this.

[Blitzzz]

You're absolutely right - the solo part needs another automation run and a different amp sound for the solo guitars. I just couldn't find a good virtual amp for the two solo guitar tracks that fitted perfectly with the two rhythm guitar sounds I´m using in the mix. I always use DI-tracks and reamp them if I have the chance. That way I can get the sound that I want right at the source and have more time to concentrate on the song instead of fixing things with EQ.

The toms have a big cut around 300 Hz and a 2 db high shelf boost around 3khz. I also tamed the region around 70-140 Hz with Waves C6 Multiband Compressor using one floating band and bypassing all the other bands. I learned this trick from Andy Sneap (he is using this on guitars all the time) and since then I´m using it in most of my mixes to eliminate boomy bass frequencies - again no EQ needed. The snare in this mix is also very easy to fix without using an EQ: I got rid of the nasty resonance by cutting away the tail of every snare hit. Without that "poiiiing"-ring at the end of each hit the snare sounds fantastic.

Speaaking about pluigns: I deleted most of my plugins after switching to Studio One because honestly no ones needs 10 EQs, 15 Compressors and 10 Reverbs. I´m down to two reverbs (UAD's EMT 140 and Valhallas Shimmer), three delays (Waves H-Delay and two stock plugins from Studio one), two EQ's (the SSL Emulation in Slates VMR and Fabfilters Pro-Q 2) and six Compressors (Slates VBC with three different bus compressors, the two compressors in Slates VMR and Fabfilters Pro-C) and that's it. I do have some special plugins for special situations like Waves C6, Trackspacer, Melodyne or Vocal/Bass Rider but 90% of the time it's Slates VMR with VCC for Saturation.

I've probably spent more then 5.000 Euros on plugins over the last couple of years to get to a point where I know what works for me and what doesn't work for me. If I could turn back time and start from scratch I would buy the Slate stuff plus and handful of useful plugins like Waves C6 and use stock plugins from my DAW for everything else.

Regarding the bus concept: The three bus compressors from Slates VBC rack all sound different. The SSL clone FG-Grey is very neutral and perfect for my "Air" bus where I only want minimal compression (max 1 db) and no coloration. The Fairchild Clone (FG-MU) is my standard "Mid" bus compressor because it adds 2-3 db at 3khz. All my guitars are going through this bus and I normally aim for 1-2 db compression. The FG-Red has a Saturation knob and it sounds great on drums and vocals so I put that compressor on my "low" (3-4 db compression) and "high" bus (1-2 db compression). I also use different VCC-Models for desk-like Saturation on each bus to further seperate the sound of each bus. And last but not least I have Slates VTM with different tape speeds on each bus.

The "air" bus is my go to place for overheads/hihat, synthies, delay and reverb tracks and everything that I want clean and "airy". The "high" bus is my Vocal bus, "mid" is for the guitars and "low" is the bus for the shells of the drums. Most of the time my bass goes to the low bus with an additional send that goes to the mid bus so the bass goes through two busses. I always use parallel compression on the shells of the drumkit and this is also going to the "low" bus. So every time I start a new mix there is allready a good chunk of compression, saturation and equalization on all tracks. I know this might not work for everyone or every style/song but every time I mix through a single master bus it sounds thin, compressed and narrow sompared with my 4-bus-setup.

[pauli]

Re: buss concept- there are definitely certain genres/situations where that 4 buss makes a lot of sense to me, but even then it means a complete paradigm shift. Mostly my brain likes to group things with cold, unmusical logic... buss the drums together, buss vocal stereo pairs together, buss guitars together... more for organizational/session management reasons than anything else, so sending something as musically important as the bass to two different busses makes my head spin just thinking about it. In theory it's beautiful, because something like a fader ride into the buss compressors would create level interactions on both the guitars and drums that are completely independent of eachother... seems like it could get out of hand really quickly, but it's clearly working for you

Not too long ago it occurred to me that I was using more corrective EQ than would be necessary if I compressed/saturated more, and it's dawning on me more and more that saturation is the key to a lot of the geese I've been chasing.

[takka360]

saturation is the key?Yes it a very big part of a good sound.
Go do a mix in a SSL room for the real deal.Not poss in the box

[pauli]

I hear there are some paid web services that'll run your tracks through an SSL desk and bounce to disk for those of us who have no choice but to mix ITB.

These days in the southeast US where I live you're lucky if there's a studio with an SSL desk within several hours drive, and booking 4 hours for a mix costs more than I make in a month... seriously.

However, in many genres, that sound is disappearing rapidly... but is it due to the desired sonics or the fact that a proper SSL room is almost completely out of reach, even for the indie labels?

Honestly, I'm very skeptical that the sound itself is worth the absolutely absurd, prohibitive cost of achieving it. Even free saturation plugs sound really good to me, but the Slate plugs are amazing. Lots of the classic recordings heralded for the natural saturation in the mixes were recorded on noisy mics and in lousy rooms with carpeted walls...

The Nightfly is one of the warmest, best sounding, most dynamic records I've ever heard, and was recorded into 16 bit converters IN THE 80s, when software was supposedly cold and brittle. You'd get skinned like a cat for trying that in a pro studio now, but that record sonically beats the hell out of almost everything I hear that was cut on tape through a Neve console. So I'm also very skeptical that sound can't be achieved by software. A good analog desk and analog outboard offer clear advantages in that you'll often arrive on fantastic results in less time, but I suspect that has more to do with the nature of analog gear than intrinsic sonic value- you have to get gain staging right from the very beginning of the mix to clear the noise floor without clipping the mix all to hell, so it requires better mixing.

So I don't doubt for a minute that analog is a great sound, but is that same sound impossible in the box? Doubt it.

[Blitzzz]

I´m with you on this. Honestly you can just do so much in the mix - if the guitars don't have the right sound or the drums sound like crap no ssl board in the world will save your ass. You have to get the tone you want in the recording process and after that everything will just come together naturally. And you don't need a ssl console for that - just use VCC :-P

What I can tell you from my experience is that Slate plugins give me that little extra smoothness, extra tightness and extra extra beautiful sturation that you don't get with stock plugins or stuff from Waves/UAD. I don't know what they do or how they do it but without VTM, VCC and VBC all my mixes sound flat and boring.