Practice Mix - lemme know whatcha think

[jeffssoloband]

Hi there,
I'm new to the forum. Here's my first mix. Hit me up with questions/ concerns/ likes/ dislikes/ etc. Thanks in advance!
Jeff

[Mall of Death]

1) Drums
Not balanced enough. The kick kind of disappears in the mix. Try boosting the high frequencies of the kick drum. Use the kick drum as your reference point, then adjust the volumes of the rest of the drum kit until everything sounds balanced. Adding a bit of reverb to kick and snare can give it a more natural sound.

Also - I like to use a transient designer to give kick and snare drums more attack. Try this free VST, it's great: Flux Bittersweet

2) Vocals
When it comes to death metal vocals, there's a pretty straightforward way of handling them. Use any sort of gain reduction plug-in to compress the shit out of them. Add gain until you head a loss in tone quality. Then run it though a de-esser. Start with very aggressive de-essing, then back it down until it doesn't sound like the vocalist has a lisp.
Now you can apply post-processing to give it a better sound. Some sort of valve saturator is allways nice. Another thing that can give the vocals more presence in the mix is using a doubler. I tend to double the track, then run a harsher gain reduction and de-essing on the second track and use a doubler panning it hard left and right. The mid track now provides punch and clarity while the strongly processed left/right track gives it more body.

3) Guitars
Sound-wise they're okay, but it doesn't sound like you did lots of EQ-ing to them. Try messing around with the high frequencies to give them a bit more clarity. Also, the base frequencies in the guitars seem to be lacking.

4) Overall
There's an overall lack in volume. On the mastering side, you could run it through a compressor and limiter. Give it a good volume boost of at least +5 db. Then throw an EQ in there and adjust unpleasant frequencies.

[Blitzzz]

Sounds like your mixing on monitors or headphones that are not suited for the job. What are you using?

[jeffssoloband]

Thanks for listening and for the detailed feedback. I appreciate it. Since my original post, I have upgraded my monitoring system, so I decided to give this one another go, based on the comments. (Yes, my original mix was done using cheap headphones.) I feel that this one is way better. Let me know what you think if you have the chance - thanks again!