YOU CROSSED THE LINE, ONE TOO MANY TIMES (BKM's mix)

[BKM]

Hi everyone,

As an avid metalhead, I felt like tackling this one, especially after having mixed two rather "tame" songs lately. I made it a habit to write down things I learned during the mix, so here's some thoughts on this one:

• I didn't particularly like the guitars at first (I like my guitars with a bit more attack and significantly less bees, if you know what I mean) but then I just embraced the song for what it is - a big, loud, ugly FUCK YOU - and made my peace with them. I think they turned out okay and they definitely fit the dirty, angry, raw vibe. There's a lot of sculpting and de-fizzing going on which didn't even take that long thanks to the experience of two years of desperately trying to got my amp sims to sound at least bearable in a mix.
  
• Speaking of raw vibe, I've had a tendency in the past to mix things very pretty. This time I set out not to do that and ... didn't really know where to start. So I basically cranked up my various saturation tools a bit further than usualy and left minor problems like small resonances in the cymbals alone. I found it really tricky to mix in a "dirty" fashion (where dirty does not equal bad) because you still need to tackle the really annoying stuff while not polishing everything to a spit shine. My own metal recordings are kinda proggy and usually profit from a tight mix, so this was definitely an interesting experience.
  
• Loved the bass! I don't recall ever processing a bass this sparsely. Low passed the amp, high passed the grit track, compressed them a bit and carved out the low mids - done. Some fine tuning to the kick of course but nothing major.
  
• Also really liked the drums. In hindsight I think I should have re-sampled the kick since that was the instrument that gave me by far the worst time. I found the room mics to be very usable here, which in my experience is rare in a metal context.
  
• Top notch vocal recording. Didn't need much besides being smashed by a Distressor (-style plugin) and some sweetening. Was really happy with how it turned out.
  
• I'm very happy with my master this time around. It's pretty loud without being harsh while still being punchy with healthy sub lows. I however found myself carving out a lot of 100 during mastering, this region always seems to pile on in my mixes. Maybe it's my sub-par listening environment, but at any rate, I really gotta pay more attention to that in the future.
  

As always, I really appreciate any and all comments. While I'm confident that this one turned out pretty okay, there's always much room to improve

[BKM]

Okay, so after taking another good listen this morning, I noticed two things:
1) the vox at some points got drowned out
2) I might have been overzealous with those 100 Hz cuts after yesterdays long mastering session.

I brough some of that meaty 100 back in and went back into the mix to turn the vocals up in general but also automate them a bit more to bring out some of the details. At the same time, I took out just a smidge of 2k because I thought it was a bit paper-y sounding.

I also messed around a bit more with the loudness part of my mastering chain. The limiter was pumping a bit, so I engaged another very transparent compressor at a 1:1.2 ratio before it to 1) shapen the transients a bit and 2) to bring out the low level details a bit more. This added a good amount of glue and fatness and also brought up the final volume by another 0.5 dB. (I don't consider myself part of the loudness war but I do find it really interesting to see how one would arrive at such a result. I actually think the track sounds less ... stuffed now despite being louder.)