Comfort Zone: Shattered

[pauli]

Thread title say it all...

[Stickman]

Hey dude... nice drum sound but the drums need more room.
Overall nice mix.

Cheers..

[manuke]

Thread title say it all...

Totally nailed the bottom end, sounds spot on to me, tight. Bass and drums are excellent. Think this is great all round, just think the gtrs should be more up front and for the voc to be pushed back into the band a little. Really good stuff. So glad all the mixes I've heard tonight sound so good, inspiring.

[pauli]

Thanks for commenting, Stickman.

When you say the drums need more room, do you mean they need more ambience, or are you talking about room on the spectrum? Or maybe width? I wondered about the width a bit, personally.

Hey dude... nice drum sound but the drums need more room.
Overall nice mix.

Cheers..

[pauli]

Thanks a lot, manuke

With heavily driven electric guitars like this, it always feels natural for me to clear out the harsh stuff on top a little bit to make room for the vocals... maybe I just went a little too far and it'd blend a bit better if I eased up on the eq cuts?

Thread title say it all...

Totally nailed the bottom end, sounds spot on to me, tight. Bass and drums are excellent. Think this is great all round, just think the gtrs should be more up front and for the voc to be pushed back into the band a little. Really good stuff. So glad all the mixes I've heard tonight sound so good, inspiring.

[Stickman]

Thanks for commenting, Stickman.

When you say the drums need more room, do you mean they need more ambience, or are you talking about room on the spectrum? Or maybe width? I wondered about the width a bit, personally.

Hey dude... nice drum sound but the drums need more room.
Overall nice mix.

Cheers..

Hey Pauli,

sorry for the confusion. Yes, i mean ambience. I would say the snare drum needs a bit more ambience to get more wideness. I know that the drums has no room miced track, but a good room reverb replace that issue. But nevertheless, nice mix!

[pauli]

Hey, no problem. I used a parallel delay on the drums rather than reverb, since reverb has a very strong tendency to cloud up a fast mix, but I can see how the snare could use a bit more.. maybe a super short reverb to give it some more body. The snare in general is probably not as strong as it needs to be as a result of my mix compression, which is far, far heavier than I'd usually do... a lot of the times a little bump at 5000 hZ will give a snare a lot of snap.

However, I'm not too sure that more wideness on the snare is a good idea, and there's a reason for that. I'm not one for hard panning most of the time, but hard/heavy rock is a genre that needs to be loud to be taken seriously next to the competition, and that means tight gain staging and oftentimes pretty heavy compression. Personally, I love to fill the entire spectrum, from left to right, as much as I can... MOST of the time... but when you need tight gain staging and hard compression, lots of subtle panning can make it really hard to get the averages levels as high as you need them without taking it too far. For hard rock, I like to keep the pan positions pretty far apart from one another (especially distorted guitars) and a very, very symmetrical stereo image. Clarity comes at premium when you've got kick rolls and distorted guitars running at high speed through most of the mix, so keeping the instruments at least 25% from one another in the stereo image is a must in my opinion, and keeping things dynamically symmetrical is going to make mix buss compression a lot easier, since you can rely on the compressor to reduce the gain on both sides fairly evenly. I'm sure someone out there more skilled than I am can make single channel stereo widening work in that context, but I've yet to figure out how .

But you're absolutely right, the drums could be a bit more live, and the snare needs to cut through the mix a bit more. Thanks for the feedback!

[manuke]

Thanks a lot, manuke

With heavily driven electric guitars like this, it always feels natural for me to clear out the harsh stuff on top a little bit to make room for the vocals... maybe I just went a little too far and it'd blend a bit better if I eased up on the eq cuts?

I dunno, just personal preference really, just listening again and to me the drums and bass sound a little more upfront than the gtrs, think it's volume rather than eq but really, it's such minor stuff, all sounds great to me. And personally I think the snare is fine where it is.

[Blitzzz]

Great mix, Pauli. There's not much to complain. I love that the drums sound dry. Guitars can be 2-3 db louder and the bass has too much audible attack for Death Metal. The guitars should dominate this song, the bass should be felt then heard. I feel sorry for bass players in thrash/death metal bands but thats just how it is

The vocals sound like Barney from Napalm Death - great shouter. Too bad I didn't see your mix before I finished my mix. It would have been a good reference. The original mix is squashed to death and too bright imho so I ended up with two songs from Napalm Death and Amon Amarth.

[pauli]

Thanks, Blitzzz long time.

Thanks also for your tips on the sonics... death metal and its related genres are a bit of a musical blind spot for me. I honestly don't know enough about any sort of metal from 2000 forward to make well informed referencing decisions. So usually I just do what I can to keep the guitars from taking my head off and keep the bottom end as clean as possible. Purely technical moves since all of the metal I've mixed so far has been of good quality and performed by excellent musicians... best thing to do in that case is to keep your head down and keep out of their way!

I'll check out your thread next.