02-01-2015, 03:28 AM
Hello all. First off let me thank Mike Senior and this website for providing very valuable, free mixing education. This is my first time using live drums and DIs. I mostly produce electronic music which is a much different skill set.
Overall the sound was inspired by classic black metal bands like Dissection. I wanted to maintain and highlight the raw and emotional performances provided.
I started with only the drum tracks getting EQ, panning, and phase relationships correct. Compression and saturation here and there, gradually introducing it to individual channels and also eventually in parallel on the bus. I find that overheads are great to compress and are crucial to get right. And just like the guitars, there was selective muting and fading to reduce bleed or give some dynamic contrast.
The bass is a mix of the amped and a reamped DI. These parts carried the low end. The kick drum wasn't overly high passed, probably around 50 Hz.
I initially made the synth strings and choir too thin but they need body because they compete against all these other distorted and full frequency elements. Widened strings using the stereo separation knob.
I added pitched down versions of both the lead and background vocals. They add body, especially when driven. You can use a waveshaper, a compressor, or even a high gain guitar amp. The background vocals have more delay and reverb, and are more stereo for when they come in to make a big impact. They also are bussed together to be compressed and sent to a few different reverbs. Boosting around 600 gives body. They leads are also automated in volume to get temporarily out of the way for the backgrounds.
The guitars are a mix of amped and DI's reamped thru free plugins by LePou and IRs mainly by ToneVampIRe. A few of the amped tracks I detuned by 10 to 20 cents because they were too similar and didn't sound wide enough. Don't overdo this.. luckily there were 6 tracks to work with so it's not noticeable. Bussed together with compression and distortion to thicken them up. Automated a steep low pass for when the vocals come in to take off some 8 to 10k. Again this adds dynamics for the parts without vocals that they gain some high end air and presence.
In mastering the vocals got lost so I went back and EQed a few dB out of around 3.5k for the drums and guitars. Our ears are sensitive to that 2 to 5kHz range, especially when every part is saturated and wants to occupy it. Incrementally add distortion, limiting, stereo widening to the mixbus. Below like 200 Hz is mono (mid-side EQ is great for this). I used the original track as reference for EQing, and that was really helpful.
* What I need more practice with: thick, wide guitars and making sure drum fills are loud enough *
That's all
Ultimately the tools aren't too complex (EQ, saturation, compression, panning, level balance) but small changes can make a big difference. Don't be afraid to make lots of mix revisions. Reverb and FX sends do get buried in the final master but without them it is noticeably dry. Vocals do need quite a few layers, and fall apart when seemingly quiet layers are muted.
Thanks,
-Fohrenbach
Overall the sound was inspired by classic black metal bands like Dissection. I wanted to maintain and highlight the raw and emotional performances provided.
I started with only the drum tracks getting EQ, panning, and phase relationships correct. Compression and saturation here and there, gradually introducing it to individual channels and also eventually in parallel on the bus. I find that overheads are great to compress and are crucial to get right. And just like the guitars, there was selective muting and fading to reduce bleed or give some dynamic contrast.
The bass is a mix of the amped and a reamped DI. These parts carried the low end. The kick drum wasn't overly high passed, probably around 50 Hz.
I initially made the synth strings and choir too thin but they need body because they compete against all these other distorted and full frequency elements. Widened strings using the stereo separation knob.
I added pitched down versions of both the lead and background vocals. They add body, especially when driven. You can use a waveshaper, a compressor, or even a high gain guitar amp. The background vocals have more delay and reverb, and are more stereo for when they come in to make a big impact. They also are bussed together to be compressed and sent to a few different reverbs. Boosting around 600 gives body. They leads are also automated in volume to get temporarily out of the way for the backgrounds.
The guitars are a mix of amped and DI's reamped thru free plugins by LePou and IRs mainly by ToneVampIRe. A few of the amped tracks I detuned by 10 to 20 cents because they were too similar and didn't sound wide enough. Don't overdo this.. luckily there were 6 tracks to work with so it's not noticeable. Bussed together with compression and distortion to thicken them up. Automated a steep low pass for when the vocals come in to take off some 8 to 10k. Again this adds dynamics for the parts without vocals that they gain some high end air and presence.
In mastering the vocals got lost so I went back and EQed a few dB out of around 3.5k for the drums and guitars. Our ears are sensitive to that 2 to 5kHz range, especially when every part is saturated and wants to occupy it. Incrementally add distortion, limiting, stereo widening to the mixbus. Below like 200 Hz is mono (mid-side EQ is great for this). I used the original track as reference for EQing, and that was really helpful.
* What I need more practice with: thick, wide guitars and making sure drum fills are loud enough *
That's all
Ultimately the tools aren't too complex (EQ, saturation, compression, panning, level balance) but small changes can make a big difference. Don't be afraid to make lots of mix revisions. Reverb and FX sends do get buried in the final master but without them it is noticeably dry. Vocals do need quite a few layers, and fall apart when seemingly quiet layers are muted.Thanks,
-Fohrenbach