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Awesome song

Update.......Having read the following: " the annoying fact that almost everybody on this forum thinks that a lame "ooohooohoooh"-choir is more interesting than a dual guitar solo in the second half of the instrumental part Smile IT IS A GUITAR SOLO! TREAT IT LIKE A GUITAR SOLO!" - Blitzz......... I did Mix 2.

I realised doing this that it was quite difficult to make this Gtr part pop out because it doesn't have those piecing notes like the bit before it. Anyway when there's no vocal there is room in the middle so I pushed it up in that 500hz - 1 khz region. I also thought that having one of the Gtrs centre would help, especially since the choir part is wide. I didn't want everything competing in the sides so I panned the higher part to the middle and spread the other part with delay, pitch shift. Really the spread gtr part becomes lost but somethings gotta give. Other than this I think I'd just take out the choir altogether and put the gtrs hard panned again.

Also while doing this I turned up all gtrs towards the end of the song and did some more automation on the snare to build things up a bit more.

The thumbnails are the main vocal and its automation tracks. Kick and bass automation

I decided to write out my entire process for mixing this song. More for myself than anything; it's a good learning exercise. So here it is.

Process:
Imported and organised tracks.
My basic system is to have three main busses; Drumbuss, Instrumentbuss and Allvocalsbuss. Under these I have submixes so for example Gtr 1 & 2 I wanted to pan and then process them together so I route them to a track called MainGTR which then gets routed out the Instrumentbuss.
The three main busses also include sends. Eg. if I want parallel overdrive on the kick and snare and I want the overdrive volume to be affected when I move the Drumbuss fader I route the overdrive send out through the Drumbuss. FX such as reverb and delay I tend to send straight out the Master because they get used on everything but you have to be careful if you have sends on individual tracks within a Bus and then move the bus fader as the send levels won't change with it.

Reference Track:
Choose and import a reference track. Make sure your reference is relevant to the track you're mixing. For this song I used Killswitch - The end of Heartache

Mixing:
First off I got a basic level mix of all the tracks. Then decided to start with the bass and kick
The kick I low cut at 30Hz. To add some thump I boosted 4db at 670Hz, 120Hz and 3db at 2Khz. With the bass I wanted to get it as defined as possible in the low end. A gentle low cut at 100Hz. Waves Rbass on its default setting. 1176 compressor with GR up to 5db. Waves LoAir to add below 100hz and add a bit of sub. Finally I sidechained a compressor to the kick so the bass ducks the kick every hit by about 4db.

Snare: I used about equal an amount of both snare files. A gentle low cut at 100Hz. A narrow boost of 8db at 150hz and 6db at 255hz. A broad boost of 6db at 2Khz. Logics exciter plugin to add some air and waves Rverb as an insert with a bit of plate reverb.

Toms: low cut at 65hz. 4.5db boost at 172hz. Broad boost of 2db at 3.2Khz. Barely a touch of L1 limiter

Room Mics: I balanced and put a very gentle roll off from 450z

Guitars: All guitars low cut at 86hz and a peaking cut of -5db at 200hz to help the snare cut through
All the guitars were either panned hard or centre (scrap that.Some gtr parts where completely gone in mono so I panned some in a bit). I did some editing on the guitars and multed some out. They all got a high cut about 10Khz some got a bit of exciter and maybe a boost at 450Hz or around 3kHz to add sparkle. I did a bit of fairly subtle re-amping with Logics amp. Of course I rode the delay send which I'll get back to

SnareFX: I copied and pasted to several points and sent to reverb

MainVocals: Already heavily compressed so none of that. Gentle Low cut at 200hz. Broad peak of 5db at 580z and again 3db at 5khz. gentle hi shelf +8db. De-esser. I side chained a multi band compressor on the InstrumentBuss to the vocal so it would duck the music by about 3.5db between 1 and 5 khz when the vocal comes in. This just helps intelligibility a little when the vocal is low in the mix as it is in this type of music. The main vocal has a lot of sends which Ill get to.

BVs: Similar to Main vocal with less top end shelf and a peaking cut of -3db at 2.6khz. I used wave Rvox for compression.

Distorted vocals: High shelf 2khz at -5 db

Sends: These are not necessarily used on everything. Most, especially the longer FX, are automated throughout the mix

MasterOut sends.
: A long hall reverb (2.9 sec. 39 ms predelay) followed by EQ
: Quarter note delay with hi + lo cut
:Short wide reverb(0.6 secs.)
:Logic chorus

VocalBussOut sends:
:Waves Mophoder. Whisper preset with a lo cut and hi boost. This adds air to the vox
:Logic pitchShifter: set one octave down to add body
:Logic overdrive
:Schwa CMX. This plug is the classic few cents shift in pitch and delay in the left and right channels to create width. Always check this in mono so you don't use too much and can check the phasing of the delay

DrumbussOut sends:
:Logic overdrive

Extras: The impacts and sounds in the quieter bridge section are a combination of a sample from Albion Spitfire instrument and automating reverb and delay on the kick.

Automation: I spent a lot of time automating things so they build towards the end. I especially focused on break downs so that each re-entry sounded as big as I could get it.

MASTERBUSS: A/Bing with my reference track I added a gentle 2db boost at 160z and again at 2.5khz along with a very gentle +0.5db high shelf. My basic mastering chain: Kramer tape emulation, stereo imager, multi band compressor, pultec EQP1A, Waves MV2, Waves L316. Having brought the level up to my reference track I adjusted a few things (e.g. the snare got a bit buried) and tweaked EQ while referencing Killswitch

P.S It's been good to write this out. Mainly it makes me go over every decision and ask myself why I did what I did and did I need to do it. For example I did a lot of processing on the Bass and in going back and listening while writing I realised A/Bing between processed and unprocessed that I really hadn't achieved much in all that processing. In the end I left it but a simple bit of limiting probably would have achieved just as much.
P.P.S doing some monitoring in mono I panned all the secondary gtrs in a bit but I left the main gtr parts that run the whole song panned wide. This main gtr part part still suffers pretty badly in mono but to make up for this I put an amp emulation low cut at about 200hz on a send and fed it to the bass. Because the bass is all centre this bit of distortion fills out the mix in mono. The bass now also sounds better in stereo.

Let me know if you think my mix is good or shit or in-between

The guitar tone on burning bridges is a 99% copy of Killswitch's guitar tone from My Curse. I don't want to go into details but what I did was:

- Recording the main riff of my curse with my Boogie rectifier, a mesa cab and a sm57 in the right place
- Use Ozones eq matching feature to change the sound of the recorded riff so it was 99% identical with the source
- take the exact same recording setup with amp/cab/mic but with Ozone eq in the send/return loop to change the guitar sound right at the source
- do a profile of that sound with my kemper

In the end I combined the best of both worlds: The sound of real tubes/mic/cab plus the EQ settings of the mixed guitar tone diretcly taken from the mix of My Curse. Thats right, the mixed sound from the record, not the raw sound. If you just use the guitar tracks without any kind of processing (only a high/low cut) you allready have "that" reference sound for guitars and there is no need to cut things away or boost stuff.

Compared with My Curse from Daylight Dies your mix is missing power and weight, especially from the rhythm guitars. They don't sound chunky and crunchy - something is clearly missing in the low mids/mid department.

The mix also sounds kindy flat. There is not much movement at all, especially between verse and chorus. Do you use volume automation between the parts to seperate from ehach other? Maybe you also have to reduce the limiting on the master.

regarding the solo: just put both guitars in the middle or pan them both slightly left/right. there is no need to do fancy panning stuff imho.

The low mid is different in my mix. When I loaded your mix and the Killswitch reference into a session with my own mix I did really notice this. But in the end after referencing against a whole lot of stuff (mainly more pop-rock to be honest) I decided I liked it. Also my earbud headphones (sennheisser, which I always check my mixes on) emphasise that low mid region, as do alot of earbuds, to compensate for a lack of any real lows and I just felt it transfered better on these.

In regards to EQing the GTRS my main reasoning was to make each one sound a bit different from the last. And in regards to the solos make them popout. The two main Gtr parts got only a low and high cut as you suggest. All the other parts I treated a little differently EQ-wise and one I re-amped a bit (all pretty subtle really).

I've used a lot of automation to differentiate sections, eg. delay on solo after quite bridge section, reverb delays and automated lo cuts during bridge, vocal gain, reverb and delay throughout the song, snare gain between sections and on rolls, Automated reverb on kick in breakdowns. etc...etc...
Level automation is of only so much use when you're squashing your final master to -6LUFS. Whats left of a 2db movement this way or that, maybe 0.25 of a db?
Should I reduce the limiting on the master? Yes, and so should everyone but as long as my references are a particular level I'm going to aim for that.

'no need to do fancy panning stuff'. I'm going to write this down so I save myself time