Discussion Zone

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

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.)