Umphrey's McGee - Crucial Taunt

[mikej]

I think it just need the limiter dropping back a touch.

Ha. Yes  you are right.  I'll be sure to give that a try first .

do you use tape emulation? i find that helps on the master for the lows and clipping

Yeah I get what you mean, it's a good suggestion. 

I tend to mostly avoid it at the moment though - for a few reasons. 

For me, the main thing I liked about tape emulation (and 'analog' plugins in general) was that I found it was really mostly an in built eq curve (slight bump in the lows, and rolled off top end) more than anything in the way of harmonics as such that seemed to be making the difference to me. 

I also figure the final limiting will add in enough in the way of distortion.

The other reason is that I ditched a whole boat load of plugins a while back when I decided not to bother updating them.  I do remember Waves J37 had some cool eq curves in it.  I have also spent time playing around with clipping, etc too in the past, and experimenting with stuff like putting a limiter first on each channel, etc.

I do very occasionally add some saturation and a bit of eq on the mix bus though to get that same sort of effect, but I guess I get concerned about over doing it.  I did add some saturation on the bass in this mix though.

For me it's also important that any plugin that creates distortion has oversampling and proper filtering to avoid aliasing.  Which I suppose is strange considering how heavy I limit mixes .

I dunno.  I sometimes put a little saturation or whatever on the mix bus and not sure if it sounds better or just different, so I take it off again.  Sometimes it does stay on though.

i personally like a woofy kick and think the drums sound great

Thanks.  Appreciate the feedback there.  The raw tracks and playing on this one I think is really good which probably helps.  (There's a lot less snare and hi hat in the vocal mic than is usual for Telefunken sessions.  I kind of missed that challenge aspect with this session to be honest!)  I think the aim of this one was for more of a studio style recording than a live band capture as such. 

I think I maybe like the low end a little tighter.  It's getting that balance right. 

It seems with rock you need to get everything exactly right, eq and balance wise to get that right on the edge, but not quite over feel.  Not easy at all.  It seems like it should be straight forward, but it really isn't.  Also needs just the right mid range pressure from the guitars which is also really hard to get right.

Cheers!