01-03-2015, 09:38 PM
Hello Everyone,
I've been teaching myself how to mix for a couple months and liked this song enough to make it the first track hosted here to attempt. My personal preferences for Metal are rooted in the 80s and 90s. I am not a fan of the sterile, dry, and limited to death modern mixing styles that have become the norm for almost the last 15 years. It just boggles my mind that people think squashing everything with an L2 is supposed to be the pinnacle of audio quality.
To me Metal was never supposed to sound perfect and clean. It needs to be a tad raw, gritty, dynamic, and with a creative use of reverb so you can escape into the song.
Since I never mixed anything near this big before, I did a lot of trial and error but ended up with a sound I'm about 90% satisfied with. What I was looking for was something that grooved enough to make someone want to headbang, had a commanding drum sound, full guitars, guitar solos that really came alive, and vocals that were exciting and soared without being too squeaky clean. And I wanted things to be pretty balanced too.
Once I came up with an initial mix I kept listening to the bounced files and making little tweaks over a few days. Once I pay for the Waverider and Pro Q2 licenses now that my trials are about over, I will do some more tweaking. Fix some of the automation. Another plugin I've been looking at is the new Excalibur from Exponential. Once that comes out I will try it and hopefully it'll be awesome and I can use it here.
Automating plugins is not something I really know much about so far. On this track I noticed the ride cymbals are very in your face, so I turned them down. I would have definitely liked the crash cymbals to be on their own track because I would have put more of them in the mix.
Concerning presets, sometimes I used them as a starting point, sometimes not. Generally I will make a decent amount of tweaks to a preset. I did reamp I think the first guitar track with CLA guitars. I was looking for a fuller sound and just kinda stumbled onto the idea of re-amping by cycling through presets until I hit one that gave me the fuller sound I was looking for outta the guitars.
There's other stuff I'd do with the vocals too, I think what I did works, but in the future I'll probably try some other ideas. One thing I've considered doing is remixing this with pretty much just Wave rider and Nomad Factory Magma with its very limited plugins. The quality of some Magma stuff is great. The Plate reverb sounds almost identical to Lexicon MPX or PCM Native. But it's settings are a lot less tweakable.
I noticed that after 20 some instances of CLA sig series and probably about 10 instances combined of CLA2A, CLA3A, and CLA76, that when I'd try to load a new instance of a CLA compressors, it'd be blank. So I had to switch to T-Racks. Not sure I prefer one or the other, but they definitely sound different.
Spectrum grab from Pro Q2 is really useful. Just watch the graph when a problem area is playing and pull up or down on a peak and that can be a lot easier than messing with numbers.
I probably did over 50 bounces of the mix and decided after this one it's close enough to where I could post it here.
A list of what I used:
Pro Tools 11 Native
JBL LSR305 monitors
AKG K701 headphones
Chris Lord Alge Signature Series
Chris Lord Alge Classic Compressors
IK Multimedia T-Racks(2A, 76, buss compressor, master eq)
Nomad Factory Magnetic II
Lexicon MPX Reverb
Wave Arts Masterverb
Nomad Factory Stereo Imager
Izotope Ozone 5
Quiet Arts Waverider
Fabfilter Pro Q2
Nomad Factory Cosmos
Thanks to everyone here for making this such a great site and community.
I've been teaching myself how to mix for a couple months and liked this song enough to make it the first track hosted here to attempt. My personal preferences for Metal are rooted in the 80s and 90s. I am not a fan of the sterile, dry, and limited to death modern mixing styles that have become the norm for almost the last 15 years. It just boggles my mind that people think squashing everything with an L2 is supposed to be the pinnacle of audio quality.
To me Metal was never supposed to sound perfect and clean. It needs to be a tad raw, gritty, dynamic, and with a creative use of reverb so you can escape into the song.
Since I never mixed anything near this big before, I did a lot of trial and error but ended up with a sound I'm about 90% satisfied with. What I was looking for was something that grooved enough to make someone want to headbang, had a commanding drum sound, full guitars, guitar solos that really came alive, and vocals that were exciting and soared without being too squeaky clean. And I wanted things to be pretty balanced too.
Once I came up with an initial mix I kept listening to the bounced files and making little tweaks over a few days. Once I pay for the Waverider and Pro Q2 licenses now that my trials are about over, I will do some more tweaking. Fix some of the automation. Another plugin I've been looking at is the new Excalibur from Exponential. Once that comes out I will try it and hopefully it'll be awesome and I can use it here.
Automating plugins is not something I really know much about so far. On this track I noticed the ride cymbals are very in your face, so I turned them down. I would have definitely liked the crash cymbals to be on their own track because I would have put more of them in the mix.
Concerning presets, sometimes I used them as a starting point, sometimes not. Generally I will make a decent amount of tweaks to a preset. I did reamp I think the first guitar track with CLA guitars. I was looking for a fuller sound and just kinda stumbled onto the idea of re-amping by cycling through presets until I hit one that gave me the fuller sound I was looking for outta the guitars.
There's other stuff I'd do with the vocals too, I think what I did works, but in the future I'll probably try some other ideas. One thing I've considered doing is remixing this with pretty much just Wave rider and Nomad Factory Magma with its very limited plugins. The quality of some Magma stuff is great. The Plate reverb sounds almost identical to Lexicon MPX or PCM Native. But it's settings are a lot less tweakable.
I noticed that after 20 some instances of CLA sig series and probably about 10 instances combined of CLA2A, CLA3A, and CLA76, that when I'd try to load a new instance of a CLA compressors, it'd be blank. So I had to switch to T-Racks. Not sure I prefer one or the other, but they definitely sound different.
Spectrum grab from Pro Q2 is really useful. Just watch the graph when a problem area is playing and pull up or down on a peak and that can be a lot easier than messing with numbers.
I probably did over 50 bounces of the mix and decided after this one it's close enough to where I could post it here.
A list of what I used:
Pro Tools 11 Native
JBL LSR305 monitors
AKG K701 headphones
Chris Lord Alge Signature Series
Chris Lord Alge Classic Compressors
IK Multimedia T-Racks(2A, 76, buss compressor, master eq)
Nomad Factory Magnetic II
Lexicon MPX Reverb
Wave Arts Masterverb
Nomad Factory Stereo Imager
Izotope Ozone 5
Quiet Arts Waverider
Fabfilter Pro Q2
Nomad Factory Cosmos
Thanks to everyone here for making this such a great site and community.