Magician's Nephew: 'Get Out Of Bed' kapu mix

[kapu]

Kapu!!!! [...]

no need to 'exchange', because the way i('m) learned(*ing) to do it comes from practicing with the tracks avalaible here, and getting tips/feedback or asking from other users.

fast and simple answer: clipping/saturation. practice/test: clean your master from any plugins. mix should sound still decent. start looping the 'power part' of the song. put a clipping plugin on the master. just crank the clippers drive/input/threshold to the max in the clipper, and it should go louder and at some point start to sound really distorted. compensate with taking down monitoring level. then roll back the clipper with ears, until it start to sound healthy again. you should have gained several decibels of 'loudness' without significant side effects. that's basically the concept. if mix goes farty (bass), boomy (low mids), rawky (high mids) or brittle(treble) too soon, then fix this with eq inserted before clipping, and repeat the 'loudnessing' again. if too drastic master equing is needed (starting to destroy the phase response/losing transparency), then 'fix it in the mix'. usually, after these iterations the mix itself ends up sounding a lot 'thinner' or 'cleaner' if the auditioned without the 'loudnessing'.

not all clipping is 'equal'. logic pro compressors distortion/phat fx suite has a quite useful hard clipping modes. cytomic the glue (ssl g-emulation) has nice clipping. advanced limiters usually have a clipping or 'super fast' modes. event horizon is good. decapitator, magneto etc. i use uad api 2500 compressor on master with low headroom setting, which allows clipping. or uad maximizer, with at least on metering appears to function as some type of clipper/saturator. many analog emulation preamp plugins can work as clippers (drive input, take down output). you can also 'go pro' and buy hardware mastering preamp converters and use it for clipping. advanced limiters with clipping capabilities can have really confusing user interfaces, which can make achieving pure clipping quite hard when practicing/testing.

the way i try to get things loud with beats still banging goes: 1) clipping 2) compression 3) sidechaining. on channels, groups and master. for channels, i try to go with subtle clipping, sometimes relying just on metering, to shave off 1..3 dB. to keep things under 'control', trying to get more consistent peaking levels namely . sometimes blending filtered clipping/saturation. basically clipping/saturating the 'telephone range' or high mids and blend it in to add some snap/crack to drum close mics for instance. then usually insert a 1176-style compressor before the clipping and applying the classic 1176 snap/bang treatment to further emphasize the 'illusion' of transients. on 1176-style comp, ratio 4 or 8, slowest posible attack, very fast release (not fastest), drive the input to make it snap, set the output level driving it against the clipper. then insert eq between compressor and clipping and 'do the equing'. then check on clipping and compression again and so on. then maybe adding some parallel compression before clipping. then doing this again in drum bus and so on.

for powerful/dense stuff the sidechaining goes: when things are initially ok, i essentially drive all the 'background' stuff and reverbs through a group. meaning main guitars, bass, keyboards etc. then in this group i put compressor/ducker, which is sidechained to kick and snare and other 'meaningful' percussive stuff. for example just sending kick and snare to a group/aux/bus with no output, and use this group as the sidechain source. the sidechain compression/ducking is then set with a few ms of lookahead with superfast attack, so that it 'ducks' or 'pumps' about 2-3 dBs techically just before the actual drum hit to give the 'psycho acoustic explosion' effect. then adjust the hold (a few to about a dozen ms) and release times (maybe a hundred or so ms) so that transient cuts through better, and level is then restored, maybe with a slight taste of pumping. usually after this, i actually have to take down the drum bus a few dBs and maybe readjust some other levels too. to further enhance the 'banginess', gating the drums with lookahead and soft knee can bring out a 'pre-echo' suction type of sound. and it doesnt have to be 'hard gating' the close mics. it can also be a few dBs of gating on the drum bus before the drum bus compressor. i guess the goal is to at some level imitate that 'wwo-p-tuff' type of dynamic structure between the transients and 'rest of the stuff', which is how ears react to really loud percussive sounds (explosions etc), but without actually being that loud. and then again in the master bus, you can furthermore squash this type of mix/sound with hard limiting/clipping with the 'illusion' of transients retained.

but this multitrack isnt maybe the best material for practicing this and getting the 'i got it right' feel, the results, at least for me, were more like 'i think i got the most out of it with relatively little effort before going into tweaking and details'. anyways, for me, the performance feels like a full blown banging from start to finish on all instrument parts, and kind of calls out for more dense and immersive sound than subtle details, largely because of the in-your-face lead vocals and hard hitting drums, constant 1/8 'rock pulse' on bass and 'crank it to eleven' guitars.

a disclaimer. the 'loudness' itself of course depends on how loud you listen to it. one can always take loud/dense mix/master down 20 dBs and state that it doesnt sound as impressive. or if it still does, filter out everything below 200 and above 2k, and then make the same statement. or just mute it, and then state 'dark side of the moon' sounds better because of the dynamics etc. for me, smashed and more muffled sound just tends to sound somewhat more enjoyable at relatively louder levels. but this of doesnt mean 'cranking up', but just loud enough to 'get into the zone'.

but that's about it. listening your stuff i think you're already doing it great. if you want things louder, add clipping/saturation on different stages. good and reliable metering with rms and peak is also very helpful, so you can get a clear picture of how smashed things are vs. how smashed you like it. ^_^