The Forthcoming Turn Registered Mix

[registered]

Hello guys,

I submit to you my version of the Forthcoming Turn, which has been a tricky one to mix for me (as I'm still learning how to mix properly...).

I'm currently happy with what I've done, though it might lack of string presence, and some additionnal cleaning of noises on the guitars.
I would really appreciate any critics from you all since it is my first try on this one, and since i've spent too much time on this too

V3 : Stereo issues corrected.

V4 : EQ mainly of the low frequencies  (Yeah, I was too greedy on the bass) + a bunch of other trials on other elements, like EQing the orchestral parts on the high frequencies to enhance openness.

Big thanks to BCS for his precious advices.

[bcs_mix]

Okay first of all, the rule of thumb for 99% of rock and metal guitars ... panning one of them 100% Left and another 100%Right. This is why there are always 2 seemingly identical guitar tracks recorded aka. double tracking. Put on your producer hat and listen to any guitar driven music (grunge/metal/rock/punk/hardcore etc. and you will notice thet the rhythm guitars are hard panned to left and right ear to create the famous term 'Wall of Guitars'. You kinda did the opposite thing. The bass sounds stereo, but the guitars are all muddled up in the center, and the fact that the performance of both guitars and bass in this song is not clean at all makes the mix sounds even worse. I promise you hard panning the guitars will open your mix up to sounding like a decent demo at least. And if you have spare time I suggest you do some tedious editing to fix the playing as well. The drums sound relatively fine, and don't worry about the strings for now. Once you place the guitars correctly in the stereo space then you can decide how to blend them in. Welcome to the site, good luck and have fun!

PS. btw if you're new to mixing I kinda recommend you start with easier genres like pop or hiphop. They relies more on the production by the artists/producers themselves while more 'acoustic' genres usually require more polishing from mixing (and even more from the recording engineer and the musician's performance but that's irrelavant). But if you like metal then I go ahead!

[registered]

Thanks for your reply and your tips, I really appreciate that since it is my first first time mixing for a "real" project. And I didn't expect so much audio Editing, this one has been Madness to me. I'm also a great fan of metal genre, but maybe I'll give a try to other type of music since mixing has been so much attractive.
And thank you for this warm welcome

Compared to your mix, it's sound pretty much narrow, and I didn't figured how you'd do that until now.
I found that reverb helps a lot (or not...) to widen some tracks, that's maybe why the bass was more stereo than the guitars. After some trials and error I've managed to give a little more space to my mix.
Imager on the master bus helps a lot too.

I've retry this whole mix by paying more attention to gain staging, and space placement of the different musical elements wince I was struggling with my mixbus output gain. Guitar parts have been hard edited also to get rid of these annoying mute noises.
I think I've got a cleaner, more understandable mix here though I'm not totally convince by the drum sound. What's your opinion?

[bcs_mix]

nah fam I don't think you really fixed the guitar panning problem. Great to know that you're a metalhead as am I, so I can easily give you references without sounding like a weirdo. Hard panning means turning the pan knob ALL THE WAY to either left or right side. A hard-panned mono track should only come from one speaker/headphone ear. I know it sounds rather extreme and counter intuitive. I've been there too but whether through recording history or arrangement choices, it IS the industry standard. Bands have made arrangements based off of this technique (the technical term is LCR panning). I'm gonna give you some references so you can really hear what hardpanning sounds like. Put on your headphones.

Slipknot - Surfacing ... In the intro listen the guitars. The drop tuning rhythm guitar riff is coming out of the left ear. Only when vocals come in and the songs takes off that you hear another same guitar riff on your right too, creating the wall of guitars that surrounds the whole mix.

Slipknot - Liberate ... a cleaner example. At the very start guitar comes from the right for one riff, and then the second one another guitar also comes in from the left.

Veil of Maya - Manichee ... this song literally uses LCR panning for arrangement purposes. Listen to the guitars section around 1.00 min. If the guitars were all centered it would destroy the purpose of the arrangement entirely.

Think of it like this : A standard 5-person metal band, one vocalist, one bassist, one drummer, and two guitarists. In a live set those two guitarists would be positioned at the very left and right, drummer at the center to show off his cool ass kick drum sticker, and the vocalist at the center in front as he is the frontman, and the bassist behind him because noone cares about him (lol jk). A standard metal mix is pretty much based off of that. Rhythm guitars (the riff ones) hardpanned L&R with leads and ambients fillin the gap in between. Bass and main vocal strictly at the center. Drums are a little bit extra. Kick and snare at the center, but perspective matters : Audience's perspective (toms go from R to L, hihats on right) or Drummer's Perspective (the opposite), the choice between the to totally depends on you and the band just make sure you give the correct 'audio picture' of the kit. It is also advisable not to hard pan drums cause drums too wide will undermine the wall of guitars. Give them like 70%-80% of the stereo image.

good job one the editing, but fix the guitars first so we can have a clearer space in the middle to really listen how the drums should sound like. Also don't use reverb on bass, it's a classic mix destroyer recipe. And practice abstaining from using too much reverb. It will always make things sound better in solo, but will also surely make the mix muddy and ameteurish. I've been there too. Let's wait until you get to songs with vocals and you'll understand more what I mean.

Let me know what DAW you use so I can help you out more, because maybe you just don't know your way around it yet.

[registered]

Dude, I haven't listen to Slipknot for decades, bring me back to nice old memories. And you're right, hard panning really works on all the examples you provided.
Headphones… Maybe I would have just started from here for this panning problem, as I'm used to listen to absolutely everything with my monitors.

TBH I've never paid attention to how bands were mixed. Mixing is a whole new universe that I've just step into. And right now I'm like a mad alchemist testing weird stuff to see if I could get closer to philosopher sound. 
I'll try to fix the panning for guitar parts. That's maybe why I found today that my mix is lacking a sense of depth, or air.
And maybe be a little more easy on the reverb too, as it sounds unprecise especially on the drum blast parts.

Anyway, thanks for your detailed reply. I'm using Reaper. I've spent hours and hours watching tutorials to learn how to tweak it, as it is the more versatile DAW ever.

[registered]

Aha, turns out that I was tricked by Reaper, with the guitar bus track width at 0%... 
In addition to that, guitar tracks were doubled 100% left and right, which is another mistake I made.
Ok, this last mix sounds closest to what I intended, thank to you BCS

[bcs_mix]

haha told you the DAW itself can be the reason. Reaper is extremely customizable and you can go all geeky with it, but the UI design is not so intuitive imo. It has great community support and practivly free, though. I also use Reaper when I'm on my Windows machine. I recommend you look for more intuitive looking themes on its website to help you out. https://stash.reaper.fm/tag/Themes . Glenn Fricker uses Reaper in his Youtube channel. I'm not the biggest fan of his mixes, but if you wanna familiarize yourself with mixing in Reaper you should check him out.

Now back to your v3 mix, I'm sure you are well aware that it is much better than v1 already. Here comes what I think is the hardest part of this track : Bass. Right now yours is quite boomy on the lowmid frequency. Make sure you boost freq. that correspond to the range of the instrument. Thing is Reaper stock plugins are all way too transparent (mathematically precise, not very 'musical'). This is where all those fancy third party plugins you may have already seen all over Youtube come into play. This noone can really help you, it's entirely your research and investment. for example check this out it may work for you https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=213501 . All I can say is reduce lowmid, boost the crap out of hi-end, highpass at 30Hz can get you atleast 50% there in bass guitar mixing. This is the part where you have to do your own Youtube research, and train your ears to be more sensitive to picking out frequencies. Say goodbye to enjoying your favorite record without criticizing its mix! (but don't worry, you'll come back to it later once you realize its actually yours that sucks). Psychoacoustics is one trippy rabbit hole, trust me it WILL drive you nuts but that's okay. Take frequent rests to avoid ear fatigue. It may takes you 10 revisions to get it right but then it's the best feeling in the world, you'll see! My very fist mix was also metal, and it took me ONE WHOLE MONTH to mix it. Now I only need a few hours to come up with the first version of a polished master. Learn your tools, read a TON of texts on what each processing module does, create presets, develop a workflow, your plugin arsenal will get huge FAST. It's very normal for new mixers to be very experimentative, but then again most will eventually strip down bit by bit, all into a very similar chain of processing. That's how industry standard workflows are originated. The more advanced you get the better you'll be at making the most from the least.

[registered]

Here's the very last version of this song. I think I'm done with it or else I'll become mad
Feweee, still a lot to learn out there. But I've improved a lot during these past few weeks. I'm still lost in the fog, but starts to see a glimmer of light from a distant lighthouse.
This journey shall continue and take me to inconceivable places, yet to be discovered.

Anyway, thanks again BCS for your concern. You've been a precious comrade down here to help with my struggles. Hope to heard from you on another topics on this forum.

[aftercutrecords]

I like it! One thing I would mention is that the low end is very hyped and there's like a 1.8khz peak in the guitars. Now I really usually like this, but it could probably be backed off on a little bit. The other thing is, there's a LOT of bass. From like 50 to 110hz, there's just a lot of bass. Probably stylistic choice, but it's not the cleanest low end. Also the snare seems to drop off a little bit and not have as much volume as the kick. The kick makes the snare disappear. Cleaning up that low end in the kick might help, and so would carving out a little space for the snare and maybe using a transient designer to make it more aggressive and stand out more. The kick and snare need to sound like they're pushing and pulling in proportion with each other. I've heard it referred to as an aggressive dance, and I think it's an apt analogy. More high end on the snare should help, as well as cleaning some space for it. Still a good sounding mix aside from those low end issues that I hear where the kick pumps the whole mix haha.