MekaPhil - Alive Yet Free mix and master

[brandon_parker]

Hi! This is my mix and master of the track.

I tried to have a clear, crisp sound while having it punchy and what you typically hear in an anime. The DI for the bass guitar gave me fits as far as gain staging is concerned, but nothing a re-amp wouldn't fix and clear up.

Speaking of which, the DI's I used is:
Guitars-STL Howard Benson (my absolute favorite plugin for reamping guitars) on rhythm and Audio Assault Sigma v2 for leads. Just add some reverb and delay.
Bass-Waves CLA Bass with just a bit of L1 due to how plucky the DI was.
Drums-JST Drumforge for cymbals and JST Mike Plotnikoff/Hatch/Joe Rickard samples for the shells.

I didn't have time to do a proper RMS levelling, so the track is really hot...it is presently 8.5 RMS.

Anyways, hope you enjoy!

[aftercutrecords]

First off, thank you very much for doing a mix of this that totally went in a different direction with the drums themselves. It sounds great to hear some different samples!
Here's some critiques, if I may:
1) The center guitar is... really loud relative to the rhythm guitars haha. You could probably turn that down till it's way less and it would still do it's job. As of right now it kinda steps on the vocals and the drums. Both of which DO sound really really good.
2) I love the tones you used. I feel like I may be obligated to invest in STL howard benson now. Thanks a lot! /sarcasm
3) The whole mix is really well balanced with the exception of the center guitar. The solo sounds FANTASTIC. The only thing I find myself wanting is a LOT more high end on the track. From like 6k to 20k is's really muted. The lows and mids SOUND really good, but it all tapers off.
4) I just want MORE scream during the choruses. "I WANNA BE FREEEE" is the turning point of the chorus and it has to carry weight. It SOUNDS really good, but it needs more volume.

Overall, I'd love to hear these changes made because everything else was just so spot on that it's really not fair for one center guitar to be so ornery and effect the listening experience.
But either way, thank you very much for doing this! And yeah, I know how you feel about the bass' gain staging. This was our first song we ever did and Meka did the bass, even though I'm a professional bassist. He wrote pretty much the entire instrumental, and with that comes whatever choices cubase ended up making for him when he exported them initially. So I also had to deal with that when I mixed the song.
It's cool that you noticed

Good job overall and I hope you'll do more of these as we submit them!

[brandon_parker]

Hi! Thank you very much for the tracks! It was a lot of fun to try a different, yet cool sound for your song.

1. Yeah...I made my gain staging on the guitars a little off balance. I can fix that by re-balancing it and making the guitars a bit more equal.
2. Thanks! STL Tones Howard Benson is just so good on rhythms and leads, but the rhythm impulses really bring the guitars up a notch.
3. During mastering, I did a high shelf of 2.4db at 14k. Typically, I don't go past 3db, especially during mastering, but I'll see why the 6-20ks aren't hitting. It's probably something I forgot to do. Speaking of which...
4. On that screaming part, I put my 1176 emulator on bypass. Oops...I'll fix it.

As for tracking bass, for controlling tranisents, I like to hit it with a preamp to a rack compressor. Going in, I like to have a 4:1 ratio with a medium to slow attack and slowest release. You do want the "pluck" sound of the bass, but also have the low end be round as well. When tracking bass, I also typically have two to three tracks in. One for DI, one for a sans amp (if you don't have one of these, you can skip it), and one for either an amp with a Beta52 or equivalent or an amp sim. And don't forget to high pass filter the bass at around 55 to 70 htz.

Once again, thank you for the kind words and suggestions. I'll post a version 2 when I have some time to work on it.