Reply To: Aurelien Sureau – Dead To The World” Mix

Hey Aurelien,

First off, don’t feel doubtful. You already did great by going to the trouble to mix this and make a submission. Your next mix will sound better still.

With regards to some feedback on your mix: if I had to decide on a common problem, I’d settle for the midrange getting rolled out of just about every instrument, and the tops and bottom boosted.

So here’s the deal… we’re metalheads, and the Internets (and many youtube channels) try to sell us on the idea that the midrange is not metal.

And to a very small extent that’s true – generally you’re probably going to leave more mids intact on a Bluegrass record that on, say, a death metal album. The problem however, as they say, is that the music resides in the midrange. In other words: the information that make our ears perceive a sound to be pitched mostly resides in the midrange. It’s entirely possible to make a record slightly too heavy on the low-end or slightly too dark/trebly and still have it sound okay provided that your midrange sits right.

What you’re going to have to do is really listen to an instrument, and determine with some experimentation what every frequency range in said instrument really means. Example: I hear just about every mix rolling out the midrange from the bass, because they’ve been taught that metal bass should have no midrange. Why should that be a rule? You should have enough mids in your bass to make it sit comfortably with your guitar sound. There are some great extreme metal bands out there with loads of midrange in the bass.

This is especially true of the drums as well. If you scoop out all the mids you’re left with a boomy bottom end and some clicky stuff on top. You don’t want that. You certainly want the parts of the midrange that make your drum sound boxy lessened – but you also don’t want to indiscriminately nuke everything between 300 and 1.5K from orbit. What I do is I listen to the instrument and decide which frequencies are the ones i want front stage (by boosting them) and which ones make my mix sound worse (by cutting them). As an example from the competition song, the toms had something great going on around 800-1K, and I boosted that (within reason).

Lastly, when compressing drums, try to use slower attack times and less compression. In the beginning it’s easier to not like the sound of a drum and feel that what’s “missing” HAS TO BE compression. this is almost never the case. You always need less compression than you’d think.

Take care, and I hope this helps!