Reply To: Stefan Verster – Dead To The World – mix contest

“I very deliberately chucked the idea of a natural mix out the window.”

I’m curious as to why? (Apart from the assertion that it’s a matter of taste.) I often think the nostalgia for 90’s death metal isn’t just for the classics finding their way to record stores back then, but because bands still sounded like real people playing real instruments, pushing real air captured with real microphones. Bands entered the studio with a producer shaping the direction of the sound, then handed those multitracks off to a mix engineer with the expectation that the core sound of the recording session will remain intact, if a cleaned-up and enhanced version of it. Nowadays it’s simply a case of a mix engineer somewhere going in blind, then re-amping DI’s and triggering his favourite samples to get the record out the door. I think that’s what people miss about this era of death metal, and I suspect that’s why Kohle chose this specific song/band for the competition.

“In order to retain some groove in such a high note density song I used some very aggressive gating.”

I have a different perspective on that: aggressive gating removes ghost hits, which I find to be essential for groove. You know that old not-entirely true-but-not-entirely-false cliche of “tone is in the fingers”? Here’s another one: “groove is what happens between the notes.” It’s also not entirely true, but I’ve often found the small hits between the main measures to be really important in retaining the feel of the drummer.

Your mileage might vary :)