Home › Forums › ‘Dead To The World’ by Malamor Mix & Remix Contest › Malamor – Sharing your techniques
While checking the phase and timing of the kicks I noticed the sample track was out of time from the mic’d tracks about 90% of the time and I fell into the rabbit hole of manually time aligning it which was crazy/dumb considering the amount of times the kick plays in the song! LOL I think there’s auto align plugins that would have helped with that, but I don’t have any. It also would have been easier just to use a new trigger sample heh.
@wyku : it makes sense that the trigger track would not be aligned with the live mics tracks from the get-go (because of latency), but i find it strange that it would not be delayed by a fixed amount of time (same delay during the entire song) from those tracks. Except if there was mistriggers during tracking but that is another beast in itself.
@djabthrash exactly, it should have been an easy shift of the entire track to account for the misalignment due to latency, but weird that it only lined up at a “few” of the hits. I’m not sure what the tech was like for that trigger device at the time, but maybe they were pushing it to the limit with the speed they were playing?
@wyku : pretty sure it was nothing fancy and a thing that still works today : good old trigger on the top of the rim of each kick drum (like the DDrum ones : https://www.ddrum.com/series?id=triggers), then send to the trigger module, then to the console. This setup has been used a lot by extreme metal drummers live (and in the studio) since the mid 90’s if not earlier.
djabthrash.
wanted to make video but had no time.
Initially I didn’t intend to participate as my current PC is comically underpowered, making me use mostly stock Reaper plugins, so I downloaded the multitracks just for fun. But after I did the rough mix I felt inspired and decided that I might as well contribute.
I don’t remember using particularly fancy techniques but I had to do a lot of trickery on the drums. The worst offender being the second kick drum. I compared the frequency response of kick 1 to kick 2 and made some adjustments to kick 2 according to that. Boosted 60Hz, tucked in 90Hz, removed some of the low mids, boosted at around 5k. After that the biggest difference was that kick 2 didn’t have a lot of click at around 6k that’s present in kick 1. Boosting that region meant increasing bleed. I ended up boosting the kick sample at that same region and blending the sample in. Worked decently well.
The snare was a headache as well. It just didn’t sound metal enough – too much wires, too little attack. I put a transient shaper on it and then a multiband compressor. I compressed the high frequencies a lot more than mids and lows to get the top end tight enough. The bleed was a huge problem, too. I ended up doing a bunch of manual gating, much like Scott Elliott. And just today it came to my mind that I can use TDR Nova in expander mode to take both the bleed and the snare wires under control. Tried it out and it worked great! I do miss the option to limit the internal sidechain range to the main frequencies of the snare like I used to do on Pro MB 2, though.
Toms required a bunch of trickery as well. They just sounded like something you would hear on a jazz fusion record lol. Especially the high tom as it was played very softly. Transient shaper came in handy again. And then, of course, volume automation on tom fills.
Guitars, bass and voice didn’t require much editing at all, they just sounded great from the start! The drums is what I (and probably most people here) have spent most of my time on.
Hey guys, great to see plenty of responses here, really enjoying the YouTube videos.
Regarding phase alignment. I have 2 templates that I use. The first is my mix prep template. I have auto align on multi miced instruments set up so that I can quickly get the various mics sample accurate. That goes a big way to ensuring you get a punchy kick and snare. I align my over heads together, then align the kick to the overhead and I align the snare to the overhead. I align the rooms to themselves and never align them to the overheads as you lose that room ambience sound.
After alignment I normalise all my tracks and then reduce them in volume so that they aren’t too loud. Remember if you are using analogue emulation plugins then it’s best to hit the plug-in with volume that you would hit the real hardware with.
After that gain leveling I go on to consolidate tracks down to stereo tracks. I didn’t have to do this with this song but if you receive a session with 80+ tracks I would always look to reduce track count down to make it easier to navigate and manage.
After consolidation I start the process of cutting out the noise on each track. This is time consuming and tedious but worth it in the long run. I do the usual stuff like using my own colour scheme per instrument. After that I export these new audio files and start a new song, importing them into my mix template.
The biggest hurdle I faced with mixing this song was running out of CPU power. My 8 years old 6600k i5 was stuttering along that at times it was unplayable. I certainly need to invest in a new computer
Cool stuff Alex. I’ll have to revisit the snare trying your compressor expander mode to see how it affects the snare tone.
On the bass: there’s the Pulsar Smasher comp everywhere. Before the amp sim, after the amp sim, on the bus. Basically I compressed the living shit out of it and then EQed it. The bass is also a mix of the original bass amp track and the DI with a ProCo Rat and Ampeg SVT sim added to it.
On the vocals, there’s a touch of reverb on the backing vocals but nothing super crazy. Just enough to give them a little space in the mix. All 3 vocal tracks also have the Pulsar Smasher comp on them.
On drums, Pulsar Smasher is all over the place again (it’s my go-to comp) and there’s some EQing on some parts just to try to add some punch to them.
I have the SMG Cock Blocker on most of my tracks to clean up noise.
On the master bus, there’s a Drawmer S73 vst. It glues everything together and adds a little extra polish to the mix.
Surprisingly, the only thing I did next to nothing to in the mix is the guitars. I panned them, made sure they sat right in the mix, added the Cock Blocker to get rid of excess noise and that’s literally it. I actually liked how they sounded out of the box so I didn’t want to go too crazy with EQing them or anything like that.
@nick-g Thanks! If you’re interested, here’s my process on Nova:
1. Make a high shelf where most of the cymbal bleed is.
2. Click the Threshold button, decrease the ratio to 0.5:1.
3. Make the fastest attack possible and put the release at 20 ms.
4. Put threshold and gain way down.
5. Adjust threshold and gain so that the gain goes to 0 mark when the snare hits.
The goal is to reduce the bleed as much as possible while keeping 5he snare sound natural, so adjust to taste!
If you have a copy of Pro MB 2 on hand, I recommend using that as the internal sidechain range is what makes it work better. Scott Elliott shared his settings on his mix walkthrough. I guess you can emulate that function on Nova by making the snare dummy track, highpassing and lowpassing it to the main frequencies and then feed it to Nova on the actual snare track.
Stolen from Scott Elliot (who stole it from Glenn Fricker) is the use of a multiband gate on the snare. Was a complete life saver! I even used a free multigate from Mogwai.
These other tips y’all are putting up are great too!
great stuff, i’ll give that a try out. Thank you
@alex yu : “Also there’s a bunch of noise on that kick sample track – gated it as soon as I’ve noticed it!”
I listened back to the D4 track… It sounds clean. Not sure what noise you’re talking about…
If you zoom in like crazy, you can indeed see noise in between the noise, but it’s so low in level it can’t be heard in the mix.
@djabthrash This might be something on my end then… To be fair, it is very faint, I just removed any unnecessary noise just in case it might be brought up in level after all the compression and limiting. Especially considering there is audible noise in some mixes here.
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