Malamor – Sharing your techniques

@alex yu : i feel you ! I used to clean all the tracks like crazy in my mix prep, but since it is a cumbersome process, now i just clean tracks and/or parts that sound noisy when i listen back to my “volume balancing only” mix (no processing).
In this case : the audible and annoying noise i heard was guitars, bass and vox during breaks, and i also chose to remove the stick counting during that drum break, which some people also chose to leave in their final mix (which is fine too).

@alex yu : i use Reaper but for that kind of cleaning job i automate the take volume manually, for more precision and control. Doesn’t take that long.
What you talk aboout is “strip silence” IIRR, and is very useful to clean up drum close mics tracks to only leave the hits.

• This reply was modified 3 years ago by djabthrash.

mix breakdown video by Max Molodtsov :
Eternal Studio Diaries: MALAMOR – “Dead To The World” Mix Overview (Death Metal Mix Walkthrough) :

To how I got my bass sound in the mix:
On the DTS BASS AMP track with an equalizer, I cut everything to 226 Hz with a low-pass filter, on the DTS BASS DI track with an equalizer, I cut everything to 587 Hz with a hi-pass filter and raised the “bell” by 1.9 db at 5 kHz. Then I directed both tracks to the “bass” bus on which: the Mammoth plug-in from Aurora DSP, the saturator from Waves – Kramer Tape and an equalizer with a small cut of the bottom and resonance in the lower middle and a slight rise at 5 kHz (about as earlier).

• This reply was modified 3 years ago by Serge.

I apologize if this gets double posted, I guess my login timed out while I was writing this. I haven’t made a mix rundown video yet, but I will this weekend hopefully. I just wanted to keep the old school death metal sound as much as I could. I really didn’t didn’t want to use any samples other than effects, but that left kick drum just sounded like duct tape on a blown head. I thought it was one kick with a beater and reso mic at first, until I zoomed in and saw the alternating pattern. I got the left kick cleaned up pretty well, but it still sounded completely different than the right kick. I ended up blending both with the D4 and another sampled kick. Guitars, I just did some eq and a smidgen of reverb and some compression. I think I should have skipped the compression there. On the bass I did some eq, comp and verb for the amp, then doubled the DI for a low clean and dirty high and blended them with the amp. On the vox, I blended a stereo stem of all vocals with a little grit added from lil tube with the three vocal tracks routed to the main vocals bus that has eq, light limiting, compression, and verb. The main vocals have some compression and eq, the backup vocals have reverb and Kilohearts phase distortion, and the end vocals just have some verb and eq. I did a touch more verb and eq on the master bus, but I had too much highpass. Sounds great on my phone, I should have stuck to my reference track more in the car test though I think. Also, lots of volume automation all around. I didn’t want to do a static mix, I wanted to draw the performance out and keep it dynamic and a bit raw. These tracks had that kind of energy, it felt like being in the old jam shack again mixing this stuff. That’s what I wanted to shine through in my mix, that raw energy of the performance they put down in the studio.

@nick g : for that delay technique, you send the delay for each guitar to the opposite side of that guitar, right ?

@nick g : which one is panned in the center ? : the delay or the dry guitar ? or both ?
And is it on all all times during the track or is it a temporary trick you use ?