Sterling High – Dead to the World mix contest

Since this was such a fun and challenging song to work through I wanted to share what I did to get the final mix/master. My main goal, like most of you guys, was to preserve the feel of the song but make it a bit more modern and punchy.

Drums: certainly the most challenging of the groups, especially the snare with all the bleed.
– Snare: oh man, thanks to Scott Elliot, I learned about multiband noise gates! A total life saver on this and I used a free one from Mogwai Sounds. Then some saturation, compression, eq ( boast lows and highs, cut 600-900hz), pultec, clipper. I had to manually cut out a lot of the dead space in the track and I decided to copy paste some hits to replace ones that just sounded like a brick of cymbal bleed. I also tucked in a sample to add more attack. Had a couple auxs to reverbs.
– Kick: I used a blend of provided trigger/own sample. Saturation, Eq, compression, pultec boost/cut at 30hz.
– Toms: lots of manual gating, eq, compression, panning automation to add movement.
– Overheads/rooms: eq to cut out unwanted freqs, compression, etc. I hard panned them but they still didn’t seem to provide a good stereo image so I added a bit of stereo delay to widen them more.
– Bus: Distressor type compressor, Clipper, pultec for fatness, and a bit of stereo widening. Parallel compression and distortion on shells. Aux routed to some reverb as well.

Bass: had real fun with this to try and get a full, nasty tone. Split the signal into 3 (standard stuff). Sub was the DI heavily compressed/limited. Mid range was DI track put through power amp and bass amp/cab sims and added some growly distortion pedal before the amp, lot’s of compression, etc. Added a high freq focus of the provided amped track for third (high) track and layered it on top to add more bite/sizzle.

Guitars: these have the least processing on them since the tone is baked in. Low cut at 100hz, low slope high cut to reduce harshness, small dip around 250. Multiband compression for lower mids and a little for upper mids. Limiter on bus knocking off at most 3 or 4db to keep things consistent.

Vocals: had a lot of fun with these. They were recorded really well and didn’t need much extra processing to get them sounding okay. A bit of serial compression (1176 into LA2A style), low cut and lower mids dip in EQ. I put a bit of delay (after testing reverb) on the main and some stereo delay on the backups to move them to the side of the main. Added some parallel distortion to varying degrees throughout.

Then the real fun began with automation and effects. I wanted the intro to be a bit different so I brought over a vocal riser and eq sweep on the bass. I’m a huge fan of vocal throws and risers so I used them to emphasize different parts. Did some panning automation throughout to add movement. Applied level automation to keep things consistent but also emphasize different pieces along the way. Copy/pasted some vocal parts to emphasize areas that I felt could use a bit of an extra push.

Master bus: some tape saturation, low cut on the sides to focus bass in middle, SSL style compression (about -3db), a little tube saturation, pultec boost/cut at 60hz, clipping, and limiting to put it around -6db LUF.

Anyways, I learned so much from others on here about their process that I figured I should share my process. Thanks for listening and reading. Good luck to everyone!

Sterling