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in reply to: Kepler Engelbrecht – Dead to the World mix #11896
I’m happy you like it :D As I mentioned towards Ledzettervall, my goal was to make it sound like it could be a recording made in the band’s rehearsal space. No frills, no fuss, just balanced instruments mostly the way they were recorded. While the bass would also not be something that I’d nowadays put on a record, it’s similar to what you’d hear from stylistically similar recordings from the same era. Although…. you’d also hear far more variance in the bass tones from back then.
in reply to: Kepler Engelbrecht – Dead to the World mix #11895:thumbsup:
in reply to: Kepler Engelbrecht – Dead to the World mix #11893Thank you:) All things considered I’m happy with the tom sound. The mix was intended to be more in the realm of documentary and less that of fantasy, so… for certain tom hits to have been harder, the drummer should have played harder. HOWEVER. I really like the drum performance. It’s not hyper-quantised, which makes it feel much more alive. I’d take that above hits that sound like they were quantised in an Excel spreadsheet.
Re: vocal mix – I referenced mixes of a similar style from the same period, and the vocals are more or less the same there. It’s a very modern trend to put death metal vocals center stage. As you said, the band might like it. Or not.
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This reply was modified 2 years ago by
FlimFlamMan.
in reply to: Kepler Engelbrecht – Dead to the World mix #4735Thank you! I love that snare and how it seems to keep the entire rhythm section together.
Thanks man :)
No gate on the snare, not even a loose one. Ironically though, I did gate the triggered kik, but that was to shape the attack of the kikdrum with the gate attack time. I have a compressor on the snare but I think it has maybe 2dB or so of gain reduction. More to keep it under control volume-wise than to mess around with the attack.
I find it strange to have found some entrants complain about the tom sound. I like those toms, they’re well-tuned and well-recorded. They didn’t even really need to be compressed. I just kept the bleed, and boosted around 800Hz since that seemed to be where the tonic of the toms lived. I automated them in one or two places to have the fill be more audible, but that’s it.
As for the vocals, I’m happy with their space in the mix. Perhaps they could be brought up a dB or so, but I feel that the vocals are closer to another rhythmic element in this type of mix, and less a melodic instrument that should be placed front and center.
Thank you for listening, both of you!
in reply to: Stefan Verster – Dead To The World – mix contest #4731“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 :)
in reply to: Alex Obregon – Dead to the World mix #4717Hi Alex,
I can hear you went to some trouble to make the mids sit right. I like that aspect of the mix. The bass and guitar sounds complement each other well and I like that you didn’t indiscriminately scoop the guitar mids. Also lots of ear candy throughout the mix that I rather enjoyed.
I can, however, hear some problems with the top-end of the kik drum. With the amount of midrange rolled out it’s basically a high-sub/bottom-of-the-bass sine wave with a 7-8k click stuck on top. While that might be exactly what you like in a kikdrum, it creates problems with the blast beats feeling oddly lopsided.
Also some issue with the transients on the toms. Apart from being too low in the mix they sound (to my ears; i might be wrong) like they were compressed really hard with too fast an attack time.
But again, nicely done on the bass + guitar sound.
in reply to: Stefan Verster – Dead To The World – mix contest #4403Hi Stefan,
I feel that the most notable aspect of your mix is the drums – by the sound of it you lost a lot of character during the sample replacement process. Consider the snare drum: if you solo the raw snare from the multi-tracks you’ll hear some very dynamic playing with hard rim shots, some center hits with the blast beats and the 1-2-3-4 stick clicks. All of those have been replaced in favour of a snare sound that is almost binary in nature (it’s either OFF and you don’t hear the snare, or it’s ON and you hear it clanging away.) The 1-2-3-4 sticks are completely missing and the decay on the snare reverb sounds a little unnatural, almost like it was gated, instead of augmenting the natural room sound from the room microphones.
The toms, in turn, sound very isolated in the stereo spectrum. What I mean by that is that yes, your ear can determine directionality in terms of left/right, but the hits themselves feel like they have too little context for your brain to determine their depth in the stereo spectrum. If you listen to your triggered tom close mic tracks (if you did indeed trigger them and not just aggressively gate the provided close mics) and compare them to the provided raw files you’ll notice that the main difference isn’t so much the tone as the fact that the close mics have loads of bleed. You have three toms, and each of these bleed into the other toms close mics (as they do into the snare close mic and the overheads), helping your ear to determine position. The flip side is, of course, that you can’t compress a close mic’d source very hard if there’s a lot of bleed on the track. (But then again, it’s not necessary to compress a well-recorded, well-tuned tom very hard.)
The kik sounds ballpark, maybe a little scooped but it’s fine for the material.
Given the issues on the snare and toms I’d guess that you didn’t really use the provided ambient microphones (either that or they’re really low in the mix). Especially the room microphones are incredibly important in any drum mix. For all practice and intent they’re the basic “image” of your drums – what they really sound like and how they’re played. So start with a room sound (doesn’t matter whether it’s stereo or the stereo pair collapsed to mono.) From there on we can start adding overheads and close mics, and make changes to additional close mic sources by hearing them in the context of the rest of the kit.
Here’s something to try: kill the reverb on the snare, and see what happens with the overall ambience of your kit (along with the tom close mic isolation) if you compress the room mics hard enough for the ambience of the room to be audible in the mix.
Hope you find something useful in here! Mixing a drumkit with all the different sources tend to be a challenging task.
in reply to: Aurelien Sureau – Dead To The World” Mix #3804Hey 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!
in reply to: Krzysztof Skrzypkowski – Dead To The World Mix #3803Hey Krzysztof,
I suspect you might be compressing your kik too hard. The transient material is extremely prevalent, in addition to the kik being too active around the 1.5K range. (Compressors knock the loud parts down a few pegs, so the quieter parts – in the case of drums parts with more midrange – become more prevalent.)
What I’ve found to be extremely useful to get kikdrums to “pop” in the mix is to either shape the transient of the drum with a gate (with extremely fast attack and release times to induce a kind of pleasant-sounding pop in the transient) and/or compress them with slow attack times. By slow, I mean ~70ms. If you can get it right you’d be surprised to learn how little compression you really need on a drum, kikdrum or otherwise.
With regards to the rest of the mix, the bass guitar also comes to mind. I’d spend some time tweaking the 500-1K range to get it to play ball with the guitar sound.
Snare sounds spot on though – good work there.
Good luck, and take care!
in reply to: Roberto Oppenheimer Dead to the world mix 2022 #3801Hey Roberto :)
You’ll find that, especially with this kind of music, there’s a lot of instruments battling it out for a small patch of sonic real-estate. The kikdrum, the bass and the low-end cabinet movement of the rhythm guitars all compete around filling up the 80-250Hz range.
Regarding these SPECIFIC multitracks (it differs from project to project) you’ll find that the bass guitar and kikdrum trigger are already nicely under control, and that the mud comes from the 150-200Hz region on the guitars. I left the low-end on the bass and kik low-end mostly as-is since they didn’t conflict in the mix.
So…without doing anything to the low-end of your kik and bass, roll off some 200Hz on the guitars; you’ll immediately hear the guitar tone sounding less boomy. (In the case of your mix the guitar tone builds up along with a low-end boost on the kikdrum). Anyway, nothing drastic. Just a little dip. Don’t go too far with that though, since the speaker cabinet movement (the low-end of our chuggah chuggah sound) lives in the 120-200Hz range, and you definitely still want some of that.
To generalise this to all mixes and not just this one: low frequencies really tend to build up, and it’s not a bad idea to decide which instrument gets to live in which part of the low-end, ESPECIALLY with dense mixes. There’ll always be some overlap (things would sound really weird with absolutely no overlap) you’ll immediately notice things sounding clearer and less boomy. The best approach here is just to evaluate every mix on its own, and decide where you’re going to carve out space for the individual instruments.
Hope this helps!
in reply to: Oleksandr Alieksieiev – Dead To The World Mix #3620Hmmmm… am I alone in hearing glitches in the first few seconds?
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