http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8290798/feared% ... 0again.mp3

I've been working on this since about 7 or 8 this morning. I'd like to perfect it eventually.


This is the Feared song with the 5150III guitars. Lots of surgical EQ on the guitars (the most bands I've ever used in ReaEQ). Bit of Lexicon's modeled plate verb too as an experiment.

Drums are SD2.0 stock samples, multiouted, and EQ'ed/compressed/verbed to shit. EQ is ReaEQ, compression curteousy of Waves SSLcomp and SSL channel strip on the drum buss (slight EQ here, lots of compression).

Bass is slightly EQ'ed DI track. EQ is ReaEQ, compression curteousy of Waves SSLcomp and SSL channel strip on the drum buss (slight EQ here, lots of compression)

Cleans are reamped through my Twin and quite chorused.

Solos are currently unprocessed aside from a touch of EQ. Outro leads are processed to hell and back to blend in with the rhythm guitars so they don't stick out like a sore thumb.

Bump...

Sounds like a fair bit of reverb on the drums, for sure. It works better in the slow/lead part, IMO, than in the earlier parts. My own personal quirk with drum reverb, is that unless it is like pop or surf music, as soon as i can hear the reverb coming across, i back it off. Unless the reverb is coming from a real live sweet space. Which is not likely to be the case with medium paced heavy music anyhow.

Guitars sound quite huge, but they also sound like you have been doing some top end softening to me. That may also be the reverb.

So yeah, overall, i like the mix(good drum levels/kick sound, very guitar-centric) but i think that those two elements are probably carrying slightly too much reverb. It is less obvious on the guitars. And i actually think it works fine on the drums even, once it gets to the slow part. But for the first half or so, i think you could back the verb off a lot, maybe automate it to ramp back up as the solo starts, to add that Epic Flair sort of vibe to it.

Definitely helpful critiques.


Drum verb is a bit experimental at this point... I've never used this particular SD2 snare before so I'm fucking around with it. I think I'd be better off with a bit of super hardcore parallel comp on it. I've also never used the deeper kick before. It's an improvement over the default I've been using... much easier to EQ and get to sit nicely, and considerably more punchy.

The verb on the guitars is there specifically to soften the high end. I wanted the overheads to cover that spectrum moreso than the guitars. There's a bit of softening via EQ as well (namely a 2.5db notch around 5.5k and a little bigger notch around 3.3k). The guitars themselves aren't all that huge... solo'ed, they're pretty much just filling out the 200-5k range and that's it, so they sound pretty thin. The bass is playing a huge role in the guitar tone here.


Re: suggestions, I'll certainly give that a try. I think automating the verb tail might be effective as well. It's a bit long for the speedier parts.

I feel like the bass needs to come up a tiny bit. But it does sound like fearedse's version.

I wasn't referencing his mix at all.


But the bass is the entire reason the guitars sound so huge... if I turn it up any more the whole mix will fall apart.

On first listen, I am really liking the reverb on the rhythm guitars. Having a sense of space on these things really adds something to the mix. Even if it's not a real acoustic space, still... There is a nice clarity and 3d sense to everything here, and I like that a lot. It's something that's lacking in modern metal.

The drums are all SD2 programming, no live playing?

I'd like to hear this with vocals.

Which SSL channel are you using? I've been using the G series simply as a reference to the real G-series I can occasionally access. IIRC a lot of the Sneap forum guys like the E-series strip better fer drums, but it's been too long for me to remember why.

That's what I thought too... I don't like modern metal productions so much these days, after listening to some of my favorite older records. I'm using the Lexicon PCM verbs on this.



Correct... Good or bad? There's lots of deep velocity editing on these... most of my time spent on this has been fucking with the velocities.


Me too... if Ola ever gets his vocalist on this, I'll bug him to death for the raw vocal tracks.



It's Waves. I don't know which series it's based on as it's not included in the name, and the damned GUI won't show up in Reaper for some reason, so I used it with Reaper's stock GUI setup. I know I was just using ReaComp or C1 on the drum bus prior, and the SSLChannel is about 200% better.

Now that I have started messing with my velocities, I totally concur with the time spent. It is so goddamn tedious but the results are well worth it.