Mixed this entirely on my HD280pros. Was aiming for huge, might be a bit too huge?


Guitars: JSX crunch channel unboosted for the rhythms and Peavey Valveking 112 unboosted for the lead/semi clean tones (the mids were in the right spot)

Drums were a bit more of me fucking around... I like them this time. Chain on the bus is SSL E-channel, Reacomp, and Izotope Trash.

Bass is one track compressed to fuck and back and another track high passed at 100hz ran through the low gain mode of X30 through a guitar impulse.


This is another Feared song... I love mixing his shit because it's damn good metal and he's a good tight player.


EDIT: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8290798/feared% ... 20edit.mp3

A link would rock.

Also, re: Izotope Trash- was this inspired by the drumcrunching in the Mortimer Chang thread?

Yes.

Even on my laptop that bass is manly. Really nice definition on it too. It's a bit too late to blast this through the real speaks but hearing what's going on here this is cool.

Re: crunchydrums- so far, I haven't met a rock or metal snare that turns up its nose at a little overdrive. Or a kick, for that matter. Really, it's the overheads where you can run into trouble. The room you can mutilate, but everyone knows that (hopefully) now. Reminds me of the talk we had re: the first Audioslave record and how dirty it is. Actually, I'd really like to know how to get that top end gloss with that much grit on everything!

Also, that bass is killer. I feel the need to mention it again. The lead kicked in. I like his tone and feel. Smoove. And picking, too. He sounds like a damn refined player. Points for the dirty semi-cleans. As a song, I like this.

Oooh, that effect at the very end was slick.

I'm really starting to think the best metal is done by people you never heard of anonymously on the intarwebs, more so than perhaps any other genre.

Thanks man.


Re: Audioslave, it's probably parallel crunched... Super sterile and polishy at one end, super destroyed at the other.


Re: The effect at the end: It's delay set to a different tempo than the song so it sounds like it glitched. From a DL4, to be precise. Took a few reamps to get that one right.


Re: Your last statement: You're absolutely right.

You may be right about that- for how distorted it is, it's really shiny sounding. I'd expect normally for something that gritty to be really midrangey.

Re: bass- I know metal has a long tradition of burying the bass guitar, but seriously, that big grinding violence beneath everything adds balls-and-a-half. And realistically, unless you're doing slowmetal, there isn't the space for the kick to hold down the bottom, and if you want any definition on the guitars (and don't want it to sound like AJFA, which I actually love the sound 'n' vibe of, but only on that record )... Most metal unless you're rocking the lo-fi thing needs Everything Larger Than Everything Else, so the bottom-end relationships are real critical. Those sounds are all gonna fight with each other, so carving out a separate space for the bass, the kick and the low end on big guitar chugs crucial. You know this, obviously, so I'm rambling to the peanut gallery here.

Re: the delay- one of the big reasons I want to have a console again (preferably one that isn't a late '90s Mackie?) is ease of inserting hardware. What model on the DL4 did you use?

Re: metal- there are known quantities we're pretty sure are going to keep being cool unless they do otherwise, but damn, chances are if I hear someone creative and different, they're a couple unsigned d00ds from Buttfuck The Middle Of Nowhere. I've had bandmates mention Tesseract and Periphery to me recently and I was like "they were no one from HCAF, just a couple kids from the forums" I can be reasonably assured something I hear off this forum is probably gonna hold up, and I'm not sure any of the currently extant metal acts forumites are involved in even gig. EDIT: The Hiryyu's band plaes shoes. I can't speak for the rest of us.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking too.



I mix around everything... meaning I don't set anything in stone until I'm done mixing. So finding space for everything (instead of forcing said space in) goes with the territory of my mixing style. If something's fighting something, I simply tweak until it's not fighting anymore. In my older mixes I had serious trouble getting guitar tones that had actual low end... then I discovered the method of boosting around 200hz in the BASS.

Echoplex. I'd like to have a console too, for that very reason... I'd like to have a nice SSL just like everyone else.
Just the Waves stuff gives me GAS for one, period. Just having it on the channel makes everything magically sound awesome... much less actually tweaking it.


You're exactly right on that point. It seems the best brutal dudes are always up on YouTube jamming in their bedroom or basement playing awesome shit.

Re: a nice SSL- The Threat Is Real. The thing became an iconic desk for mixing rawk for a reason. It can disappear or it can be obviously present and still kick ass. The EQ and dynamics section can do an awful lot and still be unobtrusive. I wish I knew more when I got to fool with Trident and Neve stuff so I could compare and contrast vs. the SSL, which... it rules. The one thing I will definitely miss about going OTB again is instant full recall, though!

Re: 200hz- the bass might be the only thing to boost that on, er... ever. Probably because that's where the action is going on down there, for once. Kick drum, okay, maybe depending on context, but honestly I've found myself dumping 200hz out of the kick to make room for the bass, or even down to 150hz. I want to say it was Terry Manning who commented on ProSoundWeb that mixing consoles should have a "-2db @ 200hz" button on every channel. This is funny because it's fucking true.

The EQ thing reminds me- are you familiar with Colin Richardson's metal guitar EQ scheme? It's kinda counter to the way most people would do it but it works. He posted it on Andy Sneap's forum a few years back:

I copy pasted that into a .txt file.

One thing most people don't seem to recognize... the guitar tones are only as good as the bass tone. In fact, the phrase "huge guitars" is counter-intuitive... to get huge guitars, you need huge bass. Huge guitar tones + wimpy bass = mud. Yeah, it sounds cool when you're chugging in your bedroom with the lows on 9, but it won't sound good when that tone goes somewhere other than your bedroom. It took yours truly quite some time to learn that...


That being said, I don't post-eq guitars much if at all... I tend to get them fitting in a fairly raw mix and mix around them... and if I have an issue with the tone later in the process, I just reamp. Even when recording my own guitars, I always reamp. It keeps me from having to retrack the whole damn thing because I had the mids on the amp too or what-have-you. I also use certain kinds of fizz to my advantage... if the frequency of the fizz is right, it makes the overheads sound better and fills in the gap between the guitars and the overheads. It solidifies the whole "wall of sound" thing.


Re: mud in the low end: I almost always sample replace the kick, so I can get away with pitch shifting the fucker so I don't have to sculpt it or the bass to make room. Usually the kick goes down a bit, because the realm of the bass guitar is slightly above the kick. Lowering the fundamental of the kick equals space for the bass.


"space for the bass" I should be a rapper.

Edit: Nevermind.

This sounds awesome. Great job.

I thank thee.

In case anyone's interested in hearing Jocke Skog's version of it.