http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13184331/TheAngelsAreAsMe_test2.mp3

This is a slab of industrialized rage courtesy of my friend Holly, who is transgendered and Very Classy , and has kindly provided screaming, yelling, and various instrumentation. I have provided other instrumentation and mixxxing.

Guitars are my Strat and her LTD Eclipse with passives- Duncans?- into a Pod XT on one of the Recto models. They have received loving from Soundtoys Decapitator, Waves API 550B and LA3A, and a Bricasti room impulse to make them sound not so Pod-y.

Synth bass is DSI Prophet 08. Softube TubeTech CL1B for compression. And the stock compressor in Logic sidechained to the kick. 550B for EQ here. No Decapitator though; I think we ran it into my ART and drove that on its way in.

Other synths are some nasty patch she found on the Kurzweil that sounds cool but needs lots of cleaning up because it's slathered in bad effects from 1992. And some random shit in Kontakt.

Drums are a combination of my samples and... Me actually playing real drums, cut up and looped. I stuck the Rode NTK somewhere between the hat, snare and tambourine and that's the bulk of the real drums with some 57 action for support and a snare sample which is probably unnecessary. Any acoustic kick drum in there has disappeared and probably for a good reason.

Vocals are that old ham radio mic I acquired a while back --> Fulltone OCD and Shure Beta 58. Handheld. Because someone likes to track with the monitors blasting and no headphones... Treated liberally with Soundtoys Echoboy and Filterfreak. The usual 550B --> 1176 suspects apply here, because I still haven't found anything better for aggressive musics. I tried demoing the Plugin Alliance version of the Maag EQ4, which is supposed to be hot shit on vocals (I have never seen nor knowingly heard the hardware version) but I found it too subtle where the API chainsaw does it's thing right away.

Waves MPX Master Tape and NLS (Non-Linear Summing) on every track and the 2-buss. I used the Neve model in NLS this time vs. the SSL one. I like this. Big and separated.

The arrangement isn't solid and there's a sketchy edit on the vocals at the end, but it's not a final mix/arrangement (especially as I am not the writer here)/etc., and at this hour I don't much care.

This is pretty fucking sweet. I love your friend's voice, and what comes across as: vaguely british accent(possibly merely an illusion due to Lydon-esque phrasing und timbre?).

Awesome mix. The guitars sound like KMFDM. She has a cool voice too. And the vocals kind of 'jump out', like the mix is in 3D! My only criticism is that there seems to be a lack of sibilance to the vocals.

Thanqs!

Re: the vocal timbre, I think it's more an Ogre/Rozz Williams thing (I could see the Lydon thing too, yeah), but the end result is the same. Weird goth people sing (or yell on this one) weird, but it works.

It's unusual to see someone say something about the lack of sibilance on a vocal, but I get what yer saying. Another KMFDM reference/comparison would be apt- those are some bright, bright vocals. The 550B is an assertive enough EQ it could probably get there, but neither of the vocal mics used have the same sort of top as an LDC.

And any sort of sense of spatial depth is one of my mixing holy grails, so if I'm getting it and other people are hearing it, I are pleaséd. I actually don't know how it turned out "for real" ''cause I finished it on headphones at some horrible hour and didn't listen back today. I suppose it came out alright though! (The Grados translate to the ADAMs pretty decently). And re: spatial depth, I've been really liking this NLS thing as of late. It adds... A little something.

Speaking of space and whatnot, she has one song I have a demo, or part of a demo of with traditional Armenian drumming- and she can actually play the damn things- so that'll be interesting. Especially with crunchy guitars.