I'm really flattered by all the positive feedback guys! Thank you. As you can imagine, it had been getting increasingly frustrating to sit on these recordings for so long—about 15 months since re-recording all the vocals with our current vocalist, but about 22 months since finishing it the first time with our original vocalist. It's about time that the world gets a chance to hear it! I even have at least a half hour of post-"Throes..." 7H7E material that I've written since, haha. Thankfully though, I still think "Throes..." is full of strong enough material that I haven't lost too much of my original excitement or artistic conviction about it.
Stoked.
Aaron- do you have any type of contact to do work for bands by any chance?
I do. My audio business website isn't quite finished yet, which will have a contact form that goes through to my e-mail, but the official e-mail address is already functional. I'd rather not post it publicly, just so I don't get spam bots picking up on it, but just send me a PM and I'll give it to you!
Definitely my type of music. I hope new jeff loomis has this vibe of production too. I wouldnt put reverb to the vocals but thats me. Can you give information of the snare?
Congratulations!!!
I'm actually even more excited and satisfied with the Loomis mixes to be honest, which probably has to do with the fact that I did these 7H7E mixes basically two years ago, so I've heard them a million times, and I've gotten even better with audio over that period, haha. The Loomis mixes definitely have my aesthetic on them (obviously), but the drums are simultaneously more punchy, roomy, and natural sounding to me than the 7H7E mixes. There's a good amount of cool MIDI instrumentation and/or ambiance throughout the whole record, so in that way, it's somewhat similar in vibe to the 7H7E stuff. Jeff's a huge fan of that kind of production value and had never really explored it with his own music to the extent that he wanted to up until now, and I think what we did adds a lot of depth and richness to all the material! It won't be much longer before you guys can finally hear a Loomis mix by the way...CM will be putting up a play-through that he and I filmed and edited recently for one of his new album tracks...no "live" audio on it, just different shots and angles synced up to pure album audio! Turned out sweet, you guys will dig for sure.
Interesting seeing how there are comments on both sides of the topic of JJ's verbed/delayed vocals. For some bands it doesn't make sense to add much general wetness to the vocals, but I thought with 7H7E it was pretty fitting and cool sounding. I don't think I've mixed in quite as much wetness on any metal vocalist I've worked with since then, though...
EDIT: Forgot about the 7H7E snare question... Basically it's just about 50% top snare and 50% sample. It might even be just one sample hit repeatedly, I can't remember off the top of my head. It's some sample that I made myself a while back and have kind of moved on from in the last two years, I honestly don't even remember where it came from or how I made it...it was probably a few different snares stacked though. A good tip is...I really like over-compressing snare sample tracks, so that they sound too smacky on their own (like, almost obnoxiously smacky and pretty fake sounding), but when it gets blended in properly with the natural track, they balance each other out nicely! That was the general approach here.