Clearing up highs and mids

[nzedrecordings]

Hey dudes, I've been listening to these guys quite a bit recently

[youtube]watch?v=gJuWmAPnX5M[/youtube]

and I'm REALLY digging their production. They're self produced and their production sounds super professional. One of the things that stands out most is their clear high end. There's enough room for the cymbals, guitars, keys, kick click, snare snap, tom snap, electronic effects, etc. without them ever feeling like they're fighting in each other's frequency space. Everything sounds super wide too. Also, while there's a lot of high end stuff going on, the highs are never piercing or overbearing.

Any ideas on how to get something similar? I'm thinking heavy limiting/compression or a harmonic exciter. I notice their guitars are also scooped quite a bit

I've been experimenting with multiband compression on almost every element in my mix and i find it's helping a lot, especially to keep everything in it's spot in the mix and "pad" the high end so it's not overbearing but it seems really excessive. Obviously there are no guidelines to mixing besides make it sound good but I'm curious how heavily everyone here utilizes multiband compression.

Here's one of my mixes for comparison:

 

[Frost Mutant]

Yeah that does sound pretty cool! Those keyboards surprised me and I like that :}

If I compare your mix to that one, your bass is a lot louder in the mix. I think you have a nice balance between bass and drums and I think the bass is a bit weak in your reference track though,
so I might not touch those first.
Guitars are louder in the reference track, lifting them a bit might get you closer to that. Did you pan your guitars hard left and right? They sound to me like they were not so going for 100 both sides
would definitely make ´em wider and more like in the reference track.

at about 1:40 in your track begins this lead part that has a huge delay/verb that is masking the rest of the band a lot, maybe attenuate the lows of the reverb and delay? The lead is pushed back
too by the effects, but maybe that is what you want If you see treating those effects helps in that part, you might want to look into other parts of the song too.
I see you don´t have keyboards in your mix so the atmosphere can be hard/impossible to match without and maybe you wanted to help that difference with your "reverby" lead.

overall, I think the main thing that is making your reference track brighter than yours is the balance. If you took up the guitars it would be cool to take another listen! I´d say if you listen to both tracks at low volume and take the guitars up until your drums start to seem to be at the same balance as in the reference track, you might be closer. Your drums are way louder at this point and the way I hear it and I would "fix" that difference by lifting the guitars and not touch the drums. Just my thoughts You´re gonna get there, good luck!

 

[nzedrecordings]

Hey thanks dude, glad you dig it. I put that mix up since it was the most recent mix I've done in the genre, but yeah I completely agree with your points. I did a remix/remaster, referencing back and forth with a multiband compressor and I think I've got a better mix now. Also used this to reference:

[youtube]watch?v=ulbrKkUuxaA[/youtube]

I processed the cymbals quite a bit with a multiband/eq to get them more consistent and turned them up which I think helped level out the mix. I noticed my guitars weren't hard panned as well. I quad tracked the breakdown at the end and I changed the wrong pair of guitars to R/L 80. D'oh! Also had a ton of reverb on the leads as you mentioned, I swapped that out for a delay which helped clear things up as well as make them sound wider. Turned the bass down as well and I think it's sounding a bit better now. Thanks for the feedback!

 

[Frost Mutant]

Wow man! What an improvement! It really rocks now and I´d say you nailed all the changes you made :} Only thing I might try would be experimenting with some
ambient overall reverb for the drums. Cymbals could benefit of some sustain and blending and might not hurt the rest of the kit either if not mandatory. If you find nice settings
you might even wanna send the guitars in there just a tad! Of course that stuff might be wise to do after mixing main vocals, but if you´re not getting those for this project or
whatever then why not try that if you like The verb on the drums in the reference track is pretty insane I might not go that overboard, then again that´s partly of what makes
their sound interesting.. of course it´s also easy to ruin an entire mix with a bad choice of reverb, if any doubts the safest bet might be to just be easy on it and radically cut the lows..
But yeah really good job and it already sounds cool and many might disagree with this verb idea too :} \m/