Death'n'Roll/D-beat/HM-2 - need fresh ears!

Shturmovik

Shturmovik

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Apr 23, 2009
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Currently working on some demo tracks for my band, and have a deadline in eight days, and am really beginning to grow deaf, so if anyone would take a quick listen to this basic mix and point out any obvious problems, I'll buy you a drink or two the next time you're in Copenhagen!

This is an attempt at the basic sound with drums, bass and rhythm guitars - vocals and guitar leads will be recorded during the coming weekend, so I would really like to have the basics down before then. I'll have very little time to get the complete mix done after that (these are just random guitar takes, not necessarily the tightest or anything) and I have about five hours of guitar takes to go through to get the best bits before then, so I thought I'd focus on getting a reasonable starting point before I wear my ears completely out.

Anyway, any pointers about what works and what doesn't???

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6457013/Bastard%20Convoy%20-%20Slept%20With%20My%20Boots%20On%20test%20mix%20060212.mp3

And may I add: that HM-2 guitar sound is a complete bitch to work with!!!
 
Great song! I love the drums, but they're slightly too loud. Also it seems like the guitars and the snare is fighting in the master bus in a kind of annoying way. I'd want the guitars to be more upfront!

And once again, great song!
 
As a starting point I would bring the snare and overheads down.

Pretty cool overall. Maybe get a little more of that Sunlight Studios signature sound on the guitars. Killer work so far to my ears.
 
Thanks - this gives me something to work with! :)

I hear what you mean with the snare vs. guitar thing - unfortunately I won't have time to fiddle more with it until tomorrow, but probably not a bad thing to take a break from it now anyway.

Completely nailing the sunlight guitar sound is proving quite elusive. I'm stuck now with the raw tracks, which I'm not completely happy with in terms of mic placement, but I won't realistically have the time to go back and re-amp this before the deadline, so I decided to try and get a sound out of it that works for the songs and is possible with the recorded guitar tracks - which I'm beginning to think sound like a combination of a chainsaw and a prolonged fart.
 
Maybe you can try adding a little saturation or distortion pedal effect after the fact and mess around with eq and compression to get it closer to what you are after. I would imagine trying to get it perfect would be a maddening experience.

Good luck with it. And yes, I would agree that you need to give your ears a chance to rest regularly. I have done some truly terrible things when spending 12 hour days (or more) trying to make my music sound passable.
 
You're right - I had the chance to spend five minutes doing a quick test with some compression + saturation (quite a lot in fact) + eq on the guitar bus, and it's definitely a step in the right direction.

Now getting a bit annoyed with some aspects of the bass sound, but I think I know how to approach THAT particular can of worms... :)
 
it's not so easy working with the hm-2 ;)
Very good work, maybe you can make the sound "rotting" a bit more, usually for the entombed sound you neeed all the controls on the hm-2 maxed (on mine that's how it works)
but I read you can't reamp :( No problem dude anyway, you have already a very good sound here!
anyway what amp did you use to get this sound?
 
Guitar is ESP Eclipse II bridge pu (emg81) -> HM-2 with everything max'ed -> 1992 Laney AOR Pro Tube 100 - oh, and a Boss noise gate in the loop as well. Again, I think I should have spent more time getting the mic placement exactly right, but at least I know there's potential with this setup.

Can't wait to get back to tweaking this mix tomorrow after work! :)
 
So, what is in your bag of tricks for working on bass tracks? Doing some pre-production tone and mix tests for an ep and am kind of struggling to get the bass just right.

Have been trying out the TSE B.O.D. on one of the two tones that I am blending together and using some saturation and compression to get the two bass tones to stick together then running that bus with the rhythm guitar tracks to another bus that has a little more compression to blend all of the guitars and bass together.

Anyway, not trying to hijack, looking forward to hearing your final results because I am old and like early Swedish death metal and that Death n'Roll sound that you are going for is one of my favorites. Is your vocalist good?
 
Sounds like you're using about the same bag of tricks as me on the bass - I'm blending a clean DI track and a track running through ReValver to get some midrange and distortion, then adding saturation and compression to get the two to work together - plus some pretty agressive lowpass eq that I'm still working on.

Drums are about 50% sample replaced with I think 6 or 7 tracks (including the original acoustic sounds) mixed together for the snare alone - which gives me perhaps too much choice at this stage!

Our vocalist is quite good I think, nice mix of oldschool growls and more modern screaming - and a complete pain to work with! He's probably gonna show up drunk and/or stoned for the vocal tracking on Saturday, but as he says himself: if you want a dynamic, crazy frontman for this type of band, you can't also expect to get someone who's quite normal in the head or an easy personality... :-D
 
OK, finally had the chance to sit down and tweak this again. Brought the snare and overheads down, added compression and saturation on the guitars, got rid of some annoying tone issues on the bass, carved out some eq in general in preparation for the vocals - and added some sidechain compression from the snare going into the overheads. Probably still need to automate volume on overheads - our drummer just insists on hitting that hihat like it's his worst enemy!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6457013/Bastard%20Convoy%20-%20Slept%20With%20My%20Boots%20On%20test%20mix%20080212.mp3

Now going through about a billion guitar takes to find the ones to use - and expecting everything to fall apart when I add vocals a couple of days before the deadline! :)
 
Hmmm... thinking about adding just the tiniest amount of reverb on the guitars for that oldschool sound...
 
Sounding really good now. I agree about automating the overheads. Better to wait until the end for that, I would think.

Good luck on finishing up the recording and getting everything done mixing wise.

Definitely will want to check out the finished release.
 
More low end from the bass. More low end from the guitars. Less low end from the snare. Cut a little 2-4k (not the whole range, but somewhere in there) in the guitars.


With these, you should nail the Entombed sound... you're already 3/4 of the way there, might as well go all out.
 
So... back from the dead, almost literally! Came down with a nasty cold that's really been affecting my hearing, and vocal tracking proved to be as much of a pain as I expected - but got a few extra days to work on this because our clown of a singer managed to lose us a potential gig because he couldn't be bothered to communicate with the venue... :-/

..and I'm mixing today on a massive hangover - not recommended!

Anyway - here's what it sounds like now:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6457013/Bastard%20Convoy%20-%20Slept%20With%20My%20Boots%20On%20test%20mix%20170212.mp3

Not the final vocal takes, I've been focusing more on getting the sound I wanted, so will go through the complete chaos that is the vocal tracks tomorrow, and then be done with this.

If anyone has any comments or advice to share before then, it would be heartily appreciated!
 
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