Doom/death/gothic mix, seeking advice

[TheDarkProject]

Hey all, I've done a mix for my band Twilight's Embrace and would be interested to hear feedback.



We're going for a deliberately organic sound with this recording, especially with the drums, which I know some of you will cringe at because they're far from the hyper-processed and quantized sounds we normally enjoy here, but we're really trying to go for the 'real band' feel - no sample replacement or triggers. But I still don't think I've done the best job with them and would like to hear suggestions.

I'd also like to hear any ideas for improving any of the other elements of the mix, obviously.

Oh, and this includes a fairly simple and light mastering chain to get some extra loudness - soft clipper to tame some rare peaks, Thrillseeker LA giving about 1dB compression, then pushed into the Elephant limiter to produce up to a couple of dB gain reduction in places. I don't think it compromises the sound, but I thought I'd mention it.

 

[Alex_M]

Hi man! Really cool song and mixing, but yes, I think drums could be processed a bit more to give the song more punchy/snappy sound. Just listen a moment at 0:26, toms is not readable in the mix and it's sounds like if drummer played something wrong...

And of course you may blend your original kick & snare with samples a bit, in this way you keep the live sound and dynamics and make your sound bigger and more expensive.
Also overheads sounds a bit thinly for my taste.
P.S. May I ask you to upload the raw tracks for this song? It would be really good for mixing practice.

 

[TheDarkProject]

I don't really want to blend in samples; I think that will take away from the 'human' feel of the performance. I just want to find a way to process the drums in a way that makes them sound more like the samples would! The snare and toms ae already parallel compressed and have the highs boosted a bit, so what more can I try?

Overheads are high-passed at 500Hz with not much else done to them. Not sure what would be better? I must admit, I consider them the least of my problems in this mix!

(Can't share the raw tracks, sorry!)

 

[Alex_M]

In this case you could try to cut some muddy frequency from toms. Your chain for toms looks like: comp, eq on each channel, then it goes on toms group with overall eq and parallel comp and reverb sends?
Anyway be sure that your parallel comp channel has sounds hard enough, it should add extra punch and sustain, also try to send your kick on this channel.
Try to make kick sound more fundamental and add some click to cut through the mix.
Make quieter your snare bottom (for 3-5 db) and use transient designer for snare group to add more snappy and ringy sound.
Probably overheads shouldn't be high-passed so much in your case, try to hi-pass at 350 Hz, if you will be concerned about too big snare after that-use narrow eq to fix this.

Do you have a room track for your drums?

Here's a short drums example I'm working on now. Kick and snare were blended with samples but toms are 100% real. Sound is not finished yet.
https://soundcloud.com/alexander-merenkov-1/roughdrummix/s-p8CIb

Sorry for my crappy english.
Cheers man

 

[Terminus]

Good song. I can't even hear a kick drum when the heavy parts kick in. I think overall the drums need to come up in relation to everything else, you've got a very guitar-dominant mix here. I'd also work on the clean vocal processing a bit, maybe make the ambiance more like your heavy vocals in terms of reverb and delays. The guitars just dominate the whole thing and the drums and vocals sit too far back imo. The snare isn't as quiet as the other drums though.

 

[TheDarkProject]

Sorry for the slow reply; I've been away at Bloodstock Festival watching Slayer, Kataklysm, Belphegor, and, er, Avantasia...

Alex: the tom chain is a separate EQ on each tom (high pass and mid-cut varying slightly for each one, and a high end boost), then each one has 2 sends, one to the parallel comp bus, one to a reverb bus. I do have a tom bus, but that is after the sends, and has no effects or adjustments on it anyway. I'm not really sure how to improve them because they already sound fine when isolated. The drummer plays quite softly so it's never going to have as much top end as might be ideal.

The kick is tricky - I had a boost on the top end but it was coming through as too harsh when it was being hit hard. So I had to take that off. I can boost everything above 2Khz by 12dB and still there's not enough click some of the time - and in other parts of the song, even a 3dB boost is too much. No doubt this is why most people replace kicks!

Will try high passing overheads at 350 instead of 500 but the spectrum analyser shows virtually nothing below 500hz anyway. I think it's just the way the kit sounds.

I do have a room track for the drums but I didn't like it so there's a ValhallaRoom reverb on the whole kit instead.

Will try transient designer on the snare group although I don't really know what I'd be aiming for there. Maybe more sustain? There seems to be enough of the attack but not enough body to it.

Terminus: it is deliberately a guitar-heavy mix. I generally think most mixes are too loud on the drums. I may make these drums a bit louder, but not much, especially when I'm not doing sample replacement because it's hard to keep everything even.