Female fronted melodic death metal (Includes RAW's for your mixing pleasure)

[MartijnPaauwe]

Some of you might read it, but my band Nephylim released it's EP last month.
This EP was produced, recorded, mixed & mastered by me.

Most of this knowledge I gained from this forum over the last couple of years, so now I give back to you.
All the raw files from one of our songs called 'The Fallen'

REFERENCE MIX:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/419882/06 The Fallen.mp3

All drums are real, tuned and played well (I hope )
Guitars and bass contain DI's as re-amped tracks

THE FILES!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0249y1wurnoigpu/Nephylim - The Fallen RAWS.zip?dl=0

NOTE:
If you intent to use files for say promotional material for your studio, always throw in a link to our website (www.nephylim.com) and credit me as producer and engineer.
Give credit where credit is due!

Hope you guys enjoy and happy mixing!

 

[MetalMiller]

thx for sharing! nice tune, reminds me of ArchEnemy meets more GrooveMetal. Nice!

 

[MartijnPaauwe]

Thanks Benny!

Yeah this is definitely one of our slower more AE influenced songs, the rest is quite a bit faster and more progressive.

Looking forward hearing your mixes!

 

[Another Guitar Dude]

Nice song and very nice mix Martijn. What guitar amps did you use in your mix?

 

[MartijnPaauwe]

Nice song and very nice mix Martijn. What guitar amps did you use in your mix?

Thanks!

I put it in the tracking notes as well, but the amps used were ENGL Blackmore and Jet City JCA50H, cab was a Mesa Boogie 2x12 V30

 

[MetalMiller]

My rough so far

 

[MetalMiller]

final

 

[Nikolas Quemtri]

Thanks for sharing!
Love the female-vocal'ed MDM.

 

[Another Guitar Dude]

Thanks!

I put it in the tracking notes as well, but the amps used were ENGL Blackmore and Jet City JCA50H, cab was a Mesa Boogie 2x12 V30

Thanks for the info Martijn. I hadn't heard about the Jet City before, sounds sweet in your mix.

 

[Heabow]

Great song and great mix! Thanks man for sharing the files.

 

[TRUIE]

Nice song ! Thanks for sharing
I downloaded the tracks, and might give it a go.

Just one question : I quickly checked the individual tracks, is it possible to have the raw tom tracks without strip silence ?
I thought you cut em a bit short (I like to split tom tracks in 2 : 1 high track cut short, and 1 low track cut longer, to preserve sustain)

EDIT : also, do you have some kind of guitar pro file of the song ?
I ask because I eventually want to try to replace the bass DI with midi bass.
It will save the hassle to do the conversion with Melodyne, check mistakes in pitch/timing...etc.

 

[MartijnPaauwe]

Thanks for all the nice words gents! Appreciate it

final

Mix sounds cool! Guitars only sound very harsh to my ears and there is something really whacky going on at 1:18 with the drums, definitely not how they should sound.

Nice song ! Thanks for sharing
I downloaded the tracks, and might give it a go.

Just one question : I quickly checked the individual tracks, is it possible to have the raw tom tracks without strip silence ?
I thought you cut em a bit short (I like to split tom tracks in 2 : 1 high track cut short, and 1 low track cut longer, to preserve sustain)

EDIT : also, do you have some kind of guitar pro file of the song ?
I ask because I eventually want to try to replace the bass DI with midi bass.
It will save the hassle to do the conversion with Melodyne, check mistakes in pitch/timing...etc.

You can find the unstripped toms here https://www.dropbox.com/s/m7dyrub98e3f4o6/TOMS.zip?dl=0
You mean one tom track stripped and processed and one unstripped processed with a HPF or something? Never heard of that one, could be interesting

Unfortunately no GP files, but I do think the bass is played well and we took a lot of time checking tunings

 

[TRUIE]

Amazing dude, thanks a lot !

Sorry about the bass, I wasn't saying it's played bad or anything like that.
It's more of a tone issue ; the lows are sounding pretty big, but to my ears it lacks something in the mids and highs/air region, sounds a bit muffled. EDIT : is that a P-Bass of some sort ?
It's just after a quick listen anyway, I'll check that more in depth when starting to reamp...etc (and that's why I like having bass MIDI too, to A/B with real DI while sending it to my reamp chain).

About the toms processing, I first heard of this in the Kurt Ballou creative live course.
For any tom track :
- duplicate it
- HPF one track version to taste (~600 Hz is a good starting point), to keep only the attack. Let's call this track TOM HI.
- LPF the other track to taste (around 2-300 Hz) to keep only the sustain in the lows. Let's call this track TOM LO.

Now, you can do your normal manual gating / strip silence and fades, based on these 2 tracks.
TOM HI track can be very short, especially at the end of a fill, because all you need on it is stick attack (a tom don't have a lot of sustain in the mids/highs anyway).
TOM LO track can sustain way longer, even after the end of a fill followed with a crash hit, avoiding any cymbal bleed because of the LPF.

That way, you can have tom tracks that sustain long enough without ugly cymbals bleed.

A simpler and quicker option to do this is to use multiband downward expansion on a single track (the "Nolly gating trick"), allowing the highs to pass through for a specific time, only when a tom hit occurs.
Very useful on snare tracks too.
But I don't know any other plugin than Fabfilter Pro-MB to do this and I don't have it...yet (if someone knows about a cheaper alternative?)

 

[Mago]

Fucking epic man, thanks for sharing the files! I rarely download files anymore here, glad there are still guys doing great work!

Sweet song, totally up my alley.

 

[MartijnPaauwe]

Thanks so much Mago! Definitely means a lot coming from you

Sounds like a really cool trick TRUIE! Will definitely try that out some day

 

[Lupus1984]

Here is my try. Fun Song to work with.

 

[georgyj]

My try.

 

[HollowmanPL]

Great song! Inflames/archenemy combination for me
I'll try it!

 

[TRUIE]

Here is my try : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6120012/Studio/Masters/NEPHYLIM/NEPHYLIM The Fallen 0127 Mix1 (MASTER).mp3
It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun to work on this !
The song is really well written, very catchy and efficient.

I will proudly use this to promote my studio, if you're OK with this Martijn (with all the crediting stuff, of course).
But first I would love to hear some feedback from you guys, and try to improve my mix as much as possible.

EDIT
Updated version : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u...PHYLIM The Fallen 0202 Mix1 Rev1 (MASTER).mp3

 

[mickrich]

Thanks for uploading.
Good song and well tracked.
Nothing beats real drums.