First Mix looking for advice

[cwelter916]

Hello Everyone,

Kind of new to ultimatemetal been a member for awhile but mainly just been reading posts instead of posting stuff. I'm working on a project right now for a friends band and would like some valuable pointers to make this mix sound better.

Set Up:
Computer(enough processing power no need for specifics) BUT USING PC WINDOWS 7
Sonar X1
Superior Drummer Metal Foundary most current version
Various vst and plugins

Tascam US122 audio input(not the greatest i know but using whats available)
Drums were recorded from a Yamaha dtxplorer electric kit for midi notes.

Guitars were DI into tascam us122 then re amp with amp vsts and impulses cabinets.

If any more set up details is needed let me know.

I have heard some very good mixes from people on here so i'm hoping to get some advice on making this mix better. This is my very first approach to a mix so bare with me lol

Don't worry about ending going to be faded well before the drum solo my friend was messing around.

http://soundcloud.com/cwelter916/test-track

 

[iceman666]

kick has to be tuned up! and the snare is showing more signal from the bottom mic. and you want the top mic to come out more. And most important your guitars are really messed up.. Can you tell me what you using for the guitars? And it'd be awesome if you put up DI tracks for the song. I can show you what you can do with it.

 

[Chainsaw Calligraphy]

The overheads need to come down a bit. Sounds like you have a pad or something in there thats making it difficult to hear the guitars clearly. A bit of EQ sculpting should make them both sound clearer.

 

[AceFireForce117]

hearing too much of the cymbals and not enough drums, start by that first then we'll see what to do with the guitars.

 

[slaytah]

The first thing that struck me is the bass and guitars are pretty messy sounding, I'd suggest taking some low end off the guitars, and maybe a 30 Hz Highpass filter on the bass?

The snare and hi-hats are way too loud, and the kick's too quiet. Are your drums all within their own channel? That is, do you have a separate channel for kick, snare, hi-hats, overheads etc.?

Also, the lower vocal sounds like it could do with some low end taking off it.

Have you used reverb at all?

 

[cwelter916]

Hello,

Thank you all to posted on this I am grateful for your help and hope to hear from you more. Sorry I was out of town over the weekend so I havent been able to respond.

Ok so my drums were recorded off a Yamaha dtxplorer just to get the midi notes. I then run into superior drummer with metal foundry. I have nothing done in the actual mixer of superior drummer everything is routed out in multi out and plugins are used in daw to mix sound. My channels are like this:
kick drum
Snare top
Snare bottom
toms
hi hat
overheads
room mic

I figured I might as well start from the beginning and go over everything again so the drums is where I want to start at. I have the kick drum turned up as the loudest in the entire mix and still not getting the feel of it like I should so I imagine my eq is all messed up. Bare with me like I said this is my first ever mix. My faults are I used alot of different settings people had recommended and tried to eq them better and I guess my outcome wasn't that good lol. My kick drum all I had was just some eq and compression running on it. One thing I noticed too is when I listen to the song I made in my vehicle the double bass parts gets very overwhelming I do have subwoofers and such so I really get a large amount of bass alot more then I do in a pro production of death metal.

 

[cwelter916]

for anyone wanting a copy of D.I. what is the best way to put them on here for you guys to mess with?

 

[iceman666]

for anyone wanting a copy of D.I. what is the best way to put them on here for you guys to mess with?

Dropbox

 

[slaytah]

Hello,

Thank you all to posted on this I am grateful for your help and hope to hear from you more. Sorry I was out of town over the weekend so I havent been able to respond.

Ok so my drums were recorded off a Yamaha dtxplorer just to get the midi notes. I then run into superior drummer with metal foundry. I have nothing done in the actual mixer of superior drummer everything is routed out in multi out and plugins are used in daw to mix sound. My channels are like this:
kick drum
Snare top
Snare bottom
toms
hi hat
overheads
room mic

I figured I might as well start from the beginning and go over everything again so the drums is where I want to start at. I have the kick drum turned up as the loudest in the entire mix and still not getting the feel of it like I should so I imagine my eq is all messed up. Bare with me like I said this is my first ever mix. My faults are I used alot of different settings people had recommended and tried to eq them better and I guess my outcome wasn't that good lol. My kick drum all I had was just some eq and compression running on it. One thing I noticed too is when I listen to the song I made in my vehicle the double bass parts gets very overwhelming I do have subwoofers and such so I really get a large amount of bass alot more then I do in a pro production of death metal.

One thing you could try to get a good, natural sounding mix on your drums is to start with just the overheads and room mics, have both those channels on 0 Db.Then build it up from there, starting with the kick, then snare, then hi-hat, then toms.

It sounds like your kick is the lowest in the mix! So yeah, that could be from your eq/ compression. Bass guitar can mask the kick drum, so try this: Solo the Bass guitar and kick channels together, then put a bump on your Bass guitar channel eq around 100 hz (i.e. increase it, to about +6 or 7Db), on a medium q setting. Then sweep the bump up and down slowly across frequencies until you find the point where the bass covers the kick drum the most. Then take the bump down at that point, try to about -4 or 5 Db. Let me know if you need me to explain this any further.

Another thing worth doing is a Highpass filter on the snare, hi-hat and tom channels, as the low frequencies can make the drums sound muddy. Try around 100 Hz to start with, adjust to taste.

Also, do you route your drum channels to their own outout channel? And what Vsts are you using on the drums?

Here's one of my band's songs, I've done all the things I've mentioned above:

 

[cwelter916]

heres a question for everyone:

When using superior drummer and waves plugins to process in your daw do you use the mono or stereo version of the plugins?

 

[slaytah]

That depends on if your drum channels are mono or stereo.

I use BFD2, and I bounce all my drum tracks out into audio separately, Kit pieces through their direct mics (in mono), and Overheads, Room Mics and Ambient Mics (all in stereo). The only direct drum channels I use vsts on are the cymbals (crash 1+2, ride, and hi-hats. As they're in mono, I use the mono version. I started bouncing out to audio because BFD2 uses just under 1 gig of ram for the 10-piece kit! But it also gives you way more control over each part of the kit.

I route all the drum channels (mono and stereo) to their own stereo out bus, on the bus I put a multiband compressor, tape saturator, and an 1176 compressor vst.

 

[cwelter916]

Hello everyone,
Had to leave town again for work so I havent had alot of time to mess with the recordings yet but winter is my slow season so Ill have a lot of time soon. I started redoing my drum sound and am really starting to learn how to use superior drummer to my advantage. I do have a question though. In the band someone has access to a ART SGX2000 would this benefit the guitar recordings in anyway or should I just stick with plugging D.I.?

 

[cwelter916]

anyone?