First mix please listen and comment

[dfer]

Ok, this is just me messing about on guitar (im shit) and bass, i used some crappy drum kit on Xpand in PT8.

Mainly just done subtractive and additive EQ, no comp except for parallel bass compresson 1176 plug in.

All instruments have HPF at 45- 60 Hz, 18 db slope and LPF at 12 k 12 db slope. (Except for HPF on Cymbals on Drums.)

Added old skool trick of Triggered Kick feeding Sidechain Gate and a 60 Hz Sine wave for extra weight in bass kick (HPF at 55Hz, 18db slope)


Listing to it now, personally i think the GTRs aren't present/clear enough (mainly due to me just roughly putting 2 x sm57's on speakers i geuss)

So do you think that my mic'in let me down or what?


GTR's - ESP EC1000 (EMG 85 bridge/81 Neck) - Maxon OD808 - 5150 - Harley Benton 2 x 12 V30's - 2 x 57's

Bass - Di'd - Little Labs Red eye

Drums - Xpand


2 x 57's were (attempted) Friedman technique but split up the two mic tracks L + R. So a total of one Rhythm take track (2 mic'd tracks panned 100 L + R, and one lead take track 2 mic'd tracks panned 70 L + R) Is that Quad tracking..... i dunno?



http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4138013/Reamp Mix Test 1.aif



Any help/tips would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks

 

[colynomial]

Hey man, good work for your first try ever!

There's a lot of information all over the forum that you can spend some time sifting through to improve but here are a few quick basic points that might help:

First you can pan your guitar parts hard left and right. This will help to make your mix sound bigger and is pretty standard practice for metal.

Second, I would download Behindert's drum sample pack or some other free library to supplement your Xpand drums. You really don't need to go and buy a big expensive drum sample library like SSD or Superior to start. Even if you have to trigger one piece of the kit at a time you're probably better off using samples you know work than trying to milk a "metal" sound out of the Xpand stuff. If you have Digi's Structure Free version, I would use the cymbals and maybe toms from the "Studio Kit" and work with some more metal orinented kick and snare sounds.

Thirdly, you probably don't need the sidechain compression on the bass. For ease of processing, again using the sampled fingered bass from the Structure Free library will ensure that you're not fighting to make a poorly recorded crummy bass to work with a tight modern metal mix.

Last, don't be afraid to add EQ to brighten up your guitars, cymbals or whatever. I would recommend bringing up one of your favourite professionally produced mixes in your sessions and just seeing how your frequency balance stacks up against it at least until you really know what you're doing. There's nothing wrong with using other mixes to gauge where you should be heading with EQ on different instruments.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: Just realized I misread the part about the sidechaining- still probably not necessary if you have a good kick sample to start with.

And about the guitars- quad tracking is actually playing the same exact part 4 times over and panning 2 performances left and 2 right. With your arrangement I would still take the "chuggy" part and pan both of your mics left and then pan both of the leads right but for future reference if you want that typical balanced modern metal sound, usually you're track your rhythm parts twice (or 4 times), pan them hard left and stick your leads elsewhere, either up the middle or half panned or whatever. There are no hard fast rules of course but that's what's going to sound most "normal" to your ears.

 

[dfer]

Thanks colynomial, well this my first proper/seriously trying mix, instead of a half assed lazy job like i've been doing for the last year or two.


Yeah i'm gonna try a few samples off other members load them up on Battery 3. (Do you guys have any other preference on the best samplers?)


I just listened to the mix through a set of JBL's nearfields in collage and found that there's to much bass compared to my Alesis Mk2's, but personally i do find JBL more of a "live sound" kind of speaker that have a very harsh/fatiguing tone.


Anyone have any other opinions?