Just to let you know, there was editing done to only 4 clips. I put the tracks on top of the original backing tracks and did the following:
- One was accidentally bounced as 44.1khz but really was 48khz so it was kinda sluggish, so I resampled it and it sounded normal.
- One was bounced too quiet overall, so I raised the guitars +6dB to match the average volume of the other tracks
- One participant was clearly illiterate and bounced his submission with some sort of master compression
The guitars were
-9dBRMS and peaks at -0.2 dBFS (the average was somewhere near -22dBRMS...), so you can guess what happened when you add the original backing tracks on top of the guitars. :Smug: I dropped the guitars so that it didn't clip anymore (which meant -5dB) instead of turning it down the 10dB to match other submissions, because the participant clearly wanted the guitars LOUD AS FUCK!
- One had some weird glitch sound at the beginning of the clip which I removed and put a small fade in there
There were also 18 tracks that was suspected to have some sort of processing on the backingtracks but I only processed 7 in the end, so the guitars were just bounced with the original backingtracks, no other processing done. I was right in atleast two of the cases as they thinned out quite a bit. You naughty boys for not reading the rules
And someone asked for feedback from all the tracks on the original thread (sorry, can't be bothered to read the original thread to see who it was, too many pages), but here are my general first opinion on all of the tracks:
In general there were clearly two point of views on the guitar tones. A) does this GUITARTONE sound good B) does this MIX sound good. If you ever watched the
Sound on Sound Andy Sneap extreme metal production masterclass videos, I think this clearly proves what he was talking about (see the part 3 from 2:15 forward)
Eventho the contest is clearly labeled "
Guitar Tone Competition 2", in my opinion too many people didn't see at the big picture when honing their tone. Even if your guitar tone is like the best tone in the world, but if you can't hear the drums or the bass, or in general anything else except the fokken guitars, does it really serve it's purpose?
There was about 10%
really pro sounding tones that I really liked, pretty much record-quality material that I would've gladly heard on any record. But when we reduce those that leaves us with 90% majority, right? That is a quite many people who were, how should I say it... Not quite there yet.
Most likely bad monitoring or lack of experience can be easily blamed on many of the cases. There was a lot of phasing, weird tone balances and other weird stuff going on, but especially the low end was really big challenge for many.
The thing with the backing tracks was that they were not bad. They were arranged by a very skilled composer and the bass was played by a pretty skilled bass player and the drums were programmed and then ran thru Steven Slate Drums, but the low end was just mixed a bit thin, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there. But in the end it's just another approach to mixing. If we would've also added the vocals, it would've given us yet another challenge, because you really can't just bury the vocals under the guitars.
I think because the backing tracks were not so low end heavy, many tried to compensate with the low end on the guitar. As some of you might know, the low end on guitars in general is really resonant and a bit on the "wild" side compared to a bass guitar so it needs a really lot of taming, so if you also make the mistake and distort it, it usually just turns in to a big pile of muddy crap that just masks everything in the low.
Just my .02€, hope it helped that special someone.
