How to get fuller sound in metal mix

stealmyriff

New Metal Member
Sep 27, 2015
2
0
1
Hi Peeps,

I was wondering if I could get some tips/advice on how to get a fuller sounding metal mix. That's always been my greatest difficulty as my mixes always end up sounding pretty flat and mono-y.


Here is a short Amon Amarth-y type of riff I did using jamup pro for my guitars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ8M_Zal0U0

Thanks!
 
I'm not sure if the drumkit is mixed correctly or not, can you show us you superior drummer's mixer?

I would also group the guitars together and apply a high pass filter in the group to avoid phase shifting.

The multi outputs of superior drummer is a cool thing to have, for example having sidechain compression on the bass triggered by the kick drum, so the low frequencies of kick and the bass don't fight each other in the mix.

With your DAW's eq it should normaly be easier to do surgical precision EQing so I would remove every hiss of each track (except the ones that can be grouped, like kick left and right, snares, toms etc...) and I will do parallel compression with those new tracks (Kick, Snare, Toms) AND also mix the drum master bus (usualy console sim, tape distortion, parametric (analog sim) EQ, multiband compressor, graphic EQ (high pass, removing hiss, in metal I also lower the kick and snare from the sides), Limiter)

I also had lifeless mixes before because I didn't know how to mix the room and overhead mic's properly, you can watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDtOy-L5aNQ and learn a few stuff (he explain what he is doing on the screen so you don't have to guess what does what), it should be a good start.

There is also high chances the final mix will come to life during the mastering process, or it can be worse if you forgot to remove the hiss from certains tracks, because you will clearly hear them after this.