I pretty sure the engineer made a mess of this

I imagine this studio has no idea about recording metal. Here is what I see wrong with it.

1. Guitar - Sounds like he only used one guitar track and left it dead center. Metal guitars are typically double or quad tracked and paned hard left and right. It also needs to be brought way up in the mix.

2. Bass - Sounds just like a direct DI without any compression or amp of any kind.

3 Drums - It sounds like the snare is paned hard right. Drums should have overheads hard left and right, toms paned from right to left ,kick and snare should be in the middle. Compression on this again is a must.

4. Vocals- Compression, again is a must and needs to be brought up in the mix. An aggressive setting for this would be ideal like a 8:1 ratio. Maybe a distresser on his vox as well.

Its kinda hard to tell someone off when all of this is free though. The best thing you can do is tell him he has allot to learn about metal and give him this forums address and crush his ego.
Hope this helps out.
 
and some weird phasey stuff on the drums.

my guess is small untreated room and bad mic-setup.

seriously, I'm doing that myself (sponsoring bandcontests, not the bad micing ;)) right NOW I'm mixing 2 songs of the winner of the last battle over here.

you won that thing and the price it to get a proper recording "it's free" is not an excuse, cause basically it's not, you won something worth a certain amount (don't wanna say that this is worth the claimed 1.5 k though)!

sorry, but there's pretty much everything wrong about that recording (not only for metal, I'm sure other recordings won't sound decent as well).
I'd go to the ppl that organized the bands battle and talk to them, they should be informed about the real "value" of the first price and the sponsors they're working with.

so now more specific:

-drums are recorded badly, phase-shit on the overheads
kick and snare too quiet and miced incorrectly for that style (esp. the position of the kick-mic was definitely wrong for metal (as far as I can judje with that quiet kick).
Drums sound like not mixed at all, I could get a better drumsound with the overheads alone!
(listening to "dacadation-count in...is the hihat supposed to be right or left??)

-guitars: a joke, in metal guitars have to be at LEAST doubletracked (in 99% if you're not going for some kind of special effect) and panned widely.

-Bass: is there any processing at all on the bass?

the vox: that's actually the best, not really "modern" sounding, but you could get away with that sound if you're going for a rougher kind of thing like Celtic Frost or so.



I hate talking bad about other engineers, not a good thing and I try to avoid it...
but there are cases where I think shit like that harms the reputation of other (all) engineers as well.

my advice: demand to record another track of that guitar and get ALL the single files as wav or aif 24bit 44.1kHz.

load them up on the Forum's FTP and I'm sure there'll be a couple of forumates here that'll help you to get an acceptabe mix out of the song.

cheers

Lasse
 
that place makes me look like scott burns, andy, and colin richardson all rolled up into one. ouch.
 
Wow. Is there even a snare mic? The drums sound like they were recorded like the advice I used to get over at recording.org back before I found this forum: 3 mics. 2 overheads and a kick. Ick.

As Lasse said... talk to the contest organizers. And get those individual wav/aiff files. Yeesh. I was doing way better sounding stuff back in my beginning tascam 4 track cassette days!
 
Dude, that is bad. I'm nothing to write home about but that truly is bad. If I were you I would just walk away from tyhe whole thing. Seriously, if they sucked that bad to give that as a final product, do you really think the original, unedited tracks are going to be any good? Doubt it. Chalk it up as a loss and move on man. There are 100 guys on here that could rival that shit in their sleep.:rock:
 
who was the main BOTB sponsor? Radio Station?

take your complaint to them... if it was a local Radio Station, let them hear it and be mature about it and just express you're really dissatisfied with the quality and suggest they consider a different prize next time. also maybe express that this is really of no use to you and maybe the sponsor can pressure the Studio to give you the Stems and you can put them up here for a remix... :Smokin: then take that back the the Sponsor to show them how bad that Studio sucked.

but I feel you're gonna get no where, but you never know.

also consider contacting the other bands and let them know of the shit job that studio does.

remind the studio that this work is a reflection of their studio's quality. maybe an intern was the engineer/producer.
 
What did you expect for free? The guy probably put 30 min into it didnt master it and left it lying around for a couple of weeks to make it look like he busted bass on it. :lol: