need help regarding mixing down...

[GodslasheR]

hi mr sneap, my band is going to mix down and master our songs next mth and i might need some advice from u... my bands plays death/thrash... personally, to me, our rough mix has already quite a good sound, but we need more alterations to make everything sound right. for drums, we only use trigger for the pedals, everything else is natural.. we are using alesis dm5 and i think the pedals sounds great, but do u make any alterations for the pedal sound when mixing down? the major problem for the drum section is the tom-toms... we can't really hear the tom-toms being played when the drummer is rolling fast... how do we tell the sound engineer bout this?? we are using shure sm57's for all tom-toms mike up.. i think for most of your recordings/mixing, u tend to put a bit of reverb for the overall drum sound... maybe u using reverb to smoothen up the drum sound? will the drum sound become 'smaller'? how do u usually mix down for guitar tracks?? i am using just a sansamp gt2 pedal, a marshall stack (slash model) with an ibanez RG... my setup is simple, but i am quite happy with my guitar tone. how do u eq the guitar sound? do u compress guitar sound? help me out here thanxs! sorry for the long thread!!

 

[Andy Sneap]

getting those toms out on fast rolls can be a real problem, especially if he's hitting alot softer. I'll mute the toms between hits, compress them a bit and also give them a boost around 4 to 6 K and a dip around 300 400hz., then you'll have to ride the hits to get them out, I'll sometimes trigger also and mix with natural sound, depends on the player really. Also I'll use a bit of room verb on there, maybe a short plate on the toms also. Gtrs I'll only compress if they are a little out of control with the low mids, I'll use a bandwidth compressor and compress around that 160/250hz problem area and leave the rest alone. Hope this helps and good luck.

 

[GodslasheR]

thanxs a lot andy for ur valuable advise.. you r the coolest guy in the world! you are also the 1st internationally renowned person to reply to my post!!! you are fucking great! it seems to me that getting the tom-toms out of the mix is quite a troublesome task.. especially if there is a need to mix trigger with natural sound.. i hope our sound engineer is patient enough to do it for us... could u help me out with another problem? the vocal tracks that we did, my vocalist did not use a vocal filter when he sings, he just sings through the mike... but i find the vocals a bit on the 'dark' side... meaning it has some harsh mid frequencies in it and it doesn't sound as polished.. when he sings high screeching vocals, the sound seems rather 'small' and when he sing deep low end growls, the sound seems 'huge'... how do we remedy this problem? could it be because he never use the vocal filter? i am sorry to take up so much of your time... thank you very much!!

 

[Andy Sneap]

filter???? do you mean pop shield? It's hard to give advice hsving not heard the vox in question

 

[GodslasheR]

yeah... a pop shield! i dunno the appropriate term for it... hahahaha.... or maybe i should ask in another way... how do u normally mix down vocal tracks? oh yeah, maybe i can tell u something about the vocal tracks... the vocals are somewhat far away from the mix and it sounds dull and uninteresting with a slight natural reverb in it... maybe this would help you understand my problem better? thank you very much!