New Metal Project, Free Wavs for Mix Practice

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joe_04_04

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Feb 24, 2011
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Hey guys, its been a LONG time since i posted on UM. I'm mostly on Gearslutz, with the same moniker.

Last time I posted on UM, I posted my mixes for a metal studio project I was a part of (Beyond the End). I posted up my stems for all the tracks so people could use them for mix practice.

http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/...tools-sessions-practicing-metal-mixing-2.html

Well I'm here again with a brand new project, which means, I'll have stems uploaded sometime soon. But I need to have at least a few people who want them so I know that wasting all the time exporting and zipping and uploading on this god-awful connection will be worth it.

The track is called Necromancer.. the project name: Oath to Anubis.

Here is my final mix:



As I did in the Beyond the End post, I'll state that I'm not putting these tracks up here for any free mixing. I'm a pretty poor mixer, but I stand next to my mixes. Meaning, after I mix it, thats it. I'm not posting these stems in hopes that some awesome talented mixer comes in and gives me a free copy... my version has already been posted to our official facebook page, my soundcloud, and our official youtube channel. Any mixes that you guys do will be for your own sole benefit. For mix practice.. and if you decide to post the results, that's your call. I won't ask to hear the tracks.. though its always fun when I hear someone else's take on my tracks.

If you guys would like to mix it, I'll try to have the stems up and ready to download in a few days max. I can't tell you off the top of my head the exact breakdown, because I didn't memorize numbers, but here's a rough estimate:

-The session uses superior drummer 2... so I have the midi for that. No real drums here so sorry to anyone who doesn't have SD2, but I guess I can render out each drum track too.
-8 DI guitar tracks. The whole session is mostly just 2 tracks left and right, but we have a few solo tracks, a few guitar sounds for effect, etc.
-1 DI bass track (which I duplicated for parallel processing, but I'll probably leave that out since its the same track)
-and a TON of vocal tracks. Probably 24 or so. 6 gang vocal tracks... 6 intro vocal tracks, and 12 or so for the main vocals (every vocal is doubled).

So its a little bit of a large session, but nothing crazy.

Anyway, let me know if you'd be interested in the free stems.

Lastly, if you could give me some mix critique, I'd really appreciate. I'm still a pretty poor mixer, but I hope to keep getting better. The only thing that's off-limits in the critiquing is the mix volume. I didn't master it to be super loud, because I wasn't happy with the lack of punch from the drums on a loud master, so its a fairly quiet track compared to commercial tracks.

Thanks guys.

Joseph

Edit: The stem download is here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5129928/Oath to Anubis/Oath to Anubis - Necromancer Stems.zip

NOTE!!! - further down in the thread, other members noticed the midi drums weren't lining up... and through a bunch of trial and error, I realized PT had screwed up the timing of the drums in some sections.

Download this second smaller package:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5129928/Oath to Anubis/Oath Additionals.zip

It includes the fixed midi drums and a click track. DONT USE THE DRUMS INCLUDED IN THE BIG DOWNLOAD. USE THESE DRUMS (Superior Drummer 2 Midi Fixed):)

I just dont have the best internet and haven't uploaded the entire fixed package again, so the downloads are sorta separated.
 
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I would love to have these tracks to give it a shot! Your mix is not bad, but guitars are way too scratchy IMO, specially in the intro when you can hear them by themselves. And the mix feels a bit hollow, like the vocals are sitting in a frequency range lower than it should. I think overall with better frequency and volume balance it could be much better. And of course there's that Superior Drummer sound, but there's only so much that can be done there.
 
DanLights said:
I would love to have these tracks to give it a shot! Your mix is not bad, but guitars are way too scratchy IMO, specially in the intro when you can hear them by themselves. And the mix feels a bit hollow, like the vocals are sitting in a frequency range lower than it should. I think overall with better frequency and volume balance it could be much better. And of course there's that Superior Drummer sound, but there's only so much that can be done there.
Click to expand...

Thanks a ton for the awesome feedback. I suck at guitars. Always have. Ironically enough, I actually play drums (even though they are programmed in this particular track), so I actually don't know anything about guitar tones or stacks or anything guitar-related. Which makes for a pretty poor engineer/mixing dude. I will have to say that the guitars sound much better than my Beyond the End guitars, but they have a LONG way to go. I'll probably never be able to track guitars through real cabs, so if anyone has any tips for DI guitars and ITB guitar processing for this kind of genre, I'd be extremely appreciated.

I will post the files up within a few days max. Once again, thanks for the critique.
 
joe_04_04 said:
Thanks a ton for the awesome feedback. I suck at guitars. Always have. Ironically enough, I actually play drums (even though they are programmed in this particular track), so I actually don't know anything about guitar tones or stacks or anything guitar-related. Which makes for a pretty poor engineer/mixing dude. I will have to say that the guitars sound much better than my Beyond the End guitars, but they have a LONG way to go. I'll probably never be able to track guitars through real cabs, so if anyone has any tips for DI guitars and ITB guitar processing for this kind of genre, I'd be extremely appreciated.

I will post the files up within a few days max. Once again, thanks for the critique.
Click to expand...

Not that it's very specific, but in my experience TSE X50 V2 is the best ampsim right now, just putting it on with everything on default makes it sound awesome, and with tweaking and selecting the right impulse for the job it can sound pretty damn crushing for a digital amp, to me it's the closest you can get to a real amp, although still not there of course.
 
DanLights said:
Not that it's very specific, but in my experience TSE X50 V2 is the best ampsim right now, just putting it on with everything on default makes it sound awesome, and with tweaking and selecting the right impulse for the job it can sound pretty damn crushing for a digital amp, to me it's the closest you can get to a real amp, although still not there of course.
Click to expand...

I've heard great things about that emulation, but unfortunately I run PT on a Mac, which isn't supported. I'd love to try it if I could.

Also, I'll have the tracks up by Tuesday latest, which is my one day off from work and probably my best bet for having enough time to do it.
 
I really really like the way you approach this man. You having already posted mixes of yourself so it's officially released is pretty cool.

I'd second Daniel, your mix isn't bad by any means. I actually quite like to vocal mix on this.
Guitars sound like the PT Sansamp sim to me, so there's only so much you'll get out of. Same for SD2 if you don't have any 3rd party samples.

Despite all this, I think the mix works pretty good.
That being said, it would be harder to butcher something like this, as the song is really really cool, the performances as well. Same goes for the recording itself it seems.

I'd love to get a stab at this as well!

Usually in my experience, it anyway isn't like you'd want to opt out for a free mix from those kind of practices, as they will sound as what they are, practice mixes. Sometimes there's a really nice mix in there, but most of the time you can't count on that you'll get something you could release out of it (imo).

RE: you can't track through a miced cab:
I'd guess reamping would be your friend in that case, if you can set up your rig somewhere where it can get noisy, and you have some kind of mobile recording equipment (laptop+interface)
 
The mix is not bad per se...
but it could be better.
As someone already said the guitar are kinds scratchy
The bass could be more distorted so it can be heard thru the guitars

I really liked the song but the first thing i thought was "This track really needs some keyboards"
 
Mago said:
I really really like the way you approach this man. You having already posted mixes of yourself so it's officially released is pretty cool.

I'd second Daniel, your mix isn't bad by any means. I actually quite like to vocal mix on this.
Guitars sound like the PT Sansamp sim to me, so there's only so much you'll get out of. Same for SD2 if you don't have any 3rd party samples.

Despite all this, I think the mix works pretty good.
That being said, it would be harder to butcher something like this, as the song is really really cool, the performances as well. Same goes for the recording itself it seems.

I'd love to get a stab at this as well!

Usually in my experience, it anyway isn't like you'd want to opt out for a free mix from those kind of practices, as they will sound as what they are, practice mixes. Sometimes there's a really nice mix in there, but most of the time you can't count on that you'll get something you could release out of it (imo).

RE: you can't track through a miced cab:
I'd guess reamping would be your friend in that case, if you can set up your rig somewhere where it can get noisy, and you have some kind of mobile recording equipment (laptop+interface)
Click to expand...

Appreciate the kind words man. And you hit the nail right on the head with the Sansamp thing, that's exactly what I'm using. Out the few choices I have (Including NI Guitar Rig), its the closest thing to the distortion I want, though its still not good.

I look into re-amping in the future. I always consider it.

Thanks a ton.

The-Zeronaut said:
The mix is not bad per se...
but it could be better.
As someone already said the guitar are kinds scratchy
The bass could be more distorted so it can be heard thru the guitars

I really liked the song but the first thing i thought was "This track really needs some keyboards"
Click to expand...

Thanks for the feedback. I'll try my best to work on guitar tones for our next Oath track. Seems to be the biggest complaint and I agree. Weird thing is, I added a ton of bass distortion. I processed it in parallel and crushed the hell out of it on the second track, then filtered out the lows and highs and mixed it in. Maybe I didn't bring the second track in far enough into the mix because I was worried the bass guitar distortion would further mask out the vocals.

As for the keys, when we started this project, I had actually programmed some keys, but ended up removing them later on. All throughout Beyond the End, it was part of our sound to have some epic orchestrations going on during the track at some point.. so that was the norm for BTE. I also did a ton of glitching in BTE, as it fit the concept of a futuristic apocalypse kind of thing... but I didn't use any keys or glitching on Oath. The further we got into guitar scratch tracking, the more I realized I kind of wanted a more old school, metal thing. Just straight up drums, bass, guitars, and vocals. A classic-styled metal track.

But I have no rules for this project, so our next song may have some keys! Who knows :)
 
Also, I have a few concerns for rendering the stems. Most of the track, I use effects creatively, but there's a few spots where I feel as if the effect is needed. For instance, the first part of the chorus, the guitars have a wah pedal on them.. the wah pedal plugin is placed after the amp sim. So I'm not sure how I could bounce out the guitars to be DI (sansamp bypassed), yet maintain the wah pedal. Rendering the guitar track with the wah pedal into the DI most likely won't produce the same result and may sound unpleasant after you process them.

There's also a filter gate on the 4th verse ("They're now inside you"). All it does is turn the track on and off very quickly - I think I set it to 8th notes or 16ths, can't recall from my head, then mixed in some dry signal so the filter wouldn't be turning it off and on entirely, just reducing the volume a bit. I'm also not sure how to preserve this effect for the stem rendering.

There's loads of effects and delay throws in this song, most of them are just creative that I could care less about, but those two sections almost seem required for the mix itself. As a musical element more than an effect... so any suggestions on how to render those out would be awesome. Should I just skip it and render them without it?
 
you could always just add a txt file and some screenshots to the zip to explain what you did.
I quite don't know why you added the wah after the amp, but I never tried that myself. But yeah, it would sound different with the wah on the DI.

So I'd say just document what you feel is a must, add some screens+explination along with a note on the time where it happens for your reference mix (include that one as well)
 
I agree with most of what has been said before. From a quick listen it the instrumental mix could use some help, but I really like the vocal production, whoever tracked them did an awesome job. I'd love to give the mix a shot :kickass:

PS Keyboards would be killer :lol:
 
Mago said:
you could always just add a txt file and some screenshots to the zip to explain what you did.
I quite don't know why you added the wah after the amp, but I never tried that myself. But yeah, it would sound different with the wah on the DI.

So I'd say just document what you feel is a must, add some screens+explination along with a note on the time where it happens for your reference mix (include that one as well)
Click to expand...

I guess I really didn't think about it too much. Wasn't thinking about it like an actual guitar pedal setup. I was thinking about it more as an EQ filter being placed after the amp sim for creative effect.

Vice//Versa said:
I agree with most of what has been said before. From a quick listen it the instrumental mix could use some help, but I really like the vocal production, whoever tracked them did an awesome job. I'd love to give the mix a shot :kickass:

PS Keyboards would be killer :lol:
Click to expand...

Thank you, I tracked the vocals with a couple of mics. First, the usual suspect, SM7B. That was the mic I used for the most of the track, but the intro vocal sample consists of 4 talking tracks and 2 growls. 2 talking tracks were pitch shifted and the other two were just blended in. Those tracks were recorded with a Kel Audio HM-7U, which is my favorite condenser (I don't have super expensive mice).

I've never double tracked an entire metal song before. I've always done dubs in certain places on all my tracks, but never dubbed the whole thing. It turned out better than I expected. And embarrassingly enough, the doubles really helped cover any flaws in the vocal tracks themselves. I also am an effect junkie, so there are normal delay and reverb sends all over the vocal tracks that are working the whole track along with dedicated delays that trigger only on certain words ("delay throws").
 
I'm sorry guys, maybe just subscribe to this thread so you can get a notification when I actually can get my ass around to uploading these stems.. had a variety of issues pop up with my car and with my pro tools rig that have completely kept me from even thinking about the stems I promised.. I will get them up. Bear with me here...
 
I have all the tracks consolidated and ready to go..

But I have a question or two before uploading.

1. Out of those wanting to remix, who all has or doesn't have Superior Drummer 2? I'm really wanting to keep the file size as small as possible and would love to just upload the midi file for superior drummer, but I will bounce out each drum to wav if necessary.

2. I have a bass drop file that was purchased.. the song has a few bass drops samples that I consolidated into single file. What is the legality of uploading that bass drop file as a consolidated region.. where people can freely chop it out and stick it in their sessions? I, of course, don't mind... but are their legal ramifications? If so, should I just have an audio file of say a blip that pops up where a bass drop should be... then people can insert their own drops? In the Beyond the End sessions I uploaded, I used a free bass drop, so I wasn't worried about uploading the consolidated region of bass drops.

Can me stating, "The bass drop file is ONLY included for mixing purposes of this session, not to be reused in another session," work? I know people will do what they want, but can stating that work?

Ready to upload, just need these answered.

Thanks.
 
I think uploading the midi is enough for drums, it doesn't take too long to assign mistriggered samples correctly.

As for wah, gate & s-drops, just leave them out, you don't want others to copy your mix,
just let people decide what they want to do with the files, even add synths or whatever, since they are remixes.

Cool song btw :headbang:
 
Tokyurot said:
I think uploading the midi is enough for drums, it doesn't take too long to assign mistriggered samples correctly.

As for wah, gate & s-drops, just leave them out, you don't want others to copy your mix,
just let people decide what they want to do with the files, even add synths or whatever, since they are remixes.

Cool song btw :headbang:
Click to expand...

Ok, thank you.

As for me, I have the entire thing bounced out.. which was the thing that I was dreading most.. so I'll upload it in the morning when no ones using the net... I should have it all up tomorrow (Sunday afternoon here in the USA).

36 mono, 44,100 sample, 24 bit files and a wav 2 track of my mix on the off-chance someone wanted it for reference.

It was 1 gig of audio, but after compression, only 240 megs or so.
 
Wow, I got home and noticed the upload had stopped :( My apologies.

Anyway, its not finished and can be downloaded here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5129928/Oath to Anubis/Oath to Anubis - Necromancer Stems.zip

I've also updated the first post with the download.

If you want to see what's all in the download BEFORE you download, check here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5129928/Oath to Anubis/Track Listing.png

Guitars are DI and the drums are the midi file that fed into Superior Drummer 2.
 
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