New mix, but is it good? (low-tuned goodness inside)

M

MF_Kitten

Cat lover/Baritone fetish
Oct 10, 2009
35
0
6
http://soundclick.com/share?songid=8309269

what do you guys think of the mix here? i´m not realy decided on whether or not it´s up to "proper" standards... is there too much low end? do the guitars need to be brighter?

and also important to me: do the drums sound good? is there anything you would do differently?

thanks! :)
 
I think this sounds fucking gorgeous. I'd like a bit more air to the guitars though.
 
The mix is simply fine do not move the ratio between drums and guitars! just work a bit on the side guitars so it can get a bit more clarity by removing a bit of bass or low mid or as Gareth said, boosting the air around them. The drums, the bass and guitars could benefit from more clarity. not the overall drum, but the individual sounds could.
 
It sounds fuckin great. What was the guitar chain? POD? I'd like to add some air to the guitars, and a bit low cut. And the overal low end is not too much, just a bit muddy.
 
haha! you would´ve all probably loved the first version i had up of this. i had some "complaints" of it not having the typical low end balls i have in my mixes, and so i went in and moved the hi pass from the left-right guitars from 100 hz to 70 hz (so it still doesn´t touch the kick), and then i gave the mix a bit more balls in general.

i think the guitars need more air too, but it´s hard to do without bringing up the fizz (that i have dialed out with a pretty narrow eq band at the mo). i´ll give it a go.

right now i´m using fake bass (the first thing that sounds like a bass in the song is a guitar track), so clarity is hard to do. i´ll try a different approach to it, but until i get an actual bass, i won´t get the best results to be honest.

i have to give this mix a good tweaking with a headset too, just to make sure i´m going in the right direction... it´s easy to get caught up in a mix that sounds huge and ballsy, just blasting it out loud :P

anyways, it´s just a POD, indeed. fizzmachine, as i like to think of it. it´s capable of awesomeness if you tweak it carefully, but it´s easy to end up with poop.

i´ll keep you guys updated when i start tweaking this thing (i´m also going to finish the song, obviously). thanks for the help! :)
 
Don't tell them you're an SS.org member, they might hate you......................woops:p

Nah, seriously, for all the hate that site gets for the recording section, MF is definitely one of the more advanced when it comes to AE.
As already said, more air to the guitars.
Where are you low passing the guitars , MF?
 
i´m high passing at 70 hz, and low passing at around 8600 i think. i usually don´t low pass at all, but i noticed that there´s a sort of nasty powdery fizz waaaaay up in the very highest frequencies that can get disgusting after a while...

like, have you ever listened to Protest The Hero´s Fortress album? as much as i think that album is awesome, the guitar tones annoy me for that very reason. they sound okay, except for that powdery high end on top.

for the guitar tons, i got out a parametric EQ with an "analyzer" function, and pin-pointed the area in which the POD has it´s fizzyness, and dialed it out as precisely as i could. it´s somewhere around 4-5 khz, i don´t remember the exact frequency right now. it helped warm the guitars up a bunch. i guess i´ll pull down the boost in the low mids and try to brighten the tracks a little then. i have to get it into my head that things don´t need to sound great alone, as long as it sounds great in the bigger picture. i was surprised when i listened to the individual tracks from that LOG album with the poducer´s edition. everything sounds really cheesy, weak and overdone when soloed. the reverb on the drum tracks is disgusting, for example, but it sounds awesome as a whole.
 
MF kitten is the shit guys, i know him from the periphery forums.

and kitten high pass higher up and then use midi bass playing in the same register as the guitars and run it through ampeg svx. just use pretty much stock settings, maybe a bit more treble and a bit less bass cos i find it to be a tad rumbly stock.
export that, re-import and duplicate the track twice so you have 3 tracks.

Label the first track "subbass."
Label the second one "twang"
Label the third one "distortion" or something like that.
Then make a group track and label it "bass bus."

with the first track, low-pass it so it's literally just subs. then take your compressor of choice, something agressive and smash it beyond belief. make that thing a square wave. you want this to be more like the bass track would be in a techno track. total square wave, zero dynamics.

with the second track, use BTE tubescreamer secret and set the tone anywhere between 5-10 (listen for twangyness without harshness) and put the drive to a point where you get a nice clank but not really any palpable saturation. so probably anywhere from 2-5. high-pass around uh... 100hz? i dunno, just listen for where you start losing meat and getting pure twang. might want a cut around 1khz and a boost at 5khz for MOAR twang.
might wanna use some compression with something like 2:1 ratio, 2-10ms attack, 120ms release and a lot of gain reduction to smooth it out a bit too.

for the 3rd track you might wanna use the di rather than the ampeg svx track. put TSS in, drive 1, tone 5, level 5. put in an amp sim of choice (i like 7170 for bass). dial in some really heavy settings, use a cab sim after that in voxengo boogex or whatever your impulse loader of choice is and then high-pass it so there's very little meat, and then use a high shelf filter and cut like anywhere from 3db to 7db at whatever frequency. just smooth it out and make it less scratchy basically.

send all 3 tracks to your bass bus, compress to glue the 3 tracks together into one big grindy machine, and then you'll most likely want to cut some high end. the rest is just finding a good balance between the tracks.

then high-pass your guitars higher and watch in amazement as your mixes become 100x more clear.
 
that´s a pretty cool idea, though i have a sloution at hand to get a clearer "bass" sound. i have a pod tone that is basically the guitar rhythm tone with the lows sucked out, and then a dual tone with a bass amp model that has the highs sucked out. record the bass parts with the same guitar and all, and then fake bass it by transposing an octave down. the fact that the lows are all un-distorted and totally clean makes it alot tighter and clearer. i´ll use that next time around.

i think i´ll move the high pass up a bunch, and then i´ll use a headset to double check where the balance of everything is. i´ll try different things anyways, and i´ll have you lot check it out :)

thanks, btw! it´s great to have a forum where almost everyone is good at mixing stuff, and knows what they´re talking about. thanks, guys!
 
dude ive known very very few people that have managed to get pitch shifted guitarbass to sound anywhere near as good as real bass. midi bass comes pretty damn close if you process it right.

this is purely because a guitar's voicing is much much higher and much thinner than a bass. midi bass will be voiced more like an actual bass and you wont get all these weird flubby resonances n shit that you get with a pitch shifted guitar.

anyway. with 8 string stuff like this, if you have the bass playing an octave below the guitars, you'll barely even hear the notes, they're TOO low. have the bass playing in the same octave as the guitar and the voicing and sound of the bass will fill out the low end just fine. people always seem to assume that the bass parts need to be an octave below the guitars, it just isnt true. you'll get a far cleaner low end this way.

and yeah if you have a bunch of bass tracks all doing different things your mix will work far better. the dist and twang tracks will blend with your guitars nicely and the subbass track with meld with the kick and fill out the low end.
listen to converge - no heroes for a perfect example of this.
 
Definitely low passing too low . I used to do that (around 8500Hz) because I had this weird idea in my head it would tame the "POD Fizz" but the reality is if you get your tone right, the fizz isn't even a problem and you're just killing the air of the guitar which makes it sound a little bit less pro for most metal applications.
What you need is 10 000Hz preferably, but fuck around with anywhere between 9500Hz and 10500Hz I reckon, and see what you like. 11 000Hz is usually more than good enough for taming "Fizz" anyway.
High pass at 100Hz, your guitar doesn't need that 30Hz between 70 and 100Hz at all. You kicks and bass guitar are taking care of that, period.
Get into the habit of ALWAYS high passing, no matter what.
 
Yeah, the higher you high pass your guitars, the more room you give the kick and bass to dominate, well, the bass. The guitar isn't a bass instrument, not even when you're using an 8 string.
 
I really like the 'ugly' sound you've got going on with this. I'd like to hear a little more clarity and more kick drum too. Cool 'kin idea! BTW, this is a great thread! Thanks for the tips on bass guitar! I'm gonna try that tonight on a remix!
 
i think the octave below guitar being nearly inaudible/muddy/whatever is only true if you treat it as a normal bass guitar. i´ve tried both same-octave and sub-octave bass with F and E tunings, and i much prefer the octave below one. you just have to use the low mids of it instead of the sub-lows. the super-low frequencies will only give you a rumble that makes you sweat when you play it loud :P
 
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