I believe in telling like it is or just keeping my mouth shut completely if it's shit!
The way I see it, you can either do that or just say "yeah, man, it's cool" regardless of what you think of it because you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. I personally think that does more harm that good in the long run because you're not really finding out the truth until you're faced with someone like a label manager telling you the stuff that no one else would own up to!
What I DO hate, though is for people to say "dude, it sucks" without having any good reasons to back it up. That's just as bad as "dude, it rules!" I think!
But you guys got out of it lightly compared to my review of our mix of the Resurrection album... and also Tania's 'Can You Deal With It' (which I LOVE, by the way, but there's a lot of things I'd do different!)
Anyway, let's move on...
The sample sounds so much more in your face than the last mix! It's hard to tell what it really sounds like with the annoying MP3 compression artifacts but that's a necessary evil for the web unfortunately...
I'd probably personally go as far as ripping even more high-end off the guitars and pushing them back in the mix a little, giving everything a little more sonic space - however, with the drums and bass how they are, you wouldn't see much of the benefits of this because both of those things are taking up a little more room than they should too (which you can't do much about with the way they are).
Essentially what you should be trying to achieve is everything having it's own space in the mix, so no overlapping EQs unless the sounds are purposely designed to work that way.
For example, the kick and bass share ROUGHLY the same frequency range but sometimes you can loose your kick drum in the mix when the bass is on top of it. What you'd do is cut the bass at under 60hz (because you won't hear it), around 200hz (to give the kick's body more room) and maybe a tad over 3kHz (because you don't really notice it missing in the mix). Then with the kick, boost it's upper mids and highs to make it cut through (where the bass has been cut).
With stuff like guitars, you should EQ your rhythms to sound the same because they're designed to work together rather than fighting for the same EQ space.
These are only extremely rough guides but it's the principle of it. The biggest mistake you can make (and trust me, this is what we did on Rederrection) is to make each instrument sound fuckin' HUGE by itself and try and blend it together! Bad move - unless you're planning to listen to each bit separately (which you're not!), there's no point in doing that - the important thing is how they all sound together. You'll find that if you solo certain instruments in a well-crafted mix, they'll sound thin or dull or not very powerful... until you combine them with the rest of the song and suddenly they sound huge! That's because the other instruments are filling in the sound and you're hearing it as a certain instrument sounding massive when it's really a combination of sounds (EG: Thin, middy guitars + dull bass = crap solo'd but HUGE sounding guitars in a mix).
Have a look here for a lot of great tips:
http://www.studiocovers.com/articles.htm
Anyway, I won't go on! Drop me a line sometime and I'll tell you how to get some drum samples and amp simulation happening! And keep writing that stuff!!
