Obligatory "Check out my Mix" thread

[Kazrog]

Everyone else is doing it... here goes...

My band BACKMASK put out a promo disc in October. The songs are streaming on our website at http://www.backmask.com

I'd love everyone's thoughts on the mixes. These were recorded and mixed by Kurt Howell (our producer) and myself, and mastered by Bill Dooley at Paramount Studios.

Your thoughts will be very useful to us... We're actually in the process of retracking the guitars (which are all Ibanez RG with stock passive pickups through Pod 2.0, soon to be ESP with EMG-81s through a Pod XT and TS9) and getting ready for a remix, as we feel the overall vibe is a bit to compressed/limited and there's some EQ strangeness going on with drums and bass, and the guitars are too brittle and distorted.

 

[Kazrog]

PS - we slammed the fuck out of these tracks, two Waves L2's plus a Manley Massive Passive and a bunch of other hardware and software mastering goodies I'm not too familiar with. There will be less slammage going on next time... drop it like it's hot!

 

[Nitronium Blood]

PS - we slammed the fuck out of these tracks, two Waves L2's plus a Manley Massive Passive and a bunch of other hardware and software mastering goodies I'm not too familiar with. There will be less slammage going on next time... drop it like it's hot!

Do go on.

 

[LynchpiN]

Presuming that the sound is not in its best quality, I can say that I like this mix a lot.
The guitar tone suits the music in my opinion. The backing vocals sound smooth, just the way I like it. The keyboards and bass are nice as well. I agree it's a bit overcompressed, but not a big deal. If I could change anything in it I would take away some of the kick drum clicky sound and maybe lower the vox a tiny tiny bit. But it's streaming and I'm listening to it in a low volume, so I'm probably mistaken.
Good job, I love this kind of stuff.
Please provide us some information on the bass and keys sound.
C ya

 

[Kazrog]

Hey Lynchpin, thanks for the feedback!

The bass is a Spector bass (not sure what model, it's a see thru dark blue finish, amazing sounding bass) through an Ashdown head into a David Eden 4x10 cab. The mic was an SM57 (on-axis, about 3" from the speaker) and we also used the Ashdown head's (quite nice) direct signal. I'm about 75% happy with how the bass sounds... we have since parted ways with our bassist, and I will be replacing all the bass, possibly through one of those new Tech 21 amps (I'm going to test a few different rigs out.)

The keyboards are are combination of sounds from Reason, Kontakt, Absynth, and the new Korg Triton Extreme. The strings on "Feed The Enemy" are my favorite sound we used, those are from the Triton. They are intended to sound like Mellotron strings, slightly detuned due to degrading tape. Opeth used a similar sound on one of the songs on "Damnation" and it always makes me happy!

The streaming audio is actually very high quality on our site, and dial-up users (such as James Murphy) get fucked over by it... a lot of things will change on the site soon, but if you've got broadband and you have some nice reference monitors, the streaming audio should sound nearly identical to full-CD quality.

 

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

They are intended to sound like Mellotron strings, slightly detuned due to degrading tape. Opeth used a similar sound on one of the songs on "Damnation" and it always makes me happy!

Wow, you're probably the first guy I see to be happy when listening to Mellotron... This instrument is fantastic, but it's so damn sad and depressive... Always make me shed a tear

Brett

 

[Hopkins-WitchfinderGeneral]

http://www.tweakbench.com/instruments.php?id=6

Great VST mellotron for you all the use.

 

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

Cool VST, the demo is very nice. I've been using MellowSound before (http://batsound.users.btopenworld.com/) but next time I'll give Tapeworm a try.

 

[Hopkins-WitchfinderGeneral]

That one is good too, but i had tapeworm first so I kinda got to like it.

I use it quite a lot in my electronic stuff now.

 

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

Hahaha, Toad is great too on the same site !!! Gotta use this one !!!

 

[Hopkins-WitchfinderGeneral]

Tweakbench stuff is cool, I can't remember which but I think they did one for making Nintendo sounds or something haha

 

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

Yeah, that's Toad ! =)

 

[Hopkins-WitchfinderGeneral]

I dunno how practical it is but it sure is funny (and cool for nerds like me)

 

[Nitronium Blood]

Everyone else is doing it... here goes...

My band BACKMASK put out a promo disc in October. The songs are streaming on our website at http://www.backmask.com

I'd love everyone's thoughts on the mixes. These were recorded and mixed by Kurt Howell (our producer) and myself, and mastered by Bill Dooley at Paramount Studios.

Your thoughts will be very useful to us... We're actually in the process of retracking the guitars (which are all Ibanez RG with stock passive pickups through Pod 2.0, soon to be ESP with EMG-81s through a Pod XT and TS9) and getting ready for a remix, as we feel the overall vibe is a bit to compressed/limited and there's some EQ strangeness going on with drums and bass, and the guitars are too brittle and distorted.

Oh and it sucks.