Paramore's sound - Sharing some ideas

[Jaroslav Lukac]

Hey guys, I have putted little copy mix of Paramore's Misery Bussiness. I know that I am probably 7 years late, but I wanted to share some ideas how I achieved it. Maybe it can help you, maybe not. See for yourself. Peace.



Drums:

For drums I have used Steven Slate Drums 4 loaded with Kick DW 24 HB layered with Kick 17, three different snares - Snare NnC Alloy 6
for more natural sound texture with ring, CLa Snare The Dong for attack and Snare 8 for fat sounding texture. For Toms I have used
Rack Tom 1 DW 10, Rack Tom 2 CLA DW 14, Floor Tom 1 DW 14 and Floor Tom 2 DW 16. For overheads Hi-hat ST Vintage, Crash ST Extreme 17,
Crash ST Extreme 18.

Guitars:

I recorded the guitars with my LTD Alexi 600 V loaded with Seymour Duncan SH-4 with Guitar rig 5. For left channel Lead 800 head matched
with Hot Plex cabinet with Skreamer in front. Right guitar was Lead 800 head matched with Cool Plex cabinet, also with Skreamer.
For lead I have used TSE X50 loaded with some stock cabinet, just to fit the whole mix.

Bass:

For bass I have used MIDI programmed stuff via Shreddage Bass Edition. Mixed into a group bus with parallel processing as mentioned many
times on the forum. On for the sub and low meat, second one the grit from a bass amplifier and the third for distortion. All processed
heavily on Group Bus.

In a mix I have used alot of console emulation with Nebula and Waves NLS to get a vibe. My mix is probably little bit fatter against
the original, I have no idea how exactly David Bendeth had his workflow on this and I assume, it was mixed completely OTB. I have tried
to catch the vibe, not to make 100% copy, which we all know, isn't even possible. I didn't had the same drum samples, same guitar, same hands of guitar player, same bass and same amplifiers.

Hope this could be inspiration for you and help to craft your own sound.

 

[rebelready]

That's a really great sounding mix! Did you even have to EQ or compress any of your instruments?
I'm always amazed on how lots of people seem to barely do anything and achieve punchy, pro-quality mixes.

 

[Jaroslav Lukac]

That's a really great sounding mix! Did you even have to EQ or compress any of your instruments?
I'm always amazed on how lots of people seem to barely do anything and achieve punchy, pro-quality mixes.

Thank you! Yes, I have used compression mainly. Especially on drums. All the snares I compressed differently so I could have that snap attack, but at the same time long tailed snare with a ring. Probably 60% of a drum sound comes from smashed room mics. If you choose the right "raw" tones at the beginning, you don´t really need to eq too much.

 

[arvoitus]

Great sounding mix! Personally i would do some more work on the vocals. They could be a bit more upfront with more eq/compression.

 

[Jaroslav Lukac]

Great sounding mix! Personally i would do some more work on the vocals. They could be a bit more upfront with more eq/compression.

Thanks! Although the version with vocals is the original track not mine. It´s comparison of my mix and original.

 

[otamatone]

Awesome job, really. It sounds very very close !

 

[xFkx]

The close mic sounds are very close and sound great, but there is a significant difference in the drum ambience, that makes the drums much more alive and "together" in the original mix

 

[Ataraxia2320]

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[frazzlepuff]

Very good job man. Tempted to get the CLA expansion for slate after hearing this. I've always found it tough to get MIDI cymbals sounding good. Smashing the rooms mics is a trick i've discovered lately too.

 

[Jaroslav Lukac]

The close mic sounds are very close and sound great, but there is a significant difference in the drum ambience, that makes the drums much more alive and "together" in the original mix

I totally agree with you. As you know, the room ambience from slate is different and I wasn´t able to re-create the original room the drums were recorded in. Maybe if I could clean more room mics with eq I could get more closer

 

[frazzlepuff]

I'd be interested to know what did you did with the room mics? Also, to make the cymbals and hats sound more realistic, what sort of velocities do you tend to go for? I've found with SSD everything tends to sound best nearer 127 but then you lose a bit of realism if everything is the same velocity. I'm very fastidious about trying to make cymbals sound real and smash well in the mix.

 

[Jaroslav Lukac]

I'd be interested to know what did you did with the room mics? Also, to make the cymbals and hats sound more realistic, what sort of velocities do you tend to go for? I've found with SSD everything tends to sound best nearer 127 but then you lose a bit of realism if everything is the same velocity. I'm very fastidious about trying to make cymbals sound real and smash well in the mix.

Here you can hear the unprocessed slate preset and processed drums.



For room mics, I just used some low-pass and hi-pass filter and CLA-76 blue one for compression. Gain reduction hitting something like -10 db. See the settings in the picture:

Here are the unprocessed room mics: https://db.tt/nwZQhidj
Processed ones: https://db.tt/acnamdLi

Here is the MIDI map exported from the project, so you can see the velocities: https://db.tt/sBi1fjXQ

Hope this helps!

 

[Rygar91]

Could you possible post your rhythm guitar settings? Been trying so hard to find a Guitar Rig tone that sits well in the mix and i think this one sits pretty nicely.

 

[Jaroslav Lukac]

Could you possible post your rhythm guitar settings? Been trying so hard to find a Guitar Rig tone that sits well in the mix and i think this one sits pretty nicely.

Here are the presets from Guitar Rig: https://db.tt/VInDFwZg.
One for left guitar and one for the right guitar. Hope it will help you. But keep in mind that I had to eq the guitars to sit in a mix and there was another processing on a master bus.

 

[frazzlepuff]

Thanks for sharing. Interesting you cut so much high end out of the room. I've been boosting the high end of my rooms lately.

 

[Jaroslav Lukac]

Thanks for sharing. Interesting you cut so much high end out of the room. I've been boosting the high end of my rooms lately.

Actually in this case yes. Snares from CLA pack has a lot of a high-end by itself, I found that pretty much annoying. I wanted to simulate room mics with Overheads within and if I would not low-pass I would be dealing with too much bleed from OHs in room mics. I wanted room mics to be mid-focused.

 

[drthod]

Hi! I love the Sound! Would it be too much to ask how you processed your kick and snare? Im asking this because im digging the changes from the unprocessed - into the processed alot, and i donw think that all of the beefiness comes from the overheads

 

[aeonix]

Hi! I love the Sound! Would it be too much to ask how you processed your kick and snare? Im asking this because im digging the changes from the unprocessed - into the processed alot, and i donw think that all of the beefiness comes from the overheads

I second this! The processed drums sounds awesome, especially the snare! Punchy and has a slight Bendeth feel to it too!

 

[frazzlepuff]

Actually in this case yes. Snares from CLA pack has a lot of a high-end by itself, I found that pretty much annoying. I wanted to simulate room mics with Overheads within and if I would not low-pass I would be dealing with too much bleed from OHs in room mics. I wanted room mics to be mid-focused.

Cool. What sort of volume do you have the room at in comparison to the Overheads? Are you doing much with the overheads?

I've been trying out this approach on some stuff, some really awesome ideas. I think the slate snares i've been blasting don't have enough high end, i always find myself adding. Especially tempted to blast the CLA pack now.

 

[Jaroslav Lukac]

Hi! I love the Sound! Would it be too much to ask how you processed your kick and snare? Im asking this because im digging the changes from the unprocessed - into the processed alot, and i donw think that all of the beefiness comes from the overheads

I can give you idea of my settings, but they probably will not work in your project, but I can tell you some things that I have used.

Kick is pretty much simple though, I loaded up SSL channel strip (in my case T-racks) and added at 50 Hz like 12 db and cutted at 200 Hz -9 db and boost at 2 kHz like 3 db or so. Compressed at slow attack and fast release at ratio 4:1. Idea was to boost lows and then compress them back. Just for the analog character. Then I have substracted some frequencies in the low mids and lows that had alot of bump so I could compress the kick without pumping effect. For this use your headphones (I´ve used earplugs). Then compressed once again with fast attack and release and I added special flavour NLS Emi emulation with drive knob all the way full. Be cautions and watch the gain staging. It can differ, because you have to watch the output signal that comes from Slate sampler. This kick was sended to Kick Parallel group with some heavy compression on it and Neve eq (Scheps 73 in my case).

About Snare, I had 3 snares loaded as mentioned earlier. I compressed every snare differently, CLA to get the smack and punch but no tail. The other ones for tail with sucked out transient. So combined it sounds punchy, but long tailed at the same time. Again sended to parallel compression. SSL on a drums bus for punchier sound (don´t worry to go crazy until you hear it´s not messing with OH´s too much) and some Nebula emulations. And that´s pretty much it.

OH´s are quite simple, I have used some eq to make them cleaner with some light compression.