Those two albums are the reason why I love Colin Richardson. Like you musicwise and mixwise I prefer Shogun over In Waves. The guitars are overly powerful in the mids but somehow not honky and cloud up the mix, they are really soft and as a result the mix has no fatigue factor to it.
I heard somewhere that Colin used Slate Snare 22 (the original not 22a) blended with the original. I have found that mixing snare 22a and Green Snare, compress for less decay, small high shelf a dB or two at around 5KHz and a hall based reverb gets you pretty damn close to that snare sound. I noticed a huge part of the glue that happens in Colin's mixes is how everything including the guitars compress in the mix. It sounds like he hits the master bus comp pretty hard and may even have hefty buss compression on all the stems as well, add that with some obvious automation and you get one hell of a dynamic mix.
One weird thing I did notice on the mix, I pulled on up in my DAW, "Torn between Scylla and Charybdis" and noticed the kick when it first comes in exactly peaks at 0dB, without clipping the top of the signal, and as soon as the whole mix comes in, even summed up with the rest of the mix, the kick still at 0dB with no clipping. Snare is the same too. Its as if he sidechained the rest of the mix, including the other drum tracks to the kick and snare and maybe even utilized some look ahead limiters in conjunction. That might be why it is so damn punchy considering the waveform looks like it was mastered as heavy as Death Magnetic. It is interesting to see a mix that heavily hit and every transient is still there, without any limiting, clipping or distortion and still have those transients really stick out of the mix.
