Metal song.... Whats wrong?

[runagate]

Runagate, it's amazing what you were able to do with that mixed down mp3. Now might be a good time for you to hide, before someone kidnaps you and forces you to mix their album.

I realize that you mean that as a comliment but I don't futz with people's mixes. That took me 4 minutes. How in f**k some gawdawful derivative bands manage to sound so cheesy is beyond me. How someone can face themselves knowing they're going in to work to make that band sound good for the next few weeks, day after grinding day, is utterly beyond me. I'm not making a value judgement in this case: I honestly cannot believe what people suffer through to be in the music biz!

I keep telling ya'll: give me a PC powerful enough and a room where I can make 1/5th the amount of noise the average band makes at practice and I will bring to life compositions heretofore unimagined on this orb. I am not the only one hampered not by lack of imagination but by lack of resources. This is why I am so thankful and amazed at the sudden influx of freeware into our world, and indebted to the devs that make it. Look what a quick conversation with a stranger on the other side of the globe has done for Brohymn. Let's keep sharing knowledge and helping one another out in-between bouts of trolling.

Mu back hurts, I'll be back in the long run, though.

[runagate]

flutternoxlimpsmixel?!?!?

What the meaning of that?

I am not a native english speaker... lol


I think is missing some EQ on the guitar sound again but that grainy sound appears now
Regards

I think that's mello's commentary on my involvement with nu-metal. He is not a native speaker of English, either, I suppose on his planet they rap in Enochian hrons. Consider it his hello I suppose.

[runagate]

Brohymn, that sounds suitably brutal.

The paradigm of recording has little to do with how one achieves a good sound live. I couldn't make a guitar sound good live to save my life (that's my guitar-playing partner's job, which involves a 63 4-channel Marshal) whereas I managed to make him happy with the Cakewalk ampsim and compression back in the day. Mind you his guitar + amp is worth more than my life, so much so that I won't even touch them.

That's a really good pre-mixdown sound you've got there.

[Brohymn]

The EQ settings are wrong dont you think?

I've read several books, but i dont get any ideia again how to shape my sound just like they do...

Im sorry a im a little noob on recoding stuff, my experiance in on playing

Regards

[Lawnmower Of The Damned]

I toyed around with Moneo and Dominion and the imaging seems to be improving a great deal in my mixes. It's not surprising as Betabugs and Digital FishPhones are great developers, but it is surprising how quickly I was able to improve my sound.

Thanks for pointing them out to me.

[Brohymn]

runagate .I hope not being boring you, but your are THE ONE. you give me several "vital" advices, and i apreeciate that to much

I ask my father friends on studios a plugins package they have there ( Waves Diamond bundle ) and working with kjaerhus too, i think my sound achieve other dimension, if you know what i mean... and some clearness to... no EQ...

I am learning how to use the "space" and setting pan and reverb to set distances and other stuff too.

http://brohymn.com.sapo.pt/Sonar5andwaves.mp3

I mixdown that (made with sonar5 producer, waves diamond bundle and kjaerhus) because i want some opinions about the sound before the mixing..... bass slap is a bit loud, and drums needs a little reverb and cymbals are too loud ..i think....

There are some Bass hum's but are caused by some mixdown problem...

Any advices will be aprecciated
Regards

PS. I ask The Vienna Symphonic Library too...... sounds amazing.... and price is amazing to .... lol

[mellotronaut]

flutternoxlimpsmixel?!?!?

What the meaning of that?

I am not a native english speaker... lol


I think is missing some EQ on the guitar sound again but that grainy sound appears now
Regards

I think that's mello's commentary on my involvement with nu-metal. He is not a native speaker of English, either, I suppose on his planet they rap in Enochian hrons. Consider it his hello I suppose.

Sorry, I hijacked your thread.....Runagate uses this kind of idiom sometimes and I can't understand the meaning of his pre-enochian words; so I tried to imitate his speak, but unfortunately......Runa, where's your contest-track...the polka?

Melloesperand/to

[runagate]

Ach, don't compliment me Only thing that'll scare me away. Damn, you've done a great job already - I'm listening now.

Sweet, you've got access to Waves?
I don't have Waves, obviously, but I've gotten to use it before and for some reason I'm terrible with names but I'm great at remembering presets, probably because I have 1000 freeware plugins, lol.

Ok, bass hum and guitar hum are easy - I don't know if there's 50 or 60 Hz hum but the X-Hum plugin has a setting that'll kill both so just toss it on anything recorded from an amp.

I can't recall what the multiband compressor in Waves is called but use that on the bass. Why? Because the Korn bass sound is a very compressed but complicated amalgam of high-end click, squashed to all hell with like 10:1 or higher compression, and fast-attack bass frequency compression.
Toss the multiband on after the X-Hum and mix the bass sound with the 3 "gain" knobs or whatever they're called and that will act as your simultaneous compressor and eq! It works wonders, that's exxentially part of what I did to your original mp3 with different plugins for one of the mixing steps. Much easier when you have the bass track in isolation, though.

Waves has a side-chain compressor, right? Side-chain the kick into the bass compressor so that whenever the kick drum comes in it compresses the bass, that way they work in tandem better. Gives you a big old smack sound on the downbeats. I can't explain how to do this, especially as I don't reacall what DAW you're using, but the Waves manual probably says.

The attack transients on the snare are a bit too sharp now. I'm sure there's a setting in the Kjaerhus plugs that says "snare" on it that will be a good starting point for snare compression. In nu-metal it's ok to squish the hell out of things with compression in a way that's inappropriate in other music.

The guitar is "hashy" in the high-end, around the speach frequencies of the human voice it sounds like, probably 3k to 5k Hz but you can use a plugin to see the frequencies that are being hyped. Again, I'd use multiband compression on the guitar as a simultaneous eqing solution to make the whole of the guitar's frequencies congeal. This is for the strummed chords I mean. The high-end is probably the only thing in the mix that's what's causing you irritation.

Come back with your next mix and let us hear.
You're not boring me, I assure you. This new mix kicks ass and I'd like to think I'll be getting this kind of help around here someday

- runagate

*edit*
Oh yeah, use your ears! Always remember! Close your eyes if it helps.

I'd turn the lead fills up a bit, too.

[Brohymn]

Waves has a side-chain compressor, right? Side-chain the kick into the bass compressor so that whenever the kick drum comes in it compresses the bass, that way they work in tandem better. Gives you a big old smack sound on the downbeats. I can't explain how to do this, especially as I don't reacall what DAW you're using, but the Waves manual probably says.

Woo.... i can hear that thing working on bands songs, but how to do that in Steinberg Cubase SX3 or Cakewalk Sonar 5 Producer edition???

For a guy like me, with small experience in studio but with a enormeus will to know things and how to do that.. is a kind complicated..

I think this could be done creating a group of those 2 tracks (bass and kick) and applying that side-shain compressor. Im right? but with a diferente signal chain

Other thing, i understand perfectly what you said about the bass, but i not understand why? It sounds lot uncompressed?


Regards

[runagate]

Hmm the side-chain works like this:
The kick drums output would be routed to the "sidechain" input on the compressor.

The bass's output would be routed to the other input on the compressor. The bass is what's actually compressed. How to do that in Cubase? I don't know - I've used Cubase once ever to mix a friend's project and all the routing was completed before I got to it.

I'm absolutely certain there's explanations here on KVR somewhere about how to do it. I bet it'd confuse me, too! I use FLStudio where you can't sidechain anything without a very complicated workaraound. It's also not neessary to sidechain the kick and bass but it is the easiest way to congeal the mix if you can figure out how to do it.

As to the part about the bass - this time I can't quite understand what you're asking. Sorry

I think you're asking me if it doesn't sound compressed enough. There's no reason to make it sound compressed or uncompressed, really, it's just that the slaps and other incidental high-frequency noises of the bass will "jell" together into one bass sound with this kind of compression treatment. I do it all the time whenever I use distorted basses. The distortion hypes the high frequency content of the bass, and simply turning up the bass eq, while it sounds better, just leaves it sounding like almost separate "bass" and "treble bass noises" whereas with the proper multiband compression the whole of it's sonic spectrum, the highs and the lows, become one whole sound working together instead of almost as separate instuments, especially given the nu-metals's bass tone of having very little mid-range sonic content. If it comes to it I'll post you an example.

I hope that helps.

And after all that there's still the mastering part of the mixdown
Luckily todays VST tools allow us a much better chance to "fix it in the mix" that used to be the case, which is good because though, like you, I've read a ton about recording but I've had very little experience using even halfway decent gear to do so.

- runagate

[Brohymn]

I've found some tutorial "So every time the bass drum hits, the compression on the bassline increases and then they don't get in each other's way / muddle each other" for Logic audio (MAC).

Maybe not the same proceduce to me but maybe someone can be interest on this:

Suppose you have a bass and a drum track (both Audio, and not MIDI).

However, it seems that the kick drum sound gets "blurred" because of the bass: both have to coexist in approximately the same frequency range, and the presence of the bass tends to overwhelm the kick drum.

It would thus be nice if the bass was a bit softer each time the kick drum hits.

The solution is known as "ducking" (the bass "ducks" each time the kick hits).

On the bass track, insert a Compressor.
However, instead of letting the bass sound itself trigger the Compressor (as would normally be the case), you now pick the kick drum track from the Side Chain popup menu in the compressor.

(Note that the names of the Audio Objects will not show up in the popup; you have to pick the right object by looking at the Object's parameter pane or on its channel strip, right below its Output popup).

Additionally (important) you have to switch off "Auto Gain" in the Compressor.

What you have now is a bass track that only gets compressed when the kick drum is active, thus creating a kind of "pocket" for the kick to sit inside.

As for the Auto Gain: when this is on, Logic will compensate the attenuation that takes place in the Compressor, by amplifying the output signal.

In this particular case you explicitly do not want that to happen: the entire idea is centred around getting the bass to play softer.

Auto Gain would destroy that.

________________________________________________________

I hope it helps someone

So im trying right now applying to Sonar 5 or cubase sx.

Regards

[runagate]

Good luck and thanks for posting that.
If I were a better writer I'd direct people to this thread when mixing rock. To me rock is much easier to mix than the strenuously psychotic billions-of-sounds style I make but that's at least partially because I've got really good people to learn from and discuss ideas with in real life that are as obsessed with music as we at KVR are. They just don't know fullall about PCs

Thanks again for posting that.

[Brohymn]

After i find how to do the side-chain on cubase sx, i think the mixing job becomes more easy...

I am now trying to get the best cleaning mix, but reverbs are putting me crazy ....

On the drums is now a multiband compressor, a different trim on snare and a reverb plugin.

On bass is a multiband compressor, a EQ to cut of the mids and boost the hi's and the low's.

Guitars have they independent tube compressor and a EQ (a pitch shifter as well, to get that LOW sound ) stills a to much bass....some channel distortion there i think too

Strings emsemble are The Vienna Symphonic Library. No post effects added... Only a little reverb

http://brohymn.com.sapo.pt/Sonar5andwaves-03.mp3

So what wrong? Bass and drums sounds a little bit off the mix i think, but i know if the F**cking reverb... i cant program that thing...puts me crazy... because i dont know what kind of reverb i mut use for each instrument

(I can tell you that this forum is helping me, learning a lot of things that i only know in my head...i know that i coudn't get any of that sounds with a DAW in front of me... )

Regards
Sorry mt english once again

[Brohymn]

PS. If you use a DAW with some VST's (and not real instruments) , side-chain becomes a insane number of tracks, buses, and groups...... only for the kick: Kick bus, kick GRoups, Kick channel, Kick room, Kick PZM, kick compressor.... sh*t

[runagate]

Now the transients are way too loud. Almost sounds like something in the bass end is distorting a mic on input.
I gotta go but I wanted to reply quick before I did.
Your song is certainly coming along though.

Yeah, track count can get extreme.
The only thing preventing me from using 100 tracks is that my laptop will only do at max 17 tracks (unless I use effects, then it's more like 7) so you can imagine I use track freeze A LOT. See ya later.