Limiter plus compressor = good idea?

[Benjamin Briggs]

You definitely should keep the drums separated. Mixing the drums down to a single track before putting effects on them may actually be one of the reasons that you're having trouble getting a good overall mix. The issue is that when the drums are all on one track, you can't apply effects to specific elements of the drums; for example, you can't use separate compression on the snare and the kick, you can't apply more reverb to the cymbals than to the kick, etc. Any effect you put on the drum track affects all of the the drums, and that means that you can't fine-tune the sound of the drums to the extent you ought to be able to. It's best to think of the kick, the snare, the toms, and the cymbals as being completely separate instruments and to deal with all of them separately instead of mixing them down to one track.

Separating the drums before putting effects on them should also make it easier to control the waveform spikes that are messing up the loudness of your mix because it will let you compress each type of sound individually -- it will let you, for example, reign in the snare drum spikes without affecting the way the other drums sound.

I completely agree with this advice

COMPLETELY agree

[GarretGraves]

well... you dont get anywhere cutting corners. next chance i get i'll work on seperating the drums. Kicks, snare, toms and cymbals.

[GarretGraves]

Ok. Here are the drum tracks as you requested.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6W0KRO9N

[Moseph]

Ok. Here are the drum tracks as you requested.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6W0KRO9N

Sweet. I'll see if I can pull something together in the next few days.

[Moseph]

Garret, check the tempo on the individual drum tracks. They run too slow and are out of sync with the guitars, bass, and mixed-down drums.

EDIT: Actually it's not the tempo. The guitars/bass/mixed-down drums are 32-bit and the individual drums are 16-bit which is (maybe?) making Sonar screw up when I import them all into the same project. I'll see if I can figure it out and hopefully you won't have to re-upload things.

EDIT 2: Mmmkay, never mind. The problem was that Sonar randomly decided to turn on groove-clip looping for the drum tracks which messes with the speed that the audio files play.

[GarretGraves]

yeah Audition automatically imports my drum tracks as loopable wavs. maybe it's the settings in which i mixed them down with. i should look at that.

[Moseph]

This was mostly typed as I mixed. It should help you get an idea of how I approach things.

Here's the finished mix.

Here is a list of images:

Console view in Sonar

Kick effects

Bass effects

Guitar 2 effects

Guitar 1 effects

Hats effects

Overheads effects

Snare effects

Toms effects

Multiband compressor

MIXING (Things are shown in the order that I did them)

I begin by mixing the kick and the bass with everything else muted. It's generally a good idea to build a mix from nothing, gradually adding in tracks rather than trying to deal with everything all at once.

Kick EQ

Very low frequencies rolled off to reduce muddiness. High frequencies cut because the kick sounded too treble-heavy to me, but leaving a spike to catch the noise of the beater. Mid-frequencies generally left alone. I suspect the drum VST you use has samples that are already mixed to sound pretty good. Often I have to cut the 400-900 Hz area to reduce the cardboardy sound that sometimes shows up in kick drums, but I didn't have to do that here.

Kick compression

The initial idea was to bring out the tail of the kick drum sound just a little bit, but by the time I was done mastering, the kick was basically just really squashed so it wouldn't clip things too badly. I hate mixing kick drums.

Bass EQ

The bass is extremely overpowering in the mid- and lower mid-range area, and that's where I want the guitars to be. I've cut accordingly and again rolled off the low bass to reduce boominess and mud.

Bass compression

I have, in effect, shortened the bass's attack just a bit (which is to say, the compressor kicks in before the bass's plucked attack has finished -- see the 115.8 ms attack value), which gets rid of some flabbiness in the tone.

I put the guitars in the mix before dealing with the other drums. We have here two tracks of what sounds like different amps and/or distortion on the same guitar signal. I'm no guitarist, but the tone strikes me as pretty similar between the two channels with guitar 2 having just a touch more bite. I panned the guitar tracks 50% left and 50% right to fill out the soundfield a little bit.

Guitar 2 EQ

I'm emphasizing the 1k-2k Hz range to catch the bite that I mentioned.

Guitar 1 EQ

Kind of the inverse of guitar 2's EQ. Here I'm slightly emphasizing the mids. The effect of both of these EQ settings together is a marked reduction in that static-y sound in the guitars (a sound that I don't particularly like, which is why I'm glad to be rid of it).

Hats EQ

Low-end rolled off because I didn't need anything more down there. Hats and cymbals are mostly about high frequencies. Highs boosted slightly for more sizzle.

Overheads EQ

Basically the same idea as the hats.

Snare EQ

Again, the lows can be rolled off. Slight boosts in the mids and again between 2k and 4k Hz. These tighten the sound, bringing out the ring and the stick hit, respectively. High-end is rolled off because I want the cymbals to dominate there.

Snare compression

Relatively aggressive compression. The snare badly needed more impact -- it sounded like someone tapping his pencil on the table -- and this fixes that.

Toms EQ

Rolled off lows and highs because I did't need them. Slight mid-range boost because I like the resonance that it adds.

Toms compression

Just a bit to tighten the sound.

Reverb

I'm pretty conservative with the reverb here because I think the mix sounds pretty good dry. I'm not sue what the conventions are for metal. I'm using the SIR convolution reverb plugin (freeware) with a hall impulse response. It's mostly the drums (minus kick) that I've bussed to the reverb, and a very little bit on the guitars. I don't want much on the guitars because I want to keep them up at the front of the mix. For the bass and kick, it's generally best to avoid too much reverb (I'm not using any) because they tend to get really muddy if you use a lot.

MASTERING

I always put BlueTubes Analog TrackBox on the master because I like the faux analog distortion. I also use a multiband compressor. Really, I have no idea how to use a multiband compressor properly, so I generally just solo out each band, play with the compression settings, then unsolo to make sure the changes I made make the mix sound better. I've found generally that when I get a band's compression settings right, it makes the mix sound, I don't know, more compact is the only way I can think to describe it -- like that part of the frequency spectrum doesn't have extraneous jagged edges on it. Then I make sure the limiter is on and boost the gain on the output until I hear distortion in the cymbals, then back the gain down until the distortion goes away. The whole process takes a lot longer than it sounds because I always have to go back into the mix to tweak levels and compression to get it to the point where I can push the multiband's output gain really high. Then I view the mastered mix's waveform in a wave editor and check it against other recordings. If the level isn't comparable, I continue to tweak things.

[GarretGraves]

I greatly appreciate this, Mospeh! This will be a nice lesson for me because I took all the classes my community college has to offer in sound engineering and they NEVER mentioned anything about loudness and balancing frequencies or anything. (the courses are still quite new at that school so i could understand if they need to smoothen things out material wise). SO this'll be nice homework!

Although, there are a couple of things with THIS track that I should mention. First, the bass kicks are rather low and I like to accentuate them for guitar riffs that follow in syncopation with them.

Por ejemplo:

But im sure with practice I can make this happen and keep the loudness it's at.

The guitars sound slightly mooshy to me but I think it's cause I need to lower the gain on my guitar. I ALWAYS get super critical over my guitar tone. Also I recorded them using the Gearbox Toneport and I can never get it to sound as great as my Spider IV amp. (I have to record demos at night using the toneport and headphones and then during the day I rerecord with the amp.) So when I record with the amp sometime later I'll fix this.

Again thanks a lot! Finally I learn a lesson using one of my own tracks instead of someone else's.

[Moseph]

I greatly appreciate this, Mospeh! This will be a nice lesson for me because I took all the classes my community college has to offer in sound engineering and they NEVER mentioned anything about loudness and balancing frequencies or anything. (the courses are still quite new at that school so i could understand if they need to smoothen things out material wise). SO this'll be nice homework!

Although, there are a couple of things with THIS track that I should mention. First, the bass kicks are rather low and I like to accentuate them for guitar riffs that follow in syncopation with them.

Por ejemplo:

But im sure with practice I can make this happen and keep the loudness it's at.

The guitars sound slightly mooshy to me but I think it's cause I need to lower the gain on my guitar. I ALWAYS get super critical over my guitar tone. Also I recorded them using the Gearbox Toneport and I can never get it to sound as great as my Spider IV amp. (I have to record demos at night using the toneport and headphones and then during the day I rerecord with the amp.) So when I record with the amp sometime later I'll fix this.

Again thanks a lot! Finally I learn a lesson using one of my own tracks instead of someone else's.

Oh, interesting. I can hear the influence of that Lamb of God track in the original mix that you posted -- it helps explain the relative lack of mid-range focus, the wider guitar panning, and the prominence of the kick drum. I focused the guitars in the mid-range, and the Lamb of God track (and your original mix) spread them out a little more. The static-y sound that I mentioned cutting out of the guitars would actually have helped them to sound like the Lamb of God track. Oops.

My thinking for the track was more along the lines of

(really more hard rock than metal), so my guitar sound tends to be more mid-range-y and up in your face.

Glad it was helpful.

[GarretGraves]

Oh no it's a good tone. Just not what I was going for for this track. But it was still very helpful info! I may use that type of tone for other songs later. Thanks again.