infidel
ubw newbie
Joined: Mar 11, 2005
Location: Lake Stevens, WA,, USA
Posts: 33
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| Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 3:05 am |
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ok- i'll bite and see if i can offer some constructive criticism.
i like metal as much as the next guy and have played my share of hard stuff over the years. even though what i've posted here is a lot more mainstream than this type of sound i still dig the hard stuff. i also trained as an engineer in a 24x studio back in the day so i've got a technical ear to a certain degree.
good stuff first: i like the arrangement, the parts are dynamic. the melodic keyboard lines are an interesting juxtaposition against the grind. loud/quiet/loud/quiet always seems to pack a bigger punch than full on balls out start to finish crunch. the flip side of this is that everything sits out occasionally while the keys take prominence in places, but they don't sit out too much- if you want to get even more dynamics out of the arrangement you might re-arrange a section or two backing them out.
overall i think the mix is a little too hot- you might consider pulling all the levels down somewhat. everything's really crunchy but even the crash cymbals sound distorted. it sounds like other intstruments are overlapping their frequencies (in the high end, of course, usually above about 8KHz). one way to get a smoother overall sound is to determine which frequencies are really important to each instrument and try to (subtly) influence the EQ of the others so they're peaking in a different range. as far as the drums go, they sound pretty solid until the big crunches hit, then they get washed out. in metal a big beefy snare sound is pretty important; i think i'd try to get a little more bottom end out of it. i dig the bass guitar sound, it's nice and round and full, but again it gets lost in the crunch- you could pull a bit of the lowest end of the guitar spectrum out and it wouldn't "step on" the bass's frequency range so much (and vice-versa) and everything would just get a little clearer sounding. the vocals are raw power, sounds like they're kickin' in the right range- sounds like they're pitch-shifted and doubled, or double-tracked in 2(+?) takes- if so, you can try picking the more important of the two vocal tracks (and this "important" take can change during the course of the song) and take ALL the other track(s) and set their -combined- volume to approximately half the volume of whatever the main track's getting.
the last bit of recording advice i have is considering the stereo placement of the signals you're outputting. generally most people start with bass and drums as the core of the mix and go from there. spreading out the parts somewhat across the stereo pan of the entire recording can also help give definition to parts. set the bass off a little heavier to one side than the other (subtly generally works better but some people opt to go full out hard L & R for things....depends on what you're after) and the kick drums somewhere in the same neighborhood of panning but the opposite way. then pick a slightly different panning placement for the vocals and guitars, since they generally occupy the same frequency ranges, and set those opposite of each other also- this keeps one speaker from trying to kick competing frequencies out at the same time and cleans it all up- without losing the distortion grind you're obviously going for! heavily distorted tones are the hardest things to get to sound good in a mix. i've always had better luck micing amps with decent mics than going direct.
hmmm. i like the chop of the guitar riff- drummer could prob'ly fill in nicely over some of those passages, cutting it up the same way. the off-time keyboard part at about 4:20 (was that intentional? LOL) with the keys are khoul- more bands would be smart to experiment with nonstandard time signatures, it always makes things more interesting, especially in technically-oriented material like metal.
well i've listened to this song about a dozen times while typing this- pretty khoul  hope some of these suggestions help you out.
my stuff is completely in a different world than yours, feel free to check it out and return the feedback if ya want-
my stuff's HERE
PEACE and ROCK ON
inf |
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