mixing metal guitars too early in the mixing process?
Posted: Sun Aug 17, 2014 6:24 am
Lately I feel I seem to have painted myself into a corner mixing-wise...
In my project I use 4 different home-made guitarix presets, all using a compressor, an eq panel, reverb and chorus, a convolver, ... I even had to add some very subtle Wah to it, just a few percent to get each preset sounding good to my ears as a stand-alone tone. In fact it took several months if not years to fiddle with the knobs to get it to sound good like it does today.
Then what I usually do is I record two takes with presets 1 and 2 (a dry/thin kind of sound with a lot of treble, no mids), and pan them 100% L/R in Audacity. Then I record two additional takes using presets 3 and 4 (high mids, lower gain, more bass), panned to 70% L/R.
So as far as I'm concerned, I ended up with a huge "wall of guitars" which just needs some overall EQ (and a bit of reducing all the gain) to sound excactly like I want the guitars to sound.
But that's because I'm a guitarist and I didn't think about bass, drums, and vocals.
What do you think, will this wall of guitars take up too much space in the mix? Should I throw away all the subtle reverb/chorus and wah in guitarix, and apply them later on, in Ardour for example? I'm primarily concerned about the drums because with drums there is some panning involved (I will put bass guitar and vocals in the middle of course)
In my project I use 4 different home-made guitarix presets, all using a compressor, an eq panel, reverb and chorus, a convolver, ... I even had to add some very subtle Wah to it, just a few percent to get each preset sounding good to my ears as a stand-alone tone. In fact it took several months if not years to fiddle with the knobs to get it to sound good like it does today.
Then what I usually do is I record two takes with presets 1 and 2 (a dry/thin kind of sound with a lot of treble, no mids), and pan them 100% L/R in Audacity. Then I record two additional takes using presets 3 and 4 (high mids, lower gain, more bass), panned to 70% L/R.
So as far as I'm concerned, I ended up with a huge "wall of guitars" which just needs some overall EQ (and a bit of reducing all the gain) to sound excactly like I want the guitars to sound.
But that's because I'm a guitarist and I didn't think about bass, drums, and vocals.
What do you think, will this wall of guitars take up too much space in the mix? Should I throw away all the subtle reverb/chorus and wah in guitarix, and apply them later on, in Ardour for example? I'm primarily concerned about the drums because with drums there is some panning involved (I will put bass guitar and vocals in the middle of course)