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mixing metal guitars too early in the mixing process?

Posted: Sun Aug 17, 2014 6:24 am
by apathity
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)

Re: mixing metal guitars too early in the mixing process?

Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 9:07 pm
by tramp
In behave of the overall mix, you may like to read this (short and pregnant) guide.
http://www.audio-production-tips.com/gu ... uency.html
At least, you didn't need to trow away "your sound", but you need to keep some frequency room for "the others".

Re: mixing metal guitars too early in the mixing process?

Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2014 11:52 am
by cowboystitching
Have you noticed your mixes being too crowded sounding once you add in the other instruments? If that's the case I would strip the processing back a bit until it sounds a bit more "balanced", and then add in the effects as you need them again. (I don't really play metal anymore, but I typically do this as a rule of thumb with all the instruments anyway) Otherwise, if it sounds good to you, then that's all that matters!

Re: mixing metal guitars too early in the mixing process?

Posted: Thu Oct 16, 2014 7:10 am
by apathity
Well so far I came to the conclusion that it is not a mixing issue, there are many higher-level issues when you open up a can of worms by recording 4 guitar takes. You're totally right about removing some processing though.

It does seem to need a lot of experimenting with recording metal guitars. If you do 4 takes, but then you end up throwing most of the frequencies away anyway (hi-pass/lo-pass), then it is a lot of unnecessary work to record all that and you might as well do only 2 takes.