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hi everyone it's bruce again and today i'm going to give you a walkthrough of my mix of the hesp pain song the cruel teeth of winter as usual i've organized my session so i can keep track of everything while it's going on got greys up here for the various buses with delays and the mix bus red for the vocal groups and then i leave buses within groups grey usually so not always guitars are blue bass is this magenta color drums are green and then scents and samples are purple if we zoom out i've got everything arranged as well vertically in terms of when it happens in the actual song too okay so let's start with the drums so the drums were recorded by a great session player called glenn wellman you can find him on fiverr.com and he's really affordable and is able to do some excellent drum tracks i've i've never had to have him do any revisions for me because his stuff's always been fantastic when it's come through and he records a live drum kit and it's recorded really nicely so i didn't have to use any samples on this because we had a nice uh drum sound already and i wanted to keep that because it really captured his performance so we've got kick bus there and that's the sub kick and the kick drum snare top and bottom hi-hat which i didn't really use because there was enough of it in the overheads tom's grouped into a bus and then we've got our uh symbols and room and drum reverb here you can go on over to glenn wellman's channel and have a look at his drum kit and his recording setup to see how he how he records things i just get the files sent through to me after i've sent him the song when i come to the do the mix i've already committed the sounds i've made so i'm not mixing and recording at the same time i've got all my guitar tones uh printed and set my bass tones and my drum tones and synthetones everything's set so all i'm having to do is is mix anything is mix everything i'm not having to decide on the actual tones that i'm going to use i do that in the kind of writing and pre-production stage before i get to tracking sometimes i might change the tones after tracking if it if what i've chosen hasn't worked out but generally i try and commit early on so it's another thing that i don't have to think about and so when i'm doing mixing i'm literally just doing mixing and then i've already gained staged everything so my levels are nice and nothing's really blowing out and clipping and so the first thing i do with any mix is i get a nice balance on the faders so that was pretty easy with these drums because they were nice nicely recorded so let's have a listen to them without anything on them okay so this is just the raw drums obviously the uh most of that reverb there has come the reverb here is coming from a combination of glenn's drum reverb that he prints a reverb track of and then the reverb i've gotten there as well okay so let's have let's have a look at the kick so here's the the kick sub microphone on its own probably not going to be able to hear much of that if you're listening on your phone or small earbuds but it's definitely there and there's definitely some energy there so first thing i'm doing is um there wasn't really much going on in the upper and middle part there so i didn't really need to do anything here so what i'm doing is i'm cutting off the the low lows cutting off at around 80 hertz i'm putting a bump there so below 80 hertz is where i want the bass guitar to live and uh what i've done is i've used both the bandwidth on the low pass filter and the band filter here just to give that a bump around 80 hertz and that gives that the base it's kind of low end thumb and power and then it was a bit woofy here bit um pillowy sounding so i put a little bit of a dip there so if you put that back in it's like kind of like someone's hitting a a pillow or a big cushion from a seti or a sofa and i didn't want that so that's out next thing we're doing is compressing it got a slow-ish attack on there so that's letting through the transient use automatic release didn't need to boost it any and that's just helping the transient come through just so i've got that initial hit from it that's all i did with that one so next up we've got the kick beater that's been nicely gated but there's still a bit of bleed in there it's not not too much so first thing i've got on here was some r base there just to give it a bit more thud and thump and then we've got a gate on there i put the r base on first and my reasoning is because i don't want everything that the rbs is adding so i'm gonna it's like i'm gonna sculpt the the combined tone of the kick and the r bass after the fact so first thing i've got in here is a gate and that's cleaning things up a bit especially on areas like this parts where they've got slow kick it doesn't have to chop everything out it just has to suppress it enough so that it isn't adding anything unwanted to the the sound of the whole drum kit and the the song and this is just the stock reverb plug-in the stock reverb the stock reaper plug-in now we've got some eq i've got this sort of loaf shaped eq there so cutting off the low laws taking out some of that woolly woofy frequency in there taking out the high end the extreme high end so we don't really need anything that's where the symbols are going to live and other instruments are going to be up around there and there wasn't anything useful for the kick drum in there so that's all subtractive and i tend to do use use my first eq for subtraction to subtract things and a second eq later on to to add things in and i tend to do it that way because it's just the way my brain works i think it sounds good so i'm i'm doing things in in set stages so i've got a set process so instead of just bouncing all around and getting lost and following a set process so i can work things through through through a mix quickly and efficiently while the song is still fresh and um i haven't got my judgment clouded next we've got the stock re per compressor and again we're not really adding anything we're just accentuating that attack getting the transient out of it and squishing down on the on the tail so we've got that sharp especially for these faster bits this is quite a slow song so i wanted to be able to control when when the kick was longer and when it wasn't and then the last thing on the base as a kick drum is you've got the channel strip the waves e channel and i find that this just sounds nicer maybe it's uh it's snare coil but to me it just sounds nicer when i boost with these kind of eqs so i've got 9 db at around 8k you take that out you can you lose some of that high end click that helps it cut through the the guitars and mix and then i've got a wee bit of a boost at 80 and then we're not really using the compressor on there at all so there's the 80 the uh 8k boost two kicks combined and they're running through a bus and they've got jst clip on them which is a soft clipper and this just gives you more perceived volume so it gives it more impact but without uh without sacrificing your transient so it still feels like you've got like an actual impact happening from the kick beater hitting the head so here it is in the context of the kit we're also getting some of that kick as well from the overheads and the high end of the kick anyway from the overheads in the room and the reverb here it is in context with the rest of the song okay cool next up we've got the snare so snare bottom i thought it sounded okay so i've got stock compressor again bringing out the transient and then boosting a little bit so we've got some of the tail in there as well but that's bringing up some of the bleed but not too much it's not too bad so we can live with that auto release again relatively slow attack so we've got cla three air there just to kind of help control the transients that we're bringing out and then give it more energy and it kind of just sounds like that's making that louder so when i was mixing this firstly i'm i don't mix things in solo i'm actually mixing them in the context of the song as well so i can hear how they're interacting with other instruments and i'm also trying to level match things so that i'm not just getting fooled by it being like this that's something to listen out for and then we've got a snare top so first thing there is gate so we've got some mob lead on that snare top it's really well gated and edited at glenn's end so we didn't really have to do much with it cleans up really nicely eq again getting the low end out of the way but we don't want to lose this bit because of some nice uh energy here sort of lower mid area gives you snare some weight and and feeling like you know you've got a bit of wood being hit by someone sounded a bit woolly and muddy here a bit like a someone hitting a cardboard box with a mallet or a ball of mashed potato with a wooden spoon so get that out that's all we're really doing at this stage attack to bring out sorry a compression to bring out the attack auto release again not really boosting anything and you can hear how that's really bringing out the attack of the snare and that's starting to sound a bit weird but again when you mix it in context with the rest of the kit especially the the snare sound that we torn that's coming through the overheads and the the room mics it gives you a more of a rounded snare sound so it's okay if things sound a bit weird in solo last thing we've got is the e channel boosting a bit of 3k and then a bit at 300 hertz and not using the compression some more of that cla here just doing a little bit there and we're not trying to do a huge amount with any one particular plugin think of it in terms of we're getting lots of fun we're using lots of thin layers of effect to bring out the details of the instrument rather than just plonking a load of one effect on and expecting it to do all the work i found that this is uh some some people might be able to do that but i've never found it's worked always better to get use like lots of thin courts to bring out the detail jst clip again to give us more perceived volume and kind of attack behind the snare and then we're going to this to two verbs we've got this cavernous verb sound because this is quite a slow doomy miserable song so we can have that huge atmospheric verb on it and then a smaller regular drum room type verb as well so this is the snares together i love the sizzling crack that's coming off that snare bottom and then here it is with the rest of the drums and in context of the song so let's have a look at the toms now did a slightly different approach on the floor toms versus the rack tom so i'll just do one of each because the principles more rather than doing them all so here we've got one the high rack tom as our eq scooping out the lower laws it's where the base lives scooping out this muddy wuffy area because that doesn't sound good it's like someone hitting a cardboard box there's a wee bit of a boost here but that's really just to kind of bring this back up to again so you can see where you've got this fundamental there that's the the nice tone that we want from the the tom we're not really doing anything up in the high end sometimes i might cut up at the high end if there's a lot of noise in there but didn't really need to do that these have also been really nicely edited by to get rid of the bleed by glenn compression auto release slow attack bringing out the attack on the drums there the transient boosting a little bit so we get more of the tail of the sound more of a fuller tone and then the e channel again boosting around 5k and then a little bit in the low end so we'll get more of that a high end attack some of that low end to put some of that fullness back into it and that's pretty much the same thing on rack tom 2. oh here's a float on this is the lowest floor tom so first thing we do same treatment we did for the racton but we've moved everything a little bit further down because it's a lower tuning on this tom and you can just hear you've got that sort of cushiony pillowy sound there like someone's hitting a surfer cushion and it's kind of masking the tone we want out of the the tom compression again exactly the same thing bringing out the attack boosting some of the tail on it to get more fullness out of the drum tone ssl channel boosting at around 3k three three and a half care and then a little bit in the low end as well to bring back some of that fullness so it sounds like something big and weighty being hit by by someone with muscles you know like like glenn is but there's a few annoying resonances so i'm using the fab filter pro q3 with the dynamic eq setting just to to get rid of this area here that that was really annoying there was like an overtone that i didn't like so if you boost that you'll hear what it sounds like with a bit of a whistle tone to it as well so just take that out not completely killing it just we've got it on the dynamic eq so it gets squished down when it pops up too much okay so the drums have go through cla 3 here that's just giving them like a little bit of a squish to get some more energy and feeling of impact out of them jst clip again more perceived volume and impact out of it it's a soft clipper so what i do with this is you don't even need it full way just have a quarter of the way up and then use the trim to pull it back down to the kind of level it was at before but it'll have more impact and energy to it and then when there's a lot of toms going on there could be more of that energy in this area that was getting a bit overpowering so if we have them all playing at once and that just helps it's not completely killing that but it is just sort of calming it down pushing it back through there's a little bit of bleed still on there but it's not too much so i didn't bother going through and editing it out and here's the tom's in context with the rest of the drum kit again we're getting more torn from the toms from the overheads and the rides as well and the room mics and in context with the rest of the song and then they're just going to that regular verb like a large room verb didn't use the direct hi-hat because there's plenty of it in the overheads in the room and i didn't really use the ride and auxiliary microphone here i just forgot to mute it but it didn't it wasn't distracting so that's no big deal okay let's have a look at the overheads first thing i'm doing is i'm squishing and limiting them quite a lot sometimes out this is just to sort of bring up the the energy and the overall volume of it of the of the track but also if you've got like a really aggressive snare drum going on in them you can squash the snare drum right down with the the limiter and that's so that you can process just the symbols without having things like um compressors getting triggered by the snare drum glenn's got quite controlled playing here so we're not really picking it up in these overheads so this is a pretty typical eq curve for cymbals we don't want anything in the low end because this is where all our low-end instruments live all our main actions up here dipping out in the in the mids here because that's where we get lots of woofy tones on the shelves of the drums and we don't want any of that getting in the cymbals taking out the extreme highs you can't really hear up here and it's just kind of like white noise anywhere the main things we're taking out here are these two notches so if we pop this one up you can see there's that noise it sounds like something it sounds like a poc or kind of sounds like slayer bells to me and it's an overtone that really affects how it how it sound and i find it really annoying so i'm just dipping that out not killing it completely but pushing it back down to a manageable level and the same for this one there's like a really high pitched ringing it's like a hissing like white noise and again not just not crushing it completely just getting dipping it out so it doesn't affect the tone and these are things you can hear more when you when you don't notice them while are there but once they're gone you notice them got compression now and that's really just that in case anything pokes out and any surprise big heavy hits so it's not really doing anything at the moment but if if something jumps out then that'll be there to to catch it and then our channel strip again boosting it around 10k to bring out some of the the shininess of the cymbals and the detail and then cutting some out at around 300 hertz because that sounded a bit trashy i can't really explain it doesn't sound good to me so that's gone i'm not really using the compressor there as well and then we've got the saturation here and this is kind of helping shape the tone bring up the volume and take out any excess harshness that i've missed with the eq and then i've got it up about a quarter of the way around it's quite easy to go too far on it but that sounds about right to me so here's the symbols in context of the rest of the kit so on the on they sound a bit thin and weedy a little bit tinny but with the rest of the kit they fit right in quite nicely and with the rest of the song let's have a look at the room mics now and i've put the volume right up because they're quite quiet before we start processing them just so you can hear them so first thing we're doing is we've got these eq curve similar before getting the low laws out getting the high highs out and then this woofy stuff in the middle we don't want to filter it as aggressively as we did with the overheads we still want some of these low end and some of the higher mids in there as well so you've got the compression on there again more as a safety net and i'm using that to boost the volume a little bit because as i said this is quite quiet we've got the v e channel ssl again boosting summer around 8k and around 200 gives it some of that low mid sump not really using the compressor too much put that back down to its volume and then we're crushing it with the cla3 here to bring out that room sound and it's actually adding more than it sounds like to the drums i just have to have the the volume overall volume much lower on the master bus because i'm using obs and it maxes out really easily you can see when i take the room away the room mics the drum the drums lose kind of they lose some energy and and size last part of the drum kit is the drum reverb track that glenn recorded and i've got that routed to the main drum track so it blends in with the other reverbs as well sorry the main drum reverb so that all blends together nicely so on the eq taking out the low lows because you don't want a muddy reverb and taking out the high highs because we want the reverb to sit back and to sit behind the kit and put it in space not be an upfront feature and again just turn in some of those woofy frequencies in the middle and then crushing it well not really crushing it but just giving it a bit of a squeeze with the cl3 here needle's not really moving but it is just giving it very slight bit of compression and then boosting the volume again let's see that in context of the kit so the whole drum kit then goes through a drum buss and i've got this compressor limiter on it called more lot which i don't really understand how it works but it sounds cool and i have it on the drum bust setting and it's actually doing more than the needle shores on this one it sounds quite good it's quite easy to go over the top with it so it doesn't look like the needle's moving that much but just brings some more life to the whole drum kit gives it some more attack and weight we can see i've got this eq as well and that's automated and what we're doing there is when we get to this section i'm putting this aggressive filter over the whole kit to make it sit backwards while we've got this ambient quiet section so that helps with the atmosphere of this section so we still get the the drums we can still hear them we can still feel that they're propelling the song forward but they're set back now because the spoken word and the atmospheres are the parts we want to emphasize here and we also want to create contrast for when the the heavy part comes back in and having a filter like that does that really nicely and you can use that kind of effect on all things like sometimes i'll put it on i'll do a less aggressive filter on guitars for example in a verse so when the chorus comes back in the chorus feels like it has more weight and punch to it and life okay let's have a look at the bass now and that's glitching because i'm having to use the uh the direct sound so i can record through obs the screen capture software this is split into two channels we've got the low end here so here we've got this really aggressive filter cutting off everything below 60 hertz and then a sharp slope down to about 500 hertz these two controls here are taking out lots of woofy low end and and then we've got a little bit of boost using the the bandwidth to to control that peak on the low pass filter so that's the the dry di track the tone isn't as good as it could be because i was using old strings but if you use new strings you'll get a much better tone especially if you want like a a nice clanky dangly bass tone next we've got the waves l1 and then i'm crushing pretty much just crushing this flat so it's not really moving at all and then i can automate when i want any dynamic changes in it because this is metal and it's not like i'm doing pop music or like jazz or something where you need a dynamic bass guitar this is just like a solid thick low end that's totally under my control and you get a nice little bit from that gain reduction gives it a nice little bit of a crunchy feeling and then this compressor is sidechained to the kick drum and that's what it's listening to and that just gives the bass a little dip pokes it out of the way when the kick drum happens so the two can coexist better some people can do it with do it with dynamic eqs some people do it with um multiband compressors some people can just do it with a static eq but i've never managed to get that to work so this is what works for me and then this is the the distorted high end of the base which sounds really gross on its own but we don't listen to on its own so that's the the d i base and it's just a copy of the same d i base so we've got the b or d by t s e audio there's a free plugin and that's emulating the sans amp and that gives us that nice uh classic rock and metal high-end bass tone but it's still not quite dirty enough so we're using a tse rat another free pedal this gives us it's emulating a pro rat pedal and that gives us some more of that nice high end overtones some more crunchy dangliness clanky sound and then aggressive filter again so we're kind of matching mirroring the filter that's over here getting crossing over about 500 getting rid of that those mid areas where the meat of our guitars is going to live getting out of the way of the symbols and the high end stuff a little boost around 2k just to bring it back up to level to volume and to give some more of that bite in so that the distorted bass track gels well with the distorted guitars and that's what it sounds like together nice clanky bass tone but with lots of solid low end and in context of the rest of the song all you really hear is the thick low end of the of this space track this track blends in with distorted guitars and it kind of creates a unified distorted wall and that's what provides a lot of the heaviness in metal productions it's not the guitars per se it's a combination of things to take it away you can tell that something's missing you can definitely tell something when we take the whole base away sounds like the mix is hollow so that means our base is fitting in and sitting there really nicely and then you get bits like that where he's higher parts of the strings and the bass pops up you could automate that out if you didn't like it but i thought it sounded cool and that's what's important it works with the song and sounds good okay let's have a look at the guitars now so guitar's a di into my scarlet solo interface the guitar is a harley benton fan fret 7 string the di signal we'll just look at one of them because they're both the same heavy i'm using the fortin cali so we've got the which has the the noise gate and the hex drive engaged and it's mono with the high over sampling on and it's just a default setting there's the the front panel see what i can just see how i've got things set up i think i rolled back the treble a little bit and turned up the bass a little bit on this one and then there's the mic configuration i've got and i think on this one i have a slightly different yeah i've got more treble in this one just to give them a slightly different tone and then i've moved the microphones a little bit i think just to differentiate them a little bit something i regret on this was that i didn't have my headstock or the springs dampened on the guitar and you can really hear it on this riff i tried to edit it out as best i could after the fact but i really should have just dampened the strings and then replayed the parts you live and you learn if you don't know what i'm talking about when i mean dampening the hair strings the springs and the headstock there'll plenty of videos on youtube that'll explain it okay so reverb not really doing much on this at all the the forting the forting stuff sounds um neural dsp stuff sounds so good taking out the law laws taking out the high highs just smoothing out the sound a little bit adding in a little bit of 8k just to give it a bit more bite a little bit at 3k to give it some more bite that's it not really using the anything else on the channel strip this is quite important though this is it again using the fabfilter pro q3 dynamic eq and without it and without this you can hear does that low end kind of no and that's going to eat up a lot of headroom take up a lot of where you want the bass and low instruments to sit so we're getting rid of that but rather than just killing it completely using the dynamic eq just to squish it when it pops up so this is a trick i picked up from the the sneak forum days and andy snape does it with a c4 compress multi-band compressor and it just kind of helps the chugs stay there it doesn't kill them completely just brings them under control so you get a nice tight chug sounds that we all liking this kind of metal last thing i've got the guitars going to a bit of reverb just so they're in the same space the last thing we've got is going sending the rhythm guitars to a reverb and that might shock some people because you're not you're not supposed to do that but it sounded good and if it was a super fast technical song like arcspire or something wouldn't be a very good idea because all your notes would get blurred or rather if you wanted like a really tight sound maybe you want your notes to get blurred but here we've got these slow chugging riffs and long drawn out notes so we've got plenty of space for that to get in and it just gives the guitars more with them sets them back a little bit into the same kind of space that the rest of the instruments are in so let's see they're in context so you can't really hear the reverb but you can feel something's missing when it's not there especially on those staccato riffs of chugging so next we've got the lead guitar this was printed recorded a while ago and it was printed with a patch i made on guitar rig 5 and i can't remember what the patch is and i've lost it because i'm an idiot but i really like the sound of it so like i said i'll quite often commit so even though it's already got effects on it that's the sound i wanted so i committed and i printed it but then the computer crashed and i lost the patch but i still had the tone so that's another reason why you should commit and print so first thing we've got is this eq we don't want anything down here in the low end and i just dipped out the was top the top end of it there just because it's not really a traditional lead it's more of a it's carrying melody but it's also adding texture and ambience it needs to be heard enough so that you can make out the melody and get the emotional from it but it doesn't want to overtake the vocals because it's in the chorus next we've got the compressor and that's just squashing it down and then boosting it back up again to bring out some more of the the length of the notes and the ambience that's going on around them and then our ssl channel i've recorded it originally as a stereo patch so i put the mono ssl channel to make it mono again a bit of a boost at 8k dipped out some of these frequencies about 4k sounded a bit scratchy and horrible so out of there and that just helps set it back beneath the rhythm guitars and the vocals and then a little bit of the compressor as well and i set it off to one side a little bit to the left in the stereo field so it balances out with the keyboards and effects that we've got going on on the right side what have we got next these dreamy clean guitars and i've got them here in this chuggy bit and this is torn forge mission man sewer and it was a one of the presets that came with it called dreamy clean and that sounds really cool and again i've got this eq to get rid of the law laws get rid of this here that sounded weird and i didn't like and then bring up the highs and that's all i'm doing all of the other effects on that just come from the plugin and we just want it peeping through especially when the in between the the par meat chunks we've also got it here as well and i've automated the panning and the volume on that so it moves around and it's in different places at different volumes throughout the song to create dynamics and movement then our other clean track is this one and that was the chorus cleaning the mission setting in the misha mansour gst plugin bringing out those upper mids and highs getting rid of the one care because that didn't sound good and getting rid of the low laws and the high highs just to set it back a little bit the just so those two things work together to bring out the atmosphere so the atmosphere we've got this monologue going on here from my friend steve patton from sea bastard and he's an archaeologist and he's talking about the harsh realities of living through the ice age winter so we want this bleak frosty sound to enhance that emotion and then that's what those two guitar parts are for they're there to enhance that that's the clean guitars and then we've got some here at the end as well just to kind of build up that this is like the end of the song the last chorus this is where it it's all kicking off so so we're bringing in this melody line the sense of a bleak isolation and desolation that must have been for early humans trying to live through winters are way harsher than anything we could ever imagine during the ice age so next up we've got samples and keyboards and these are played so the keyboards are played by alexandra also plays in nemer so you should go and check them out too they're really cool if you like um earthy black metal definitely check those out and we've got a whole bunch of stuff and no not really doing much to them because alex designed her sounds and and played the parts so they would fit in with the things that were around them so what have we got we've got these this intro drums and this feedback so this was just a drum the original drum programming when i was tracking the song and i applied a filter and distortion and a volume swell to it and then the feedback is fake feedback i made with gst sub destroyer playing midi notes with through an amp sim and i can't remember which one but it's a a really simple way to do it it just gives you this like haunting haunting spooky intro like you're hearing distant sounds through the cold fog drifting across the frozen tundra so the other thing we've got here are these slay bells they're jingly bells and these were played and recorded by alex all we've got on these is a bit of reverb they had these nasty resonances no do not like that and then this one up there just pretty much just all high-end information and that was the same for all of them and then we've got them going to a reverb just to give them some sense of space and that they're part of the same the same sonic world as the rest of the song so the jingle bells again were put in because we're releasing this song around christmas time and it's a winter even though it's not a very jolly one and so that's there to to enhance that emotion to bring that in and we just also thought it'd be really cool to do so we tried it out and it worked and they're in different places or in the song different we've got them at different volume settings and panned in different places just to to give it some movement here in the chorus it also helps give a sense of movements this is something i've picked up from um pop productions is you'll often have like a thing something like a tambourine or an egg shake or a maracas in choruses or parts of the song where they want to to create a lift to add a little bit more energy so that's what we did here and i'll often quite do it even in a really doomy song like this just to give apart like a chorus or a special part a feeling of movement of more energy so that's something you could try out in your own productions and it doesn't matter if you're doing like do metal black metal or death metal it's if it if it works to enhance the emotion and impact of the song then it works it doesn't matter if it's not a metal instrument so i thought it was it was really sounded really good and it sounds really cool what else have we got so we've got some different keyboard sounds now um i'm not sure which instruments alex used to do these so i'll have to check with her and add it in so i know she uses absinthe and then i think something called sample tank that makes uh emulations of things like b3 organs and other vintage type instruments i think this one might have mostly been um absence though so we've got this sound here and that's adding low end and atmosphere so what have we got on here then yeah so we didn't want any of this low end it's quite muddy takes up a lot of information and this is where we want the base guitars on low end and then i've boosted all of this up up mid stuff from the upper mids upwards so it cuts and fits in a fab filter and again that's just to control these low end resonances because even though we use that other filter to bring them down there were still quite a lot of them there we didn't want to kill them completely so we're using this dynamic eq to to control them and then got to recomp here just to squish everything into place and then boost the overall level and help draw out the notes more get more length on the notes and then that's automated throughout the track so it fits in properly what have we got next next we've got this b3 sound in the chorus and the pre-chorus rather we're not really doing much to that getting the light out the way sorting out a resonance and then boosting in in the upper parts where we've we've got very little energy and that sounded okay what's next high matar and that's in the chorus usual story getting out of the way of the low end teaming the woofie stuff in the lower mids boosting in this upper mids and high end and then getting the high highs out of there so we want to be able to hear this and feel it we'll feel it more than hear it in the chorus so if we take it away the chorus you can hear it loses something and then you bring it in and it really adds to the atmosphere trying to create these mental images of the vast expanses of frozen wastelands that would have been the uk and northern europe during the ice winters and then we've got this sound here in the main riff called leviathan and again all we did here is just got rid of the law laws and that's kind of adding not so much note information as atmosphere and an underlying sense of consequent underlying sense of dread and melancholy so without it something's missing but with it it just gives this section some some atmosphere and interest and again that's automated in terms of volume and then it's pan especially here in this spoken word bit so what else have we got so we've got these ghost hack samples and that's things like orchestral hits and they're going to massive reverbs without any processing on them there's a riser sound just to increase the tension towards the end of the spoken word section and then we've got another impact sound abram and then those two played together sound like this and i used to re-pitch on that just to shift the pitch slightly so it was in key with the song so they sound like this just adds a little bit of subtle drama to this spoken word part where steve's talking about the bleak life of ice age humans and then we've got our riser comes in here again these aren't effects that are there to be heard direct sounds we want you to focus on steve's spoken word they're there to enhance the emotion of what he's saying and make the next section really pop and explode next up we've got the vocals and there's a lot of them that's because i tend to have things separated out onto lots of different tracks sometimes i'll comp things down and commit them so i've got a stereo track with like a gang vocal or multiple doubles and things on it but i didn't on this time because i was trying to i would i didn't have ideal recording circumstances because i was just in my bedroom because of the lockdown so i had everything separated out i won't go through all of these but i'll just show you what i've done which is pretty much the same the same on all of them to different degrees so he's got the main vocal so firstly i've got reaching just on automatic because i'm a rubbish singer keeping some of this around the the lower mids because that's where the warmth of the voice is got rid of this within the part here which made it sound like a cheap telephone and then got rid of the high highs here squishing it down six to seven db boosting it a little bit as well medium slow attack auto release trying to bring out the kind of attack of the vocals make them sound more to bring out their energy and emotion in them i couldn't be as aggressive with them as i wanted to in recording because my neighbors complain of fighting the little old lady upstairs so until i can get to a studio or space where i can be loud i'm gonna have to do vocals like this while we're in lockdown and the compression having the compression set like this really helps to counterbalance the the fact that i'm not able to be as loud along the plus side i'm having to think about things and enunciate them more and bring more emotion through my voice without having to just be loud and growly so it's definitely been an interesting way to record vocals using the low pass filter on the ssle channel boosting some 8k hard upon the frozen that's not a thing i just do all the time it just happens to be the way things have worked out on this song where i've had to add a lot of 8k on various things adding a bit at 4k just to help it poke through because i've ducked this down in various instruments somewhere the vocals can poke through getting rid of some of that low end low mid stuff onward little bit of the compression and i've got that set as the last in the chain on the channel strip with cla 76 blue face using the rock my vocal setting because it sounded cool nothing wrong with using presets if they sound good and work again to lock their vocal in place and then bring out more of the aggression you can hear the retune glitching there on my crappy singing but that's okay it kind of blends in with the music i've got lots of bare walls in my room and so i'm having more problems with this than usual but that's what i've got to do to get to make music at the moment so i'll have to live with it for now it's uh it's better to be making music even if it's not as good as you want it to be than it is just to sit and wait because the more you do then the more you learn and the better you get faster and then we've got that going to a delay and that is a short delay here and that's just hit delay with this setup one foot and that's pretty much the same way i mixed all of the all of the vocals i'll just look show you the the differences so in this pre-chorus a vocal i use a little altar boy to give it this spooky cold crystalline effect i've also put some saturation on it and on the chorus bus i've got decapitators just to help it blend with the heavy guitars more and a little bit of aggression and texture i'm also simultaneously putting the chorus vocal to a long and short delay to a separate long and a separate shot delay just to give it more of an epic feel because we're in the chorus now so things need to be really big so that's everything for the vocals yeah so for background vocals i eq then take off a lot more top and a lot more lower end as well just so i can get them to to sit back so this is steve's vocal as well we had a lot of issues with steve's vocals it wasn't recorded in like mine it wasn't recorded in ideal circumstances so i had to use this this weird eq curve to get it to fit and that's comped together from several takes that i edited so again it was a really good performance so what yeah so while it wasn't technically perfect it was still they were still really good performances and they really captured the emotion of the of the song and that's really more important than if it's technically good although ideally you'd have a technically good and emotive performance okay cool beans so these are the various reverbs i've got on the the verb that the drums go to is this uh soft tube sar one reverb and that sounds like this that's guitars going to as well it's like a hall setting and that just helps to put everything in the same space there's our short reverb h delay so the vocals go in before the effects chain so you can still really hear how bad my singing is but it gets the job done here's the long delay also use the filters on the on the delay to take out the highs and the lows so the the delay like the reverb sits back more and this is the cavern effect that's for the the cinematic impacts in the middle section and that's a h delay with those settings going into a czar one with all settings and that's and i usually send controls to set the volumes and then just leave that at zero i've also got this on the main reverb we've got this eq so that's all of the the separate instruments and and instrument groups everything goes down to a mix bus where i didn't have anything on the mix bus this time and then into the master bus so the first thing i've got on there take all of these off first thing i've got on there's ssl bus compressor and that's just doing a tiny little bit of compression we're just getting a little bit of a nudge on the needle just to sort of push things back down when you get those big tom rolls and the big snare heads then we've got this fab filter four cube just doing a low cut on there i can't remember i've got that one turned off and then this is a little experiment with mid side so here i'm doing a bit of an experiment on the master bus with uh fab filter pro q3's mid side functions normally i would get my pal soleus to master these for me but i didn't really have time for this on this one so i'm having a little bit of a go myself and i tend to i prefer to have someone else do it because soleus is really good and knows what he's doing and having someone else does it restores objectivity because by this point my objectivity is completely gone so it's hearing it with fresh ears so what we're doing now is we're putting all of the low end through the middle channel we're cutting the low end out of the sides and using the dynamic eq to do that and then using the dynamic eq to boost the low end in the middle and then we're taking some of the upper mids and lowering them in the middle of the spectrum and then boosting them at the sides there's on it's quite a subtle effect but if you listen carefully you can hear that it focuses the the low end down the middle and then we get a nice lift on the edges and lastly we've got l1 just to bring us up to volume so there we go that's how i mixed hesperpain's cruel teeth of winter and also did a half-baked mastering job on it i hope you found that useful let me know if there's any if you've picked up any new tricks from that or if there's anything you'd like me to talk about in detail about the tracking or mixing of this song you can check this song out on spotify and bandcamp hesperpain and i'll be doing more mixing tutorials in the future so subscribe so you can take advantage of those i've also put the multi-track files for this in a link below so if you want to download it and have a go of them of mixing it yourself then you can do that until next time see you later bye