New rock instrumental… fit for listing?

[zacnelson]

Thanks Steven! I'll make sure I let you know!

[denalihighway]

Love this track Zac - sorry I'm late to the party.

Take this with a large grain of salt, and I'm listening on laptop speakers also, but the big sections left me wishing for a slight bit more dynamic range, and then at one point I wondered was I actually enjoying nodding along to what I perceived was slight pumping... I really don't feel qualified to say that though. Did you go pretty heavy on the bus compression / limiting?

Really great stuff though. I was listening to stuff like this jogging on the seafront the other day.

[zacnelson]

I limited it a tad more than I usually would; I was trying to capture the dense sound that I've heard on some reference tracks that I like, it's a modern rock approach I suppose, it was definitely intentional. Thanks for listening!

[denalihighway]

ah yeah - I see. Cool...

It certainly has a real intense, density to it, which I really liked. A lot of power and punch in the guitars.

Great stuff man.

[denalihighway]

Are you still using the Spectrum Mapper on most of your stuff? I bought it in that sale too but I haven't learnt how to use it properly yet so haven't been using it... gotta get into that.

[RockChild56]

Yo Zac,

Hmmm maybe Post Rock is the Genre I need to be listening to these days.
It seems to be a mixture of Power Metal and Pink Floyd.

I like the feel and the power of you have going on.

Good Luck Man,

EJB

[zacnelson]

Thanks EJB! Actually I'm still not 100% sure I know what post-rock is…. I imagine there would be many examples that are a lot further away from metal or hard rock. Maybe post-rock is whatever you want it to be?!

You might want to check out the track by Gareth Ebbs (Denalihighway) - it's on another thread in this forum. His is probably a better example of the sound I think of when I imagine post-rock. I think my track is bordering on modern rock. But it's fairly cinematic so I'm hoping I get a forward!!!

[zacnelson]

Gareth, I'm glad you like the punch in the guitars, it certainly is VERY hard to achieve that - so many different guitar parts competing for space in the mix!!

Oh and if anyone is interested in some mixing tips for getting all those guitar parts to co-operate, let me know and I'll try and reveal some secrets!!

And Gareth I am still using the DSM V2, I use it on acoustic guitars EVERY time, and on lead vocals EVERY time. I can't live without it.

However when I first got it, I over-used it, and it took me a few months to truly understand where it's strengths lie! It's a very strange beast and I don't think I've ever had so much trouble familiarising myself with a plugin, at the same time I couldn't live without it!

[denalihighway]

Cool - well its sure workin well on your stuff. I really need to go back to that thing. I noodled with it when I bought it but I didn't know what I was doing and I was making a hash of what I was mixing!

Feel free to post any of those mixing secrets you're talking

Cheers dude

[zacnelson]

I can't remember, but I don't think the DSM V2 features in the mix on Too Close To The Sun.

Anyway, one of the big secrets to getting a wall of guitars track like this to work is that you need to make a lot of the individual elements sound SMALL. A BBBIIIGGGG sounding mix is really only achieved by accumulating lots of small sounds, a combination of BIG sounds all together results in a small sounding final mix!!!

The key to getting those big guitar sounds is to knock off HEAPS of top end. I honestly don't think hardly anyone realises this. I will sometimes low-pass as far down as 4khz. This may take some getting used to, particularly when you solo the guitars. So the big high-gain power chords chugging along under the other guitars are heavily low-passed. But the higher distorted guitars are also low-passed a bit too, because they need to leave room for the cymbals and other cleaner instruments to sparkle. Also, on the power chords I'm allowing the guitar sound to be quite deep, some people get carried away high-passing every element in the mix, or scooping the lows, in order to not have too much in the low-mids. I agree that mixes can quickly accumulate a low-mid clutter which is ugly and dense. But in my experience people go overboard and suck the low-mids out of each track, when really you want to allow one or two instruments to really own the low-mid territory. In this case, I originally scooped the lows on the power guitar at around 300hz, because when it was solo-ed it felt like that part of the sound was a bit ugly. BUT when all the tracks are played together, and the power guitar is just one character in a dense mix, it actually made sense for me to remove that EQ plugin and allow the power guitar to own that spot in the frequency range. So you can really HEAR that guitar, not just feel it. And the same goes for high-passing instruments. Sure if you have a layer of icing with one of the instruments that is going to sit above the others, then high-pass a lot, even up to 200hz. But with those power guitars, whilst I was tempted to high-pass reasonably high (say 100hz), I actually opened it up more and only high-passed to about 40hz. That way it really extends the warmth down noticeably, and fills an otherwise empty area in the mix, it all seems more anchored that way.

With the snare drum you need to be unafraid to allow it to have some strong woody mids in the 500hz to 1khz range. Sometimes it can be tempting to suck out the mids because they might feel a bit boxy or ugly, but when you remove too many mids, the snare ends up just blending in too much with the overall mix, and even though it can be heard, it doesn't STICK OUT. In a lot of good mixes you'll notice that the snare, even if it's not super loud (although it's usually quite loud), tends to occupy a very specific place of it's own in the mids.