This song has been most challenging to mix so far. Part of being that it's black metal, the other that it had 22 tracks.
So, I once again retrieved some raw tracks from Mike Senior's multitrack resource page.
And because of that my "workspace" looked a lot different than usual:
No tracking, no Modplug Tracker, nothing too "conventional" for me. Haven't worked too much straight in the DAW doing the mixing. Oh well.
6 tracks for the guitars turned out to be quite challenging. They almost buried everything else and also each other... And well... There's so much going on all-in-all that at some points some burying occurs. Atleast to my ears.
All guitar tracks have individual sounds, 3 tracks being panned left and 3 panned right. I used my previously created presets on the rhythm guitar tracks and made sound for the lead tracks from scratch.
The rhythm tracks are modern high-gain, while the lead tracks got more a vintage british high-gain with chorus and delay.
The first rhythm track has more open sound, while still being crisp and extremely aggressive. This can best be heard during the second guitar break at 3:07.
The second rhythm track has extremely compressed sound that takes no prisoners. This sound can best be heard during the first guitar break at 1:40.
Bass track was put through guitar amp simulation, the very same that the guitars use. The amp setting was made modern middlescooped high-gain and put through bass-cabinet modeling with 15" speaker. So it's the first time I use distorted bass on a mixing project like this. I thought that it seems to be so common these days that I'd give it a try as well.
I had no presets for the drums since I'm working on my laptop now, and all my previous presets for plugins I usually use are on my old PC. And also because of that I had to get new plugins, so I have all new tools in my pack now and I'm learning to use them as I mix.
This time I used some EQ on the bassdrum, snare and toms. And all tracks got a limiter in there.
The hardest part so far was getting the levels right for the drums and the guitars. After getting those out of the way the next big problem was the synths. That was luckily quite easy to fix, since some tube compression brought them up in the mix. Still there's so much going on with the synths all the guitar tracks and all, that I feel like the soundscape is a bit too full...
The vocals were quite easy since I had quite good vision what to do with them. Since there was 2 tracks of lead vocals, I took them both and panned them a bit to spread the stereo image and to leave some space in the middle for bass, drums and backing vocals.
I then applied some tube compression and reverb to them.
The backing vocals had one big problem; when they came along, the lead vocals got buried, and when I pushed the backing vocals back, it was like they were not there. So I came up with the idea to lower their pitch with one VST I have. So they got positioned in the middle along with some tube compression in register octave below the original.
So, this is my first time mixing black metal. What do you think of it? Was hell of a job, but fun nevertheless!
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