Slow In Motion: Stories from a deep place

Slow In Motion - Stories from a deep place

The second installment from Slow In Motion is finished at last! I'm going to talk about the last song of the package, since it's the one that took most work mixingwise and because every individual element explained here is the same in every song where applicable. So, let's get started.

I had a clear vision of what I want from the sound of the second package; fuzz! A LOT of FUZZ! And I got what I wanted.

As you can see, the last song took some doing, since there were many elements to take into consideration.


First of all, to achieve the FUZZ I was after, I went for the guitars. The bread and butter of the resulting sound is Distorque Audio's Face Bender. I was so happy to see that it actually has 2 stompbox effects modelled, so naturally I put one to left guitar (fuzzface) and the other (Tone Bender) to right guitar. I then tweaked the pedals settings individually to go together. The amp sim I used was just some quite random amp I have. To that I didn't do any individual tweaks, just a working base tone to build upon. The result was even better I had hoped, but to keep the guitars in check I put GVST's Multiband Compressor to the group track and squashed bass, middle, and treble frequencies.


The bass (as usual for me) turned out to be a hard one to get sounding good. I've been playing with TSE Audio's BOD for some time before I started working on the sound for this package and decided to use it since every other method didn't seem to work at all. I'm not sure that I can say I'm happy with the result, but it works in this context, so why not? I worked fairly long with the BOD being the one bringing the distortion to the sound, but at some point I decided to turn it around, making BOD more like a booster and eq.
EQ on the bass is well... Bass. I didn't want any clang and sparkle to the sound, since it just sounded weird with the guitars (tried it at one point). After all I put multiband compressor in there, let all the bass frequencies through with some compression (as you can see) and cut the mids somewhat and almost all of the treble. So all-in-all the bass is like a layer of distortion here. And you can hear it clearly at some points throughout the package.

Drums were fairly simple to do because I knew exactly what I wanted and how to achieve it. I just put the drums through Shattered Glass Audio's Ace. Individual settings for different parts of the drums and that was it. The result is very basement-like, but I really like what that amp sim does to that particular set of samples. After that I just put a compressor on the drums group track in Cubase and tweaked it to perfection.


I had some idea of what to do with the piano. There were 2 things on my mind; need to get some life and space to the sound and put it a bit to the background. Well, succeeded on the first and ultimately "failed" on the second. To have some space and life to the sound I used Soft Amp's Flextron DC14. Once again a guitar amp simulation, but who cares?
Most pleasing sound I achieved with the 2000's model paired with 1x12 cab, since I didn't want it to sound "big and bassy" with the 4x12. The life to the sound came through that with heavy middle and treble boost and the space to the sound came with the built-in reverb and ambiance of the cabinet mic. After that I just put a compressor on it and tweaked it a little. The compressor doesn't actually compress but brings it's own twist to the sound. The same thing was actually with the drums, since I used the same plugin called Max Synth's DSP-3. I really liked how it fitted to the soundscape and at first the piano was in the background (in the 9th song, since it was the first to have it) and I thought it was fine. But coming to the last song with all the other elements (mainly the strings) I noticed that guitars pretty much buried it in combination with the strings, so something had to be done. Solution was fortunately simple as to just bring up the level of the piano quite a bit. I had to remix the 9th song because of the changes to the piano and at first it felt like the piano was too loud. But I got over it so quick that I decided to leave it like it is. So the piano sure as hell isn't in the background anymore.


The first "new" thing to work on this song was the violin, which also does something that I haven't had in these songs before; playing a solo. I didn't want to assign one of the guitars to the solo because I wanted it to sound constant, so I had to come up with something else. I remembered that I have many times used a certain violin samples when I've needed one, so I decided to go with that. I've tweaked the violin so that one (the original) is really short on sustain and the other has a buttload of sustain. Because of that their attack (and thus sound) is a bit different from each other. I used the long sustain in the longer notes and the short one in the faster runs.

The solo came to be as I just felt that this song could really use one, so I played around for some time before coming up with the pattern. It's simple, but that's how my solos mostly are as I never see myself as a solo player, so I'm not so good at composing them. Also I have much limitations when it comes to solos since I don't know many scales or anything like that. The solo part is kind of an combination of something older (the rhythm part) and newer (being the solo itself). As I was playing around with the melodyline, I got the idea of combining it with that rhythm. That opened up some possibilities to me since the whole part goes mostly on triplets. I really used that to my advantage on the drums and that's why they sound the way they do in there.

I had the same idea with the violin as I did with the piano; life and space. But this time I didn't use an amplifier simulation. Instead I got the life from Digilogue's ancient Blueline Chorus and the space came from same serie's reverb. I tweaked them to really have an impact on the sound and then leveled it with some compression. But then I had to brought it up aswell since it is after all the one to play the solo and shine in the spotlight.


Last but not least was the strings. I first had them only in the solo part and I really really liked it. But then I thought that it would sound more epic and be more constant if they would be layered all over the song. So I did that and I heard it was good. The strings were fairly simple to get to fit into the soundscape as I only used the DSP-3 to give it some colour and then just searched for the right level for them to be present but not dominating. All-in-all I think I succeeded pretty well. The result is more like an epic melodic metal song than a sludge song, but it fits for the theme of the song a lot better that way and really stands out as a closer to the package.

So, there you have it, long story about a long musical journey. Enjoy!

Black Metal Army of the Seven Nations

Black Metal Army of the Seven Nations

This got started sometime in fall last year, can't remember exactly when. I had the base of the sound done beforehand because I was working on another black metal song.
The initial sound isn't so kvlt, but I liked it, so I worked some (black) magic in Podium.

The sound you hear is the result of shitloads of VSTs. There's first Grease Tube on the guitars and bass. Guitars are "tight and compressed" as the settings say in the plugin. The bass is complete opposite, being "open and crisp" with "far" mic placement that gives it depth and even more bass.
Drums are layered with my presets in 50rcery, which I've come to conclusion, is a compressive multiband EQ. :D
Then in Podium I put some more compression on the drums and EQ on the bassdrum. For the EQ I Boosted 60Hz, 500Hz and 2kHz.
But the real black magic came from the 50rcery in the master channel with most boost on low-mids and treble.

Mostly this is just me trying to remember what I did as most of the parts of the song were already made last year. Today I mostly just made some re-arranging and re-working the parts already done. The only new thing from scratch was the solo. At first I had no idea what to do with it, but after a while I got the idea of using bass on it. But the bass I used on the song already didn't work on that, so I got the other sample set I usually use in my songs.
Then it was just decision of what to do with the sound. But that wasn't a big problem, because the answer to life and everything in the universe if FUZZ! I just put Face Bender on it, tweaked it to perfection and went with it. At first I thought to follow the original solo, but then again since I don't do it with the riffs either I just intrepreted it. It sounded wicked in the tracker already and propably not in a good way, but I wanted to make it just outrageous so I put some phaser and reverb on it in Podium and the rest is history. :D

I finished the song after the solo because I felt like it had nothing more to offer. So here you go, a quick and dirty explanation of a quick and dirty raped song.

Slow In Motion: Things yet to come.

02. Pressure of Becoming

I'm going to write only one post regarding this forthcomihg "album" because the sound is initially the same on every song.

I've learned that you can get interesting sounds when you put already amped guitars and bass through an VST guitar or bass amp. And in this case (as in most of my mixing work lately) I put the drums through an guitar amp simulation aswell.

Guitars went through an AXP Flextron clean channel with the '90s mode. When I took the "bright"-setting off I got that mud'n'dirt to the sound. After that I tweaked the EQ in such a way that the curve is almost flat (as seen in the following picture).

The EQ on the amp is almost the one I always use; bass halfway and mids full. The only difference here is the highs that I reduced a lot to cut the hiss'n'sparkle. Only real difference between the channels is the tube position which is Post-EQ for one and Pre-EQ for the other.

Bass went through Shattered Glass Audio's Ace which is a Fender Tweed rendition. It gave a nice growl to the bass; it breaks nicely to distortion. There's nothing much to tell here; I just played with it until I was satisfied with the result.

I put drums through AXP's FM25 which is a rendition of Fender's Frontman 25. Not the most aftersought amplifier, but excellent for this purpose. Everything went through the clean channel with individual tweaks to EQ and cabinet.
Bassdrum and toms got 1x10 cab with hard mid-scoop EQ; 10-0-10. Ten seemed to be the key for that. :)
Snare was just flat-out full blast EQ with 2x12 cab.
Hats got some reverb (half-way), not that it can be heard. :P Cab was 1x10 with full mids and treble. Bass I cut completely out.

So that was the initial sound in Modplug Tracker. It clipped somewhat heavily, but since individual tracks did not, I went with it. After I got that done I ported the whole thing to Cubase for final tweaking.

In Cubase I didn't do too much. Since the guitars have somewhat different sound (left being much more muddy) I boosted the level of left guitar 3dB compared to the right one. Bass got some compression to make it even and constant. The only other major thing before master channel was the snare which sounded quite thin on it's own. So I put some EQ with low-mid boost and some sparkle at 2kHz. And after that some compression to bring it up in the mix.

Master channel included a compressor and limiter to push the mix and prevent it from clipping. Dynamically this is a murder, but that's what I was going for; a dirty wall of sound.
I got what I was after, I hope you enjoy.