Self-Inflicted Extinction

Song in Mikseri.net: Self-Inflicted Extinction

This song has been dormant for 3 years. I first pitched the idea of a death metal song where the bass would be just outrageous in 2014. Had couple of riffs in there and I liked it, but I couldn't come up with anything, so the idea eventually died.

The same idea came to me again some time ago while I was working, but this time it was more refined; I wanted to incorporate death metal, doom metal and that outrageous bass.
So the initial end result for the death metal parts was that one guitar would be laying some groundwork with slower doom-like rhythm, other guitar would be tremelo picking some figure in the key of the rhythm. And bass would be doing same as the "lead" guitar, just in a different pattern.
The whole song is based on triads, it's actually a childish, simplistic idea. The speed is the factor here that makes it sound the way it does. Slow it down and it's not so exciting.

At first I thought it would be just a blasting death metal song with the idea of the bass going throughout the song in triads, but when I got the death metal part done, I needed something to transition the song from verse to verse. At first I thought the bridge part would be slow doom-like piece, so at first I made a doom part, but that didn't work. Then I remembered that I had written down the tremolo-part of the verse, so I just took that and made the guitars play it in harmony, so I got my bridge.
I took the doom-part, now unused, and made it into pre-chorus, but what I came up as a chorus just didn't go well with the pre-chorus, so I changed places. It works better that way.

What comes after the chorus is just something I was doodling with, but I thought that it would be just hilarious to have an acoustic part in a song like this (propably there is bunch of bands that have done such thing (Arch Enemy comes to my mind), but I haven't) and it gives a nice contrast.
The acoustic part is the only one that is NOT based on triads in this song. :D

Oh well, so, about the bread and butter of this blog; the mixing.

I had a rough idea of what I wanted this to sound like; fat guitars, clangy bass and big drums. Well that was the initial idea atleast. But it got refined as I started fooling around.
The first mix basically had everything I mentioned above, but I didn't like it as much I thought I would, so I had to come up with something else.
I still wanted to keep some of the elements there, so I tried and found a nice sludgy sound for the rhythm guitar.
This song is mixed basically just with Blue Cat Audio's Destructor, only bassdrum has Reaper's own EQ with the Destructor.

Rhythm guitar achieved the nice, dirty and ugly sound pretty much the same way as the lead guitar; with Destructor's bass amp presets. Since Destructor is basically 2 EQ:s and a distortion module, there is no reason to stick to the "guitar" presets when dealing with guitars.
The lead guitar has a clean bass preset called Aluminium Man, at first I used it for bass too, but it didn't work that well in the mix, so I changed bass to the dirty version of the same preset, so the bass has some distortion in it... Again.

Drums had, well, drum presets at first, but I wanted something else for them. I wanted them to be clear and gritty, so I just shuffled through the presets and eventually set with different prestes of "tape emulations" for the drums. I added some EQ to the bassdrum to make it more prominent in the mix. Some 60Hz boost to give it some oomph and some 4KHz boost to give it some (oh) snap.

This time I didn't do anything to the acoustic guitar. Just raised its levels to match it with the other instruments.

When all that was done I added Destructor to the master track and fooled around with the "mix" presets until I found something I liked. Then I just adjusted the compressor a little and leveled it so that the mix doesn't hit red.

So that was the story of this song in a nutshell. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Miehen Kivinen Tie

Miehen Kivinen Tie
Dynamics are for pussies. ;)

This is my first release with new DAW and plugin that I bought. I got Reaper for DAW and Blue Cat Audio's Destructor mainly for guitar and bass use... But I noticed that it has presets for so much more, so I used it. So basically this is kind of a test run with new equipment. :)

My new workspace ^^

At first I wasn't sure how I would proceed with this song, so I just went with trial and error. As I was testing I decided to just blast the shit out of the mix, so I did.
The drums are the most prominent example of this approach. I played only with the presets here because they are extremely good, there is plenty and well... I haven't gone in-depth with the plugin yet.

For bassdrum I used "Bassdrum Oomph"-preset which turned it kinda like it's from some house song or such... Not so metal. :D
But it's great for this mix because it's easy to pinpoint and it's so out of place here... To me it's so wrong it's great.
I put the same preset on the toms just to make them go BOOM!

Snare and cymbals got 2 versions of "Smiley Exciter"-preset which, as you might guess, is a V-shape EQ curve. It worked nicely as it took both aspects of the drumkit out from the frequency spectrum where bassdrum and toms are, despite the bass boost.

After all that destruction, I made a Drums Master-track where I applied Vladislav Goncharov's Limiter no6 to compress and limit the drums. I compressed the drums with 3:1 ratio, long attack and short release. I also engaged the high-frequency limiter to keep the cymbals in place.

As a pre-caution I also used the peak limiter in multiband mode and the protection module as a final "master limiter" for the drums.

For guitars I used the "Convolution Amp/Cab modeler" provided with Reaper. Left guitar got Fender Deluxe amp with Marshall Cab and right guitar got JCM 800 with the same cab as the left track. After that I looked at the frequency spectrum of the guitars and as a result applied EQ to them. What happened as a result is a bit wide notch around 100Hz to remove the boom from the guitars.

For bass I used the BC Destructor's "Aluminium man" preset that gives bass the grit you hear. As with guitars I checked the spectrum and as a result I basically cut everything around 50Hz, but the notch grows exponentially, so the notch affects degradingly all the way to 500Hz.

After all that it was time for the Master channel. There I also used Destructor and found a preset called "Oomph mix". It basically boosts the whole spectrum, balance leaning towards bass. Afterwards I just applied Limiter No6 again to limit the whole thing to -0.5dB. Destructor has a built-in limiter, but there's no control to it, so I just wanted to make sure the red light doesn't flash, that's all.

The result is something that I haven't done before, but I'm satisfied with it and had a lot of fun fooling around while mixing this. Watch out for your eardrums and enjoy!