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.

Death to Terrorism

Death to Terrorism



At last I have something to write again! I have another song finished aswell, have to consult the archives before I can release and write about it though. It's been finished for some time now, so I need and try to remember how I mixed that one. But that's not this song, so let's get to the point here.

This was originally just a test of a plugin type I hadn't used before; a gate.
I had experimented with it in 2 other songs-in-the-works, but this one was the first to be complete.

At first I had the gate on drums as well as on bass. On drums it was so tight it killed all sustain and at first I was happy, since it was going to be a fast song right from the start. But then I noticed that the bassdrum had some kickback because of the gate. It wasn't audible in the fast parts and barely in the slow ones, but it still bothered me a lot. So I opened up the gate somewhat so it left some sustain to the drums and also returned some of the original sound of the samples. And I saw it was good.

The gate on bass made it distorted in a very sweet way (for my ears), sounding like a bit crusher. I liked the way it sounded and was very happy... For a while. It turned out that the gate didn't work in the long run; the sound became really odd after some time into the song. So ultimately I had to think something else for the bass.

I had an idea for the guitar after reqular EQ proved not to work as I wanted in this situation. I got the Grease Tube VST plugin and tweaked the guitar sound with that. And it made wonders for it, making the guitar track extremely dirty.

So the next idea was to put the same plugin on the bass track. And it proved to give a really decent result. I have to admit I'm still sad that the gate didn't work because with the guitar track it would've propably been a killer sound. But all-in-all this was a really good alternative since the plugin gave some nice distortion to the bass.

After I got all done in MPT I exported the tracks to Podium for the final mix. And that proved to be a pain in the ass... A big one too.
I had already done some mixes with the gated bass, so at this point it was just tweaking the levels, but that turned out to be quite a job to do. All-in-all I had to mix this shit almost 20 times before it was finished. The mixing was a bigger job than the composing or coming up with the sounds. :P

In Podium I added EQ on the bassdrum, snare and cymbals, but this time I boosted only ranges from around 1kHz to 4.5kHz. As follows:
Bassdrum: 6dB boost at 2kHz.
Snare: 3dB boost at 1,25kHz.
Cymbals: 4.5dB boost at 3kHz and 3dB boost at 4.5kHz.

So in that matter too this was a different way for me to do things. I wanted to make a clear dirty mix, so that's why I didn't make the drums so snappy and crispy. It wouldn't have fit for the atmosphere of the song.

I had really hard time with the drums on this one, they were being buried all the time. So after like 15th or 16th mix it was clear to me that I need to bring the guitar and bass down. So I made a 3dB reduction to them and got the drums' levels up a bit in the process. Now it sounded really neat on my AKG K-44 headphones and I was so happy.
But then I listened it through my KRK Rockit 5's and it became clear that the snare is barely audible at times. :/
Some listens more and I realized that I can't do too much to it or it becomes too dominant on the other parts, so I left it as it was.

This time I used compression on the master track along with the usual limiter. That's how I mixed all the mixes before the last one. I noticed that the compression cut some of the low end, so I exported 3 files from Podium: drums, bass and guitar. Drums I exported the way I had mixed the song: with compression and limiter. Bass and guitar got out without compression, although they both are extremely compressed already because of the Grease Tube.

After that I imported those three tracks back to Podium, applied the limiter to master track and made some reduction in levels and that was it. Finally.

So there's little problems with the snare, but I'm still very happy the way this turned out to sound. And composing-wise I'm also satisfied, I think there's some nice things going on, especially with the drums. Also something bit different at times.

Enjoy this little piece of heaven. ;)

Obscure Abomination

Obscure Abomination

A trio-based death metal this time (as there is only one set of guitarsamples). Sort of repetitive as DM is not my "primary" style, not too good at composing it. Still every now and then I just get the feel to do something like that. But to the point, shall we?

Ok, so first I made a good sounding rough mix in Modplug Tracker that is eventually what you hear in the final mix. There was not much that needed to be done, mostly level adjustments. Compression and eq on bass and that was it. The mix in MPT hit the red almost all the time, but individual tracks were ok, so it was a good foundation to work with in Podium.

So, guitars are raw, there is no eq or anything on them most of the time. And by most of the time I mean that there is the part at around 1:20, but we'll get to that later.
The main sound of the guitars are the raw sound of the samples. And to this song it works just fine, atleast to my ears. Only thing was that the guitar track was doubled to compensate the boost of bass and drums.

Bass has my "dry curve"-eq, but still it comes out in the mix quite nicely, beefing the sound up. The guitar itself has quite bassy sound, but I think these work together nicely. They don't eat eachother out.

I started from scratch with the drums. I had a new plugin to work with, 50rcery, a multiband compressor that doesn't seem to be a compressor afterall. Oh well, anyways, as it works like one, I used it like one.
I made 2 presets; one for the drums and one for the cymbals. I first did what I've learned to do a while ago; long attack and short releases. After that I focused on the threshold and with it I pretty much killed the sustain of the drums. There was only going to be "short and aggressive" drums, and I think I got it right.


Oh yeah, and then there is the part at 1:20. For that I had to double every track. And thst's what you see in Podium; the little trio-based dm piece took 24 tracks! :P

That specific part's sound was inspired by Torture Killer song off of the album 'Swarm!'. Can't remember what song though.
Anyway, I wanted to make my version of that idea, so I doubled the tracks and worked a sound of it's own to that part. That meant mostly eq with high-end boost and rough bass-cut.
Again two presets were made from scratch; one for the guitar and bass and the other for drums.

The preset for stringed instruments got boost from 10kHz to 19kHz and everything else cut. That pretty much kills the bass in this, but then again it was somewhat the point, as I wanted a really thin sound.
The drums were pretty much the same, only that the boost was from 1kHz to 19kHz and everything else got cut.

After that I exported everything to Podium, set the levels and started to think what to do with that "special part".
It was dry alright, but as my original intention for the sound was to put it through a speaker emulation of some 2x2" cabinet and I couldn't do it, I had to come up with something else to push it back a little to make it sound even more tiny and lofi.
So, the solution was to level it down a little more than the "main sound" and add some reverb. I think I did the trick as good as it could be done with the set of tools I have.

The final thing was to put limiter on the master track with a -0.5dB ceiling (I started to use that a while back) and boost up the overall volume so that it clips only a little every now and then. Though it seemed to clip a bit more than I expected when I opened the mixdown in the sound editor, but I decided to leave it at that.

So, here it is; a short blast of high-speed death for your ears... You're welcome. ;)

UPDATE: Ok, so I got some feedback about the ride-cymbal. I made changes to it based on the feedback and tweaked the volume levels.
As I was on it, I reworked one part of the song a little, and well, now I'm more satisfied with it.

I had to export the tracks again to Podium, so I thought to do a little re-mixing to it as well. I put some mild eq-boost on the bassdrum and snare and after that I tweaked the levels a bit. Bassdrum got a little cut, snare was kept as-is and the guitars and bass got boosted about 3dB.

The boost from the limiter plugin was removed and it's character shaped a little.

So, little tweaking here and there. I think it turned out ok. :)

Cnoc An Tursa - Bannockburn

Cnoc An Tursa - Bannockburn

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!

The Ghost, The Spirit, The Killer

The Ghost, The Spirit, The Killer

Some Twin Peaks-inspired doom-metal this time. Somewhat lot of restrictions when it comes to composing because of the samples, but for so long I've wanted to do something with this sampleset. The sound is propably the crispiest I've had so far... And I love it!
This is the first song I made totally on my laptop, that brought some new things with it, and that's propably the reason why I feel like I had some problems with this song here and there.

I've used the guitars and bass multiple times in different songs, but never together (if I remember right). And this is only the second time I use this drumkit.

What I mean about the restrictions regarding the composing is that the guitars only has one octave of open and muted powerchords, so every melody had to be played on different instrument and the guitars would only be there to provide the rhythm. I thought about violing, cello and clean/acoustic guitar for the melodies but ultimately settled with the piano.
That was great, because then I got the idea of making it sound really creepy when I came up with the melody for the intro (which by the way sounds really Halloween to me). So I have 3 tracks of piano on every melody; one center, one delayed panned to left and one delayed panned to the right.
So, for a while I was happy with the result. But then it started to sound like it needs more creepyness. So I threw some reverb in there and brought it up a little in the mix.
Now it's creepy enough for me. :)

From the original notes the final tracked version has some major changes; the verseriff is totally remade and the drums in chorus have got some changes too. It's a lot better now.

The mixing turned out to be really tricky. I lost the count how many mixed I've done before coming up with this.
I started, "as usual", by implementing my "curves" to the guitar and bass. And those curves look like this:

Bass...

...And guitar.

And then some compression to the drums and EQ to the piano. So the rough mix had all the elements I usually use.
After that I got all the tracks to Podium and put some EQ on the bassdrum and snare. And the reverb to the piano.

I had read from a finnish book called "Rockband's ABC" that if you want the "snap" to the bassdrum, boost the EQ around 4kHz. So I did and it really was there. I was so happy! So I boosted the snare as well from 4 and 5 kHz, got some "snap" there as well.

A lot of experimenting was done with the mixing before getting it the way it is. In many ways this is reverted back to the raw mix.
I had put some EQ on the toms as well, distortion on the bass... At some point there was 2 tracks of bass; the clean and the distorted. But all-in-all those experiments didn't sound so good afterall.

So what you hear here is quite much the first mix after the raw one. Drums have the EQ on bassdrum and snare and reverb on the piano.

The guitars could use different eq-settings to get even crispier sound, but that should be done from the modelling-processor and re-record the samples. Now I have to go with this, so here is another piece from me. I'm satisfied, I hope you are too after you have finished listening the song.

A Dying World

A Dying World


Another older song. First I thought this to be for Left Side of the Track, but as the musical direction changed I thought to track and release this. A lot have changed when compared to the original; tuning came up to standard E from drop A, Hammond changed to violin and I added contrabass and timpani when I had made the base of the song in Open MPT. I also made some alterations to the drums as I was tracking the song and some little additions were made to the song as well (most notably the contrabass "solo" part).

This song was a pain in the ass to make. The tracking part was easy but after that came the problems. At first the violin sounded to be out of tune with the guitars, but that was just my ears f*cking with my brain. And after that came the problems with the volume of the violin; other channel was louder than the other, so it was heavily panned. Got it fixed pretty easily though.
After those came the crashes; at first they were way too loud! That took three mixes to get it right.

So was it there then? All good to go? Ha! No!
After the crashes came the bassdrum; it got buried badly in the blastbeat-parts. Luckily that was easy to fix; a bit more volume to it and that was it.

At that point I had made three mixes of the song and it still wasn't good enough.

Next problem was the overall mix; it was so quiet, so damn quiet. So once again it was back to the old track editor view... Next up was the overall volume boost, which didn't solve all the problems. Of course it didn't!
It was louder alright but all the "orchestral" elements got buried really bad. So another mix was to be made.

I had played it secure at first; the levels were cut really hard, so no red light was flashing. But it turned out to be too secure, so I got all the levels up a bit, to the point where little flashing occured.

Now, after many different versions and several mixes later the song is finished. All is quite well balanced, although the guitar gets a little buried in the blast parts, but all-in-all I'm happy with this now.

So, take a listen and enjoy.