Feedback on this grindcore mix.

A

ausgrindslaught

New member
Hey guys I'm an Australian guitarist down in here Sydney. I recently bought a digital 8 track (40 gig hd, USB out, 4 mic inputs) and have been trying my hand a mixing in Cool Edit Pro.

Not sure if many of you know what it is, but my band plays grindcore - so what we need is a wall of guitars, drums cutting through the mix and a nice phat bass to round out the sound. The muddiness or cleanness of the sound depends on the individual - Nasum's Shift and Rotten Sound's Exit are very noisey, muddy albums, but are awesomely powerful. However, something like Nasum's Helvete or any Napalm Death circa 1996 to today have clean crisp productions. I'm somewhere in between there :)

Anyway so I recorded drums with a snare mic, bass mic and one overhead. Gutiars recorded straight into the 8track. Atm got 4 guitar layers, one bass and one for each drum mic. Recording wasnt the most ideal, but I'm doing a proper demo in about a month and just messing round til then.

Take a listen to my mix and give me any feedback you can. Any tips on creating a bigger sound (in regards to drums, guitar, bass I dont mind) or even clearing up a bit of the noise would be awesome. I've had a lot of double getting the dble kicks to cut through without destroying anything else.

I've been checking out the forums here and a lot of you seem to have good advice to offer. Hope the extreme genre doesnt prevent you from doing the same with me.

Cheers guys, the MP3 is at -
 
OMG!
The mix sounds very "mono".
Maybe pan guitars and drums?
I also think you went overboard with the level.
Nobody here would think they'd ever hear me say this, but it's much too limited and compressed :eek:
I am know as a limiting and loudness defender, but too much is too much!
 
Yes I'd say it is compressed and limited - look at the image of the MP3 file in Sound Forge. :D

Sorry I can't upload the whole image - got to get me one of those editors - suggestions anyone?

Can't listen to this at work but I would wonder about distortion/clipping at these levels.....

:eek: :D
 

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Haha thanks for the kind words and help guys (and girls).

The mix sounds very "mono". Maybe pan guitars and drums? I also think you went overboard with the level.
Click to expand...

I've got one guitar panned left at 100%, another right at 100% (both in the outer spectrum), then another panned left around 60-80 and another right in the same (close to the centre in the spectrum too). All have slightly different tones.

Up the middle I have all the snare and bass drum. Slightly outside that is the bass guitar - so it doesnt overpower the guitars too much or totally kill the drums. Got one overhead panned hard right. When I do this 'properly' I'll have 2 overheads.

I'm going to mess around with where I place the vocals, I dont like where they are... they lose a fair bit of aggression. Those vocals are totally random by the way - just some random recorded stuff from a rehearsal tryout... in no way representation of how they'll finish up!

I compressed the drums - nothing else. Had to normalise the guitars to bring the level up. Not sure why I get that crackling with the guitar tracks (check when all guitars kick in with no drums near the end). Got some dynamics processing on the snare to make it nice and punchy. Bass drums still get pretty lost in the mix.

Again thanks for the help.
 
ausgrindslaught said:
I compressed the drums - nothing else. Had to normalise the guitars to bring the level up. Not sure why I get that crackling with the guitar tracks (check when all guitars kick in with no drums near the end). Got some dynamics processing on the snare to make it nice and punchy. Bass drums still get pretty lost in the mix.

Again thanks for the help.
Click to expand...
The crackling is happening because you are using digital maximum for your limiting. :eek: See attached pic, the "possibly clipped samples" reading should be 0, you are in the many thousands. Every one of those is a click or pop, and are quite unpleasant, even for grindcore.

The roughly -8.3db average power and -4dB maximum power is exceedingly loud. Just about to the point of unbearable, especially with all the clipped samples.

If you only gave the drums compression, you gave a shit-ton of compression and limiting to the overall mix (during "mastering").

I think a better mix, that has been mixed down with no clipping... hell even give it 12-8dB of headroom. And put it in the hands of a decent proclaimed Mastering Engineer, it'll sound a lot better and a lot more professional.
If you insist on doing your own mastering, do research on the subject. It's a very important step that is often overlooked by home recordists.
 

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ausgrindslaught said:
I've got one guitar panned left at 100%, another right at 100% (both in the outer spectrum), then another panned left around 60-80 and another right in the same (close to the centre in the spectrum too). All have slightly different tones.
Click to expand...
Uh ?
I use headphones and can't hear the guitars on each side, maybe the guitars you put closer to center overpowers the hard panned guitars? If that's the case, I think you should hard pan everything, sounds was better to me.
 
I'll check out the hard panning.

Yeah thats all I compressed... And I have done zero mastering. About to play with mastering for the first time ever. This is just for fun, its not being released. Recording a decent demo CDR next month to give out at gigs.

Any chance you could reiterate some of that mastering/limiting talk in laymens terms?
 
Alright I had a go at having a quick master (I normalised the wave to about 50% then did some very fast attack compression). Sounds a fair bit smoother... check it out;

 
Yeah that 2nd one is betta. But, um.....you gotta, uh .....it's like, uh, how you say? Let me put this another way. When I come home from a long day at the office and put on my grindcore, I just... ...I don't know what I'm trying to say here; but, you know?
 
Yeah that 2nd one is betta. But, um.....you gotta, uh .....it's like, uh, how you say? Let me put this another way. When I come home from a long day at the office and put on my grindcore, I just... ...I don't know what I'm trying to say here; but, you know?
Click to expand...

Haha, nah I dont mate. I put on my grindcore going to work, during work, after work, then play it myself after work, goto grindcore gigs, run a grindcore record label and play in 2 grindcore bands... You might say I like my grindcore. Sorta. (not that I dont listen to plenty of other stuff)
 
Honestly, I feel reading up any good mixing tutorial should help this mix out a great deal.. I know grindcore is meant to have a certain degree of chaos to it, but I think you should be aiming for a bit more of a "controlled" chaos.. If you know where the noise is being introduced, then you know how to make it to your taste.. Basically what you should be paying the most attention to is your levels.. I get a sense that the preamps are cranked to the max, or that the recording levels on the channels are too hot. As it has been said, give yourself copious amounts of headroom, and once you've made your mixdown, which should not peak the meters, use something like Steinberg ME Loudness Maximizer to bring the volume up.

In the future, record your signals as cleanly as possible, and if you want to grungify things later, Cool Edit Pro has many built in filters capable of doing this.. or you could use some kind of guitar plugin to dirty up some of the sounds. The main thing is that when you do things this way, at least you can always hit "undo" if you don't like the result, rather than having to record it all again, or make do with something you're not entirely happy with.
 
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