Finally managed to download the files, still can't understand what wasn't working at first... Metal wise I'm mostly listening to doom and stoner but that solo at the 2min mark will stay in my head for days haha Awesome playing, hope you like this mix ! (And damn, comparing the .wav export with this MP3 version I really realised I spent my teenage years listening to very bad quality files... The 2000's were hard !)
Edit : You asked for my workflow and I forgot to post it sorry !
Basically I used a Rythm Bus with both drums and bass sent to, a Side bus for the rhythm guitars and a Center bus for the lead (Rhythm/Side/Center being just the name I give them).
Each of them is only multiband compression.
I level and pan in mono, I find that it keeps the power, the impact, I hate completely panned guitars, I hate them even more since my car's left speaker broke and I only hear one guitar at a time haha
What is sent to the busses is a drum group, the bass, a rhythm guitars group inside which each guitar is carefully panned, and the lead guitar.
Each individual track has a limiter on it, on a relatively low setting, only to avoid peaks and gain some headroom.
On each group/track (for the bass and lead) there's some compression with the mix setting mostly between 40% and 60%, then there's some eq with heavy hi and low filtering done in context, not soloed, tweaked until everything fits in it's place.
Finally for the mixing stage I have many sends with many types of reverbs and delays, and one with some kind of NY style compression. The most important part for me being that everything is sent to a Hall or Room reverb, and the most important part (the lead guitar here) sent to the delay. Adjust to taste, eq heavily each send on the low end, and send everything to another multiband compression bus. Add this bus to the dry mix up until you hear it... then back it off a bit. If your hear it it's wrong, if you realise it was there only when you mute it you're alright !
Finally I have some eq and very slight compression on my master, it's always there even before I start mixing, basically the eq is a slight cut in the lowest low mids and highest hi mids to avoid mud and sibilance.
Then I spend a whole bunch of time on volume automations.
Aaaaaand... That's it for the mix. I export the stereo sum and my mastering process is still pretty basic : some eq to make the whole thing sound even better, multiple compressors with low compression and low to medium mix, and finally a limiter, only to avoid high power peaks and also to make the whole thing more cohesive.
On this particular song the mastering was quite fast : there's not that much dynamix movement between the parts. That's how metal works most of the time haha As soon as you have heavily distorted guitars everything is already very compressed and limited. On less violent styles of music I usually do automations on everything at the mastering stage.
Really hope you like it, I spent something like 3 or 4 hours in a row on it and really enjoyed it !
