HPF the kick to about 2k.
This is a joke, right?
You want plenty of click, but you also want it to feel like a punch to the gut.
Honestly, there's about 1,527 "How do I record good metal guitar" threads around here, I'm surprised you didn't find any. To quickly build off what joey said...
Guitars
- Layer. Layer, layer, layer. Try less gain than you think you need, as doubling or quad-tracking them makes them sound "bigger" and this allows you to still get a pretty good attack from your guitar sound. Of course, this pretty much requires you to be a damned tight player - that's true of pretty much anything though, for any genre that's remotely technical.
- I'm actually going to disagree with the "use two guitars" thing, at least for fairly technical stuff. Different pickup positions in the same guitar, sure (I personally dig the sound of the middle position on H-H guitars for layering with a bridge pickup sound), but you begin to run into ever-so-slight intonation differences between even well-intonated guitars when you start doubling with different ones. This is especially true with different scale lengths. Definitely explore complimentary amp settings though - relatively clean, bright tracks layered against more distorted, darker, smoother ones. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
- Scooped mids suck. Don't do it. Also remember that a good metal guitar sound is as much the product of the way the bass fits in with the guitar as it is the guitar itself - you're probably going to end up doing some high pass work, and I'd be very careful about boosting the bass on the amp. Also, while this isn't something you'd want to do 100% of the time, I know a lot of guys who advocate low-passing their guitars around 7-8khz to get rid of some of the "fuzz" in the very high end. If you're having major problems here, then it's probably due to mic positioning, amp settings, or something else somewhere in your chain, but it's worth a shot.
- Maybe 99.99% of metal rhythm is the product of a close-mic'd amp - 2" or less from the speaker - generally with a SM57 or some variant. I like the 57, but an Audix i5 might be a work too - a little deeper, a little less middy. I have one of each and go back and forth basically based on mood.
Everything Else
(I'm a guitarist - so shoot me
)
That said, honestly, when I hear a kickass metal mix, more often than not it's the drums and bass that I'm digging the shit out of. I even say this as a guitarist. This isn't really my strength, but...
As a jumping off point, remember that a "natural" drum sound has very little to do with modern metal - your goal here isn't to capture the sound of the kit in the room, but rather to create something a bit artificial. In particular, a metal kick sounds very little like a live kick drum. A lot of the top producers in the genre will end up just replacing the kick on their records, either with a sample from the drummer's performance or a stock set, or occasionally will use the originals but also augment them with a sampled kick to even them out a bit (it's surprisingly tough to get perfectly even double kick stuff down, I gather, and you want your drummer to sound like a machine here). That said, you're looking for a kick tone with a strong fundamental, a powerful "click" to cut through (especially true with low tuned guitars) in the 6-8khz range, and not much at all in the mids. An example I like of a metal kick in a detuned context that if anything sounds exaggeratedly EQd but makes a good example for that is the drum sound on Devin Townsend's "Terria" - it's actually an awful drum sound IMO, but it just works so well with the huge wall of sound going on elsewhere in the album (this is the exception that proves the rule on what I was saying about great drums and bass usually being what I like about a metal mix
). Also, the kick (and snare, to an extent) will usually be louder in a modern metal mix by a noticable amount than they are if you're standing in the room with the drummer.
For bass, personally the best results I've gotten have been by using a Sansamp RBI pre, and recording two outs - one a "clean" direct with no processesing, and another with a fair amount of the pretty shitty sounding distortion that the preamp provides. I then low-pass the clean one, either high pass or seriously cut the very low end of the dirty one, compress the clean one pretty heavily and the dirty one very little (relying on the natural compression from the gain), then bring them both up panned center, blend to taste, and then try offsetting the clean one a sample or two at a time here and there to see if anything about the way it starts to phase works for me. This gives you a great, kind of gritty bass sound with a crisp attack, but still a lot of depth to it.
Also, look into sidechain compressing your bass - Reaper's compressor allows you to do that and the program is free to try/cheap to use, and at least on par if not better than any other DAW I've used. The idea is that you put a compressor on the bass, but instead of letting the bass signal trigger the compressor, use the kick drum to trigger it so whenever there's a hit on the kick, the bass gets clamped down on a bit. This helps keep the low end clear, and since a huge amount of getting a good metal mix is carving out space for the bass and drum to work WITH each other rather than fighting for space (complimentary EQ, sidechain compressing, whatever) anything you can do here is going to be huge.
So, I guess my advice (again, AS a guitarist) is don't even really pay much attention to the guitars while mixing until after you've gotten a solid kick sound and a bass sound that works with it. Then bring the guitars in, and make them work with what's already there.
