I am in year 12 and I am intending on doing sound technology at university. I am using this E.P to help out my band and to use in my portfolio. I mam VERY motivated about it and I want to do this for the rest of my life.
philbagg, Thanks for that gargantuan response
very helpful there is only one thing I'm not entirely sure about. You talk a lot about the frequencies of the instruments and the way that they sit in with eachother and making sure that the sonic space is not crowded. This is a pretty new concept to me and I'm not real sure how to go about stripping certain frequencies from a signal. Are you talking about using a compressor or are you just talking about EQ'ing? sorry I'm new to this stuff haha.
Geez. Well, then, here we go...
Drums
Start with Greg L's thread on drum tuning, and then unless you're already getting kickass drum tones that you're super thrilled with, do a forum search for the Recorderman and Glyn Johns micing techniques. This is as a baseline - metal being metal you're probably going to want to augment the overheads with close mics on your toms, but this way you'll at least get a good, phase-coherent overhead picture. Also, experiment with overhead distance - IIRC, bringing the mics in closer increases the volume of your cymbals relative to your toms, and if you're adding tom close mics (and the placement doesn't fuck with your drummer) this is probably desirable.
Also, most modern metal has a lot of drum replacement - it's not uncommon to simply use a kick drum track (especially one with a lot of double bass) as a trigger and use it to trigger a sampled kick to get a much more even, machine-gun like kick response - try it both ways and if you can get a great kick sound acosutically then go nuts, but a sampled kick (and sometimes snare - hell, it's not uncommon to have the toms sampled and replaced as well) is kind of part of the metal sound.
EQ wise, metal is one of those few genres where you're not after an "organic" drum sound. You want a lot of click (Greg gets some of the best drum tones I've heard on this board and generally has his kick mic 6" off the beater, inside - you'll probably want to go a little closer), good bass "thump", and not much else. So, try a couple dB boost in the 6-8k range, scoop the living shit out of the midrange, and keep the low end - say, 80-100hz and below - where it is, maybe boost slightly if needed.
Also, you're probably going to want to gate the living shit out of everything so that when a drum isn't being hit, the track is silent.
Bass
The hardest part of a metal mix, IMO, especially with low-tuned instruments is getting the kick drum and the bass to sit well with each other. I've struggled forever with getting a good, punchy, full sounding bass, and the formula that worked
for me was running through a Sansamp RBI preamp and splitting the signal, and recording a "clean" direct out and a moderately distorted "processed" out to seperate tracks. The unit actually produces some of the shittiest sounding, least desireable distortion I've ever heard, but I found that by low-passing the "clean" track and compressing it pretty heavily and then high-passing the "distorted" track and compressing it very lightly, then mixing to taste and experimenting with VERY slightly offsetting the clean signal to take advantage of natural phasing, I was able to get a pretty good sounding bass tone with enough body and girth from the clean sound, but good high end and crisp attacks from the distorted one. Certainly, this idea of layering clean and distorted versions of a single performance against each other is worth running with - the worst criticism I've gotten of bass tracked this way is that it sounds too much like, "hey, listen to my awesome bass tone!" for a metal album, and considering where I started I'm prepared to live with that.
For seperation between the bass and kick, you're going to want to look at two approaches. First, complimentary EQ. Figure out where the preponderance of energy in the low end of the kick is - pull up an EQ with a narrow Q and a large boost, and sweep it back and forth until you find where the most of the "thump" seems to be, and see if you can cut the bass a bit at that frequency and get it to work. Meanwhile, you're going to want to scoop out a lot of the mids and low-mids on the kick for that modern metal kick tone - that should leave you some room to bring the bass and guitars through a bit.
Second, see if you can find a compressor that allows you to use sidechain compression. I'm not sure what Pro Tools LE ships with, but I know Reaper's compressor will do this. It's a bit tricky to set up at first, but the idea is simple - you put a compressor on the bass guitar set heavily enough so, when triggered, there'll be a slight decrease in the output of the bass - it'll get squashed whenever it's triggered. Then, set it so it's triggered not by the bass guitar, but by the
kick drum. Now, whenever there's a kick hit, the bass will momentarily get "smaller" allowing the kick to poke through.
Guitars
I'm a guitarist, so this is kind of my thing. First, there's a lot more to a good recorded tone than a great source tone, but it all begins there and if the sound of the amp isn't any good then you're never going to get a good tone on disc. General thoughts - you're going to want to do at LEAST two tracks of guitars, panned left and right. Layered guitars sound "bigger" and "gainier" than single ones do, so you're probably going to find out you'll want to cut your usual gain levels maybe 10-30% from where you'd be live.
Also, scooping your midrange sounds metal as fuck and all, but remember that in a mix a guitar is predominantly a midrange instrument - that scooped death metal tone sounds brutal alone, but add in the rumble of a bass guitar and the wash of high end from cymbals, and suddenly it vanishes. Furthermore, try complimentary EQ settings from your amp - for example, a bright, slightly scooped, relatively clean track on one side, and a dark, mid-heavy, more saturated one on the other. They may individually sound like shit, but played back in stereo often the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts.
EQ-wise, again, remember not to tread all over the bass. I'll often low pass guitars anywhere from 60hz (I play a 7 - most guys start at 80, which is about the fundamental of a low E) up to maybe 180 or so, depending on what I'm hearing back through the monitors. Let your bass guitar fill out the low end - there's enough down there with the bass and kick that you don't need the guitars to add much more down there. Similarly, I know a couple guys who advocate cutting or low-passing the high end - maybe 8k or so, to taste. I wouldn't advocate doing this ALL the time, but it;s certainly worth a try - if it sounds better, fuller, and less fizzy with those frequencies gone, great - if not, then undo it.
For mic placement, generally you're going to want to start with a single SM57 within 2" or less of the grill. I tend to like fairly dark tones so I tend to go a bit close to the edge of the speaker cone - this is all personal taste. One thing to keep in mind - while sweeping a mic back and forth, your ear is going to automatically tend to prefer the "brighter" positions to the "darker" ones because there's more going on up in the hgih end and it'll seem louder. That doesn't mean it's a better tone - dial in a position you like, record a quick 30-second clip, maybe double it if you're bold, then walk away, listen to something else, and come back and listen to your clip. More likely than not, the first few times you do this it'll sound thin, buzzy, and shrill. Over time, you'll figure out where you like a mic on a cab and positioning will get easier.
Vocals? Fuck it, I record instrumental rock. Talk to someone else.
Other thoughts
Really, so much of metal is about controlling dynamic response. Spend some time experimenting with a single repetitive sound - say, a sample of a kick drum hit, looped - and a compression plugin, and try to see how you can reshape it's response. Using a nearly instant attack and a relatively high threshold and rate to basically lop off just the transient, a lower threshold a few DB below the "body" of the kick and a slower attack to let the transient through unharmed but clamp down on the sustain of the kick (this is another way to work with the kick and the bass - making the kick as "clicky" as possible and trying to get rid of the boom), whatever. Just play, see what you can do to the sample, and pay attention. A guy I know with a bunch of pro metal releases under his belt who does excellent work often uses two or more compressors per track when doing drums, plus a tape sim as an added level of compression. It's an artform, and frankly I'm not good enough at it yet to tell you to do more than experiment and listen.
maybe it's a PT 8 bug).
It's because you use a high-pass to get rid of lows and vice versa, I think. 
