Trying to achieve a good metalcore sound.

[acoustic_kid94]

im sortaof new to recording my own stuff, professionally at least. i've recorded acoustic stuff using audacity, but ive begun using Cubase, and recently got an MXL 990 microphone.

ive done my best aquatinting myself with VST's and VSTi's and learning what some of the effects do.

i use VSTi's for most of my stuff, all in fact, except for guitars, and vocals. what im looking for, are suggestions of settings to mess with on each track, techniques to record clean vocals and screams (editing them too, like compression) and im looking for suggestions, and ideas. anything really, to help me create more professional sounding tracks.

thanks
-Trey

 

[Captain Ego]

I am not a metal dude I uses distorted guitar for rock though. What I have found is that the dropped mid "chug" sound or scoop sound does not translate well when I have recorded it. It just sounds like chugging but no definition to the tone. It sounds good and thick live, but played back on a recording, I don't like dipping the midrange as there's a lot of sound going on in there.

Another thing I learned reading other threads and noodling around myself is that clarity is lost when gain is turned up on distortion. Again, sounds cool live out of an amp, but in a mix with other stuff, it just turns into mush without definition. Solution is to just turn the gain way down. On most modeler pedals or modeling amps I have seen, even at a 0 level gain for the drive module is still distorted if they are models of virtual amp's dirty channel. My only guitar amp is one of those modeling thingys, not a true JCM or 5150, just pretends to be, and I get fine distorted enough for rock sound with the gain turned almost all the way down. For metal I would think you would want more than that, but you don't have to crank it all the way to sound heavy in a mix, you'll cut through more clearly with less gain turning everything into mushy static.

As for vocals, I'm not fluent in the hundreds of different metal sub-genres and have no idea what the "core" means in "metalcore" I just assume it means a lot of screaming. For death metal style gutteral roar throat singing I have heard that doing a "whisper" track of the voice along with the actual vocal allows for a bit of clarity in actually understanding the lyrics. Not something I dabble with, just something I heard that people do in their metal recordings.

Good luck man.