Heavy Metal/Rock -- Mix in Progress

[Dahmen]

Hello there.

The final session for this mix is on friday and before that i would like to get some more feedback on what is achieved in the mix so far. Since this was recorded through my old desk and with the old placement of the speakers i know that some top end is missing. Also the guitars are a bit dull but what else is coming to your mind when listening? It was the aim to capture everything the most natural but also satying kind of heavy. Thank you very much for your feedback.

[psykostx]

The tracking sounds great dude. What I would do is cut some of the lower mids out of the drums, not much, maybe 3db... then turn them up a bit. Snare and hi-hat could use a bit of gel. Turn up the snare a bit and compress it on a track with the high hat so the snare is back to the original level it is here... this will pump the hi-hat a bit and make the backbeat smash more. Then with the drums turned up, push the whole thing through a limiter to add a bit of distortion. The levels are fine now the way they are, there just isn't much action going on between the instruments... if you turn stuff up and then compress it back down with other instruments, they will seem to interact a bit more. Sometimes I just turn the snare way up and then run the mix through a limiter to push it back down. That makes the music pump to the back-beat. I consider limiting to start around 6:1 ratio, but some consider 8:1 or 10:1 as the place to start calling compression as limiting.

The instruments sound great and the levels are spot on. I would just get some more action/interaction going for character.