I got 99 problems but X2 ain't 1.

Beepster.... 

You probably will never hear anything like that from me.... but I can certainly appreciate it.  As I hear it.... the guitar playing/shredding is cool and well played. 

The mix can stand some improvement. It sounds lackluster to me.... I had a hard time hearing the drums and the bass, and the way I am thinking is that those two should be heard. They sound like an afterthought.... way in the background. I hear the guitars just fine and they are covering the bass and drums a bit too much.... 

The problem I see with metal mixing  is to get everything where it needs to be in the mix (nice and loud) and still have space in the music so everything is fitting into it's proper place without stepping all over everything else.  With the proverbial "wall of sound" which typifies this genre..... not an easy task to accomplish. 

Yeah, it's classic "guitarist trying to engineer" syndrome. The guits always end up high in the mix. After a few days away from it that really has become apparent. Part of the problem I think is the panning and lack of drum separation. There were certain guitar parts that completely dropped out if I set the guitar levels any lower so it kept getting turned up. I tried doing some volume/gain automation on those parts but no matter what I did they still got buried. The two most problematic parts were the wacky tremolo bar part in the middle and the end of the solo right before the outro where I'm noodling in the lower range (the notes were getting sucked into the rhythm guitars at that point). I'm gonna have to try getting a more distinct tone for my lead I think but the only GR amp sim that was really working for this was the Hot Solo. Looks like TH2 has more varied usable sounds that might stand out from each other a little better. I'm working on a new track now that I think will turn out better in regards to mix. Also I'm writing it in a more normalish fashion (riffs first then the track will be built around those). Might take a few days though. Cheers and thanks for the input. :-)

KILLER performance!  Mix wasn't that bad just needs some EQ work to help define the low and high ends.  KUDOS Beep!

Kev

Beepster


Yeah, it's classic "guitarist trying to engineer" syndrome......... Cheers and thanks for the input. :-)

I was going to mention this..... but didn't.  Guitarists obviously want to hear.... GUITARS!  So it's kind of hard when you really start to engineer  a mix to take off that "guitarist hat" and look objectively at the mix like a producer and engineer. 

I remember when I first came to realize this....it was a hard thing to turn that guitar down so it sat in the mix properly...... the next step was to use envelopes that shut down certain instruments totally in places. I caught a bunch of grief when I mixed a piano player  into a song and had the piano enveloped out and down in places and only allowed it to play in a few selected places.. ("we can't hear "her" piano playing")... but that's what mixing is. Now, I use hard enveloping ALL THE TIME! The music is better for it. Talk about giving space..... use hard enveloping and get lots of space. 

Thanks, kev. We sure do have a lot of thrasher around here, eh? Sonar seems to be great for this stuff so it makes sense. Cheers!

Right on, guitarhacker. I'm not familiar with "hard enveloping". Is that when you EQ out everything except the most prevalent signal? I'm not very good at that. I'm hoping R-Mix might help me see where things sit in the spectrum then I can carve out the good stuff from there. That may be the wrong way of doing it though but I'll research it. I need to start buying some books on the meat of actual music production techniques now that I know how to make the software work... kind of. Cheers.