Mixing: Machine Head – Is There Anybody Out There

I’ve recently signed up to Nail the Mix; an educational service & community organised by big time producers Joey Sturgis, Eyal Levi & Joel Wanasek, BIG names in the commercial modern rock & metal world. Aside from the very informative podcasts they make & Facebook community that comes with it, the mix service alone is an awesome tool for learning to be a better engineer. 

The premise is every month, stems from an A grade recording of an A grade band are provided (all within ‘heavy’ music, ranging from pop punk to death metal to djent) & each member does a mix of the song. To give an example of material that has been provided so far, there has been songs by Chelsea Grin, We Came As Romans, Neck Deep. 

At the end of the month, the top 20 mixed are chosen by the producers & the #1 mix wins a prize of some sort. After that, they do a quick interview with the winner discussing the techniques & creative choices they made, then finally one of the producers will do a live mix of the song themselves, explaining every action they take, from Eqing a snare, compressing a guitar to applying reverb to vocals. 

While a fair few of the songs provided can’t be posted up to Soundcloud due to copyright reasons, I figured it would still be worthwhile to blog about the mix to discuss the issues I found & things I learnt from working on the project. 

Check out Nail the Mix here: https://nailthemix.com/

This month’s song was a single recently released by Machine Head - Is There Anybody Out There 

Unlike the Recluse project I worked on a while back, tight pop metal was the name of the game for this song. After listening to various things mentioned by the producers & the guests on their podcasts, I’ve been introduced to many things I would never think to use or go into detail with..with a big chunk of this being the usage of limiters, and automation. 

It was a huge project to work on, with a total of 105 tracks, comprising of roughly 20 drum tracks, a single bass track, 15 guitar tracks, 25 strings tracks, 30 vocal tracks & 15 fx tracks. 

I’ve finished the mix, but there are still some tweaks I think the track could do with. Sadly as I’m away for the next few days, I won’t be able to make any more changes to my mix before the hand-in date. I’m not sure exactly how long I’ve spent on the project, but I must have plowed at least 20 hours over all, including editing. 

As I had the time, and I figured both for the production quality & practices sake, I did a lot of editing. As a reference, I used one of the older NTM projects, a tech death song with drum edits so tight that every individual hit from kick, snare tom & spot mic'd cymbal was precisely cut out to remove all bleed. It took a fair while, but I managed to chop up the toms & cymbals pretty well. I started on the snare & kick drums but halfway through decided to buy a plugin called Debleeder by Wilkinson Audio, which is basically gate made specifically for drum shells to remove bleed, while preserving the transients of the instruments. It excelled at both kick & snare, with the bonus of being much quicker to operate than any other gate I’ve used. 

This a snapshot of the unconsolidated edited drums. 

Split band bass mixing is where you duplicate the bass track, having a low pass on one & a high pass on the other, at roughly 130-150Hz, then treat each track differently, for instance distorting the high track & leaving a lot of dynamics in, while leaving the low track fairly untreated, but keeping the dynamics highly controlled. 

I discovered this method after Joey from NTM mentioned it in a podcast. It helped hugely in keeping the bass in the song consistent but also allowing me to be creative in the guitar/bass blend. 

I made use of a limiters more than I thought I would ever use, at the mixing stage at least. After seeing mixes done & listening to podcasts by the producers from NTM, I had many more uses of a limiter in my head, both on instruments where it made sense & others that it wouldn’t necessarily. With that said, some of the uses only really apply to productions such as this, where a modern sound is the end goal. 

In my previous mixes, on kicks & bass guitar I would usually compress, but it never occurred to me to use a limiter to keep the low end seriously in check, so that it would not budge an inch unless I allows it to. With the split band method, this worked extremely well. 

I limited the guitar tracks fairly hard, which while isn’t a hugely out of this world idea, before now i was in a mindset where compression wasn’t really beneficial for guitars, given the dynamics killing that lots of  amp saturation does to hi-gain guitars. Limiting helped the overall production, making sure the guitars stood out in the mix. 

The odd use of a limiter was on overheads. I used it to bring the snare down in the overhead tracks, so they could focus on giving a picture of the overall cymbals. It worked nicely, doing the task but not destroying the cymbals tone either. 

Saturation really came in handy during this mix, particularly on toms. Instead of using Eq to get a nice punchy sound, a saturation with a barely audible affect did wonders fattening the toms and making them jump out of the mix. 

I found a fun little trick using saturation on the snare, where I automated in a close to distorted saturation plugin during the breakdown & using automation sent it to the strings' concert hall reverb, resulting in a fat metalcore type snare sound. 

As I was busy this week helping friends in the uni studios, I had to get the mix done as best as I could & submit it. It’s  bit of a shame as I feel my mix was getting there..but i still had a fair few tweaks to sort some details out. Regardless, I feel I made a good attempt of the mix. 

A/Bing my mix against the official release, the first thing I noticed was the limiter I had put on my master bus for a ‘loudness preset master’ I had crushed some of the life out of my mix, given the amount of dynamics in the official mix. On a less crucial note, I had approached my mix a little different stylistically, keeping the FX tracks much lower and less obvious, going for a much darker less in your face snare tone and on the string tracks, I had more of a focus on the high end of the violin tracks, that seemed fairly buried in the proper mix.