http://forum.recordingreview.com/blogs/u2redlight/ Skyrocket your home recordings faster than ever with recordingreview.com en Tue, 18 Jun 2013 06:19:54 GMT vBulletin 60 http://forum.recordingreview.com/images/misc/rss.jpg http://forum.recordingreview.com/blogs/u2redlight/ http://forum.recordingreview.com/blogs/u2redlight/120-how-i-won-adk-metal-mayhem.html Sun, 18 Dec 2011 19:03:41 GMT So here is my blog in which I'll try to describe the best way possible how I did my entry for the ADK Metal Mayhem contest.

Songwritting: I downloaded provided files & downloaded the mix sample. Mix sample was done by Metaltyme, who also provided the raw tracks. For a few days I've been listening to the sample while doing some other work, relaxing etc.. until my subconsciousness took that piece for it's own. When I reached the creative state of mind, I picked up my guitar and wrote few riffs and after I had basic ideas recorded I started to program the drum tracks. I don't own any midi controller yet, so it was all done by mouse clicking, but it went pretty smooth and since I'm a drummer I don't find it difficult to program drum beats.
Once I had drum tracks done I did a quick preproduction and arrangement test. At first I had in mind something agressive with growl style vocals only, then I got sick and I included the mellow part to the song & re-wrote one riff to fit the new style of the song better. It was pretty easy since I already had the vision how the song should sound like. So I wrote the lyrics and let my girlfriend sing my vocal ideas. After I had the raw vocal tracks done I finished the arrangement and the recording proces began.

Recording: First I changed the strings on guitars. Guitars used for recording were Esp/ltd viper and Ibanez Soundgear bass. It was a plan to use Fender precision bass (that I had borrowed for my bands EP recording sessions), but it had thinner strings on that were not appropriate for the drop B tuning.
Recording chain for the guitars was : straight to the Api 512c Hi-z input -> to the M- Audio Fast Track Ultra 8r, with the stock preamps bypassed.

For the vocals I used the Shure Sm7 microphone again, straight to the api and from there to fast track.
For guitar sounds I used the Peavey 5150 II & 6505 cab with celestion v30 speakers. Slightly out of center I set the shure sm57 mic, that was a little angled.
I also used the revalver mkIII.V & guitar rig 4 amp sims along with impulses for the lead guitar and for better blending my parts of the song along with the provided ones.
I also sent the provided DI's trough some compression first to get it more emg flavored.
For the bass I used the Bass amp room amp sim along with the DI.

Mixing Process: After some time I opened the new session in cubase, imported all the needed files & ran the toontrack's superior drummer s2.0. Once I had the session set I focused myself on different parts of the song and tried to fulfill their emotional side with desired tools. For vocals I used 3 instances of Decapitator, one Echo boy instance for Reverb & Echo effect, and one Delay instance. The Decapitator expensive vocal trick I used on mellow part of the song was once described by Brandon using the same plugins ( Soundtoys Plugins) and it can be found here .http://forum.recordingreview.com/content/expensive-vocal-sound-other-unicorns-145/ .



On the other parts of the song where I had to deal with hi-gain guitars, I used decapitator to add some dirt & edge to the vocals. Vocals went trough some serious compression (1176 & White 2A ) . All other effects were done trough the send/return function. Guitars were treated pretty simple with a small touch of compression, and some verb in the mellow section.
Bass tracks were duplicated 3 times, once for sub, once for all other crap and once for dirt ( distortion provided by decapitator) & compressed together pretty hard. I automated the hell out of bass in all parts of the song.
As I said above I used the superior drummer s2.0 along with the metalfoundry SDX for the drum kit. This samples work pretty well & I like the function that you can pair a lot of different drum kit pieces together inside the program. I think I paired 3 snares for desired character. I used a lot of parallel compression,eq. I own the yamaha hs80m monitors, but I was forced to do the mixing on ATH headphones & laptop speakers, since I was far away from home at that time.

At the »mastering« stage I used the Elysia compressor for the mid/side processings, multiband comp compressing the low mids only and then some fine limiting for loudness. That was pretty much it.

Special thanks goes to Brandon, Metaltyme , ADK and to everybody who gave me his vote, wrote a comment or just gave my entry a spin.

Ps: this is my first blog here ever. My primary language also isn't English, so there might be some typos.
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