What Impacts Your Metal Sound the Most: A Guide from Recording to Mastering

Part 2: Production and Mixing – Crafting the Sound

Shaping Your Metal Sound: A Guide to Production and Mixing

In this chapter, we’ll dive into the stages of production and mixing. These stages often overlap in practice, but I’ll do my best to keep the discussion focused separately on each area. The topics are extensive—especially when it comes to mixing—so I won’t be able to cover every detail required for a great mix. Instead, I’ll focus on the cornerstones you need for a successful result.

There’s always more to learn, and mixing in particular is an ever-evolving process. Expect more posts on this subject in the future, and stay tuned for deeper insights into taking your metal mixes to the next level.

I’d like to remind you that we’re focusing on home studio approaches, so there will be some corner-cutting and adjustments along the way to fit what’s realistic and achievable in a typical home studio environment. In Part 1, we discussed the importance of avoiding microphone recordings in untreated or poorly treated rooms, especially when dealing with bass frequencies. We also touched on why amp simulations are preferable to re-amping and recording real amps with microphones in most home studios.

In this part, we’ll continue building on those principles, focusing on techniques that deliver solid results without needing a perfectly treated studio space.

Producing Bass Guitar

Now that you have your dry line signal, it’s time to focus on re-amping. I recommend checking out the Neural DSP Parallax plugin—it’s an excellent tool for shaping bass tones depending on the metal genre you're aiming for.

In general, keep in mind that the low end needs to be compressed to maintain tightness. For genres like death metal or thrash metal, you’ll want the top end to be more piercing and clangy. However, in black metal, you can dial it back and aim for a more subtle tone, focusing on the lower part of the spectrum.

Avoid too much build-up around the 250Hz range, which can make the sound muddy. Instead, focus on the frequencies around and below 100Hz to create a solid foundation.

If you have a physical re-amp box, you can experiment by running the line signal through a guitar distortion pedal to add some grit and character to the bass tone—no microphones involved in this approach.

Throughout the process, aim to make the bass sound solid and leveled, without any weak spots. Regularly compare your processed sound to the dry line signal to ensure you’re not over-tweaking or weakening the overall tone.

Producing Guitars

By now, you should have your dry line signal ready for re-amping. When it comes to guitar production, Neural DSPoffers several excellent plugins, and I personally use the Fortin Nameless Suite. However, one crucial aspect of guitar tone that’s often overlooked is the IR (Impulse Response), which simulates the cabinet sound.

To get the best results, I recommend using a third-party IR pack, such as the Kristian Kohle pack from Borgen Digital or the Ola Englund IR pack. The key to cabinet simulation is to mix in some mass to the sound. Don’t be fooled by the sharp, close-miked sound—it’s often better to create a tone that feels a bit more distant and softer while still adding weight. A good approach is to blend one close-miked sound for clarity with a more roomy mic sound for depth. Personally, I often mix the roomy mic to be more forward in the mix for better prominence.

To create a wider tone, experiment with using a different tone for the left and right guitar tracks. One guitar can be more trebly, while the other is more mid-centered. This variation helps achieve a fuller, more expansive stereo image.

Another important thing to remember is to avoid too much gain in your guitar sound. Excessive gain will weaken the overall tone, making it less powerful. Always experiment with the gain settings and dial it back if necessary. Be sure to check your sound with both guitars panned to the sides—this will give you a more accurate picture of how it sits in the mix.

If you find yourself constantly adjusting the gain, it’s often a sign of either poor recording performance or a signal that’s too weak to properly drive the amp. The latter is more of an issue when re-amping with real amps, but it’s something to keep in mind.

Producing Drums

Before moving on to mixing, your drums need to be as tight and in time as possible, with minimal performance mistakes. This typically requires some degree of editing, depending on the drummer's skill level—there’s almost always some editing involved. In Part 1, I mentioned importing MIDI tracks of your drums into your DAW for a visual reference of where the hits should land. If possible, I highly recommend doing this. Most DAWs also have a visual grid that you can set to the correct note length, which can be a helpful visual aid (assuming you’ve perfectly set up your song's tempos and time signatures as discussed in Part 1).

For the actual editing, I suggest using slip editing rather than relying on the time warping functions offered by most DAWs. While time warps are easier to use, excessive warping will cause the edits to sound unnatural and can throw the phase alignment off, resulting in a weaker sound. Instead, try to copy and paste longer segments to keep the sound natural and strong. Splicing too many short sections can lead to a loopy and artificial sound.

Never edit one track at a time—always group all of your drum tracks into one group so you can edit everything in sync. Editing tracks individually will mess up the phase coherency and cause everything to sound disjointed and chaotic.

Pay special attention to the cross sections of your cuts, particularly in the overheads and room mics. Adjust the boundaries of your edits to ensure the transitions sound natural and cohesive, avoiding any harsh or noticeable shifts in the sound.

Phase Alignment

One critical step in drum production is phase aligning. We touched on this in Part 1, but to recap: phase alignment is necessary because sound waves hit the microphones in your multi-mic setup at slightly different times, causing natural delays between the mics. You’ll need to align these tracks so that the sound waves hit at the same time, avoiding any phase issues.

You can do this either before or after editing, but it’s important that the tracks are treated as one whole performance from start to finish, without being spliced. This will make the alignment process much easier and prevent issues where certain parts are misaligned.

First, decide which track will serve as your anchor—this is the reference track that you’ll align all the other tracks to. It’s usually a good idea to use one of the overheads as the anchor since overheads capture everything on the kit. Once you’ve chosen your anchor, zoom in on a hit in that track and the track you’re aligning. Look for spots where the hits should happen simultaneously, and then manually adjust the waveform so that the waves of both tracks are pointing in the same direction (either up or down) at the same spot on the grid.

Repeat this process for each track in your session to avoid the waveforms canceling each other out. Make sure to use your ears during this process as well—when the tracks are properly aligned, you’ll hear a noticeable improvement in the sound.

There are plugins available to help with phase alignment, such as Sound Radix’s Auto Align, which I’ve used before. However, I generally find that the manual approach produces better results.

Producing Vocals

If you’ve followed Part 1, you should now have at least three vocal tracks ready for production. The first task is to remove all the breaths from the silent sections and deal with any loud puffs of air that hit the microphone. I recommend doing this manually using your DAW’s volume automation tool. Some may choose to splice the waveforms, but volume automation is usually faster and more precise.

To speed up the process, group the three (or more) tracks together and focus on cleaning up the main vocal performance. The rest of the tracks should follow automatically. Once done, double-check the backing tracks to ensure they’re aligned properly. Volume automation can also be used to reduce harsh consonants and puffs that hit the mic too strongly.

While some people might use a gate plugin or other dedicated plugins for this kind of work, these often require endless tweaking to find the right settings. Doing the manual work not only yields a better result, but it also helps you become more familiar with the vocal performance.

When removing breaths, be careful not to erase anything important, such as ending syllables or stretched consonantslike "s" sounds. Also, avoid cutting the vocal too sharply—apply a small fade when cutting and bringing the volume back in (see image for reference).

If you only have one vocal performance, you’ll need to create the backing tracks from that single take. One way to achieve this is by running the vocal through vocal processor plugins like Ozone Nectar, where you can process octave lower and octave higher variations of the voice. These plugins also offer voice doubling features, which can help fatten the sound.

The key is to alter the track enough to avoid phase issues—don’t use the same track as is or process it too closely to the original, as this won’t achieve the desired effect. Vocal synths can also work well in this situation. Remember, the created backing tracks should sit in the background, and their purpose is to fatten up the original vocal performance.

Preliminary Processing of Vocals

You can already start processing vocals during production to bring them more forward in the mix. Begin by adding an EQ and applying a high-pass filter to remove unnecessary low-end rumble. Typically, there’s nothing useful below 100Hz in extreme vocals, so you can set the filter there. However, always use your ears and adjust as necessary.

You can also shape the vocal with bell-shaped filters. Listen carefully and address any problem areas:

• If the vocals sound nasal, try attenuating frequencies between 900-1500Hz.
• If they are muddy, reduce the bass or low-mids.
• If the vocals sound harsh, attenuate the high-mids around 2000-6000Hz.

The key is to experiment and find what works for the vocalist’s voice and the microphone used.

Next, add some compression. For extreme vocals, you'll need an aggressive compressor—any standard compressor won’t do the job. Some good choices include the Empirical Labs Aggressor, Waves API 2500, or Valley People Dynamite. These compressors also work well on drums, so they’re versatile.

Set the attack to around 5ms for a quick response, and the release fairly fast, about 100ms, though this can vary. Use a ratio of 4:1 or 6:1—this is extreme music, so don’t be afraid of heavier compression. You can also drive the vocals a bit by increasing the input gain and reducing the output at the same time in your compressor. Just be careful not to raise the volume too much, leaving some headroom for mixing.

Lastly, consider adding a de-esser to tame any harshness in the high end.

Mixing: Setting the Foundation for a Successful Mix

Mixing is an enormous topic, and I can’t go too deep into it here without turning this post into a very long book. However, what I can do is steer you in the right direction, giving you the foundation for a successful mix. I will also be making future posts that concentrate on smaller, more detailed aspects of mixing, so stay tuned for those.

A few general guidelines to start: trust your ears more than anything visual. The low end will likely be the hardest part of your mix to get right, so don’t expect quick or easy fixes—those often lead to disappointing results. Finally, make sure to take breaks and return to your mix later. Your hearing will wear out, and you’ll lose focus if you push too hard without resting.

Monitoring: The Foundation of Your Mix

It all starts here. Monitoring is arguably the most important part of any mix. Having good enough monitoring ensures that you can accurately hear what you’re doing. Imagine if a carpenter couldn’t see what they were building, or if they only had a blurred view—this is how important monitoring is to a mixing engineer. If your monitoring is lacking, for example, if anything below 200Hz is just a blur, how could you possibly end up with a good result?

The first thing you’ll need is a pair of near-field monitors. Unfortunately, this is essential. You’re unlikely to get the balance, especially the low end, right using only headphones. Headphones tend to blur your vision when it comes to mixing. You want monitors with a good frequency range and a flat response. For value, Adam active monitors are a solid option, and I’ve used Kali Audio In-5 monitors for many years. While they’re not perfect, they provide a good overall picture of your sound.

I used to have small Genelecs, and while they were superior in the mid and high-mid ranges, their frequency range didn’t go low enough to provide a complete monitoring solution. Genelecs with extended low-end response can be very expensive, but they're worth it if your budget allows.

I do use headphones as well, but only for reference. It’s important to remember that closed-back headphones are not ideal for mixing, as bass frequencies tend to build up inside the ear cups, giving you a distorted perception of the low end. For mixing, you’ll want to use semi-open or open-back headphones, which provide a more accurate representation of the sound without exaggerating the bass.

Monitoring Room

When monitoring with speakers, you’ll once again encounter phase cancellation issues, especially in untreated rooms. To get the best results, try to treat your room with as much absorption as possible to minimize these problems. At the very least, focus on treating the first reflection points, which are key in improving your monitoring accuracy.

If you have issues with your room and you know it, try to minimize the volume of your monitors. You should still be able to hear everything clearly, but by lowering the volume, you’ll reduce the amount of reflections and bass frequency build-ups in the room, which in turn reduces phase cancellation problems.

Here’s a helpful link that shows how to treat first reflection points using a mirror: First Reflection Points Guide.

Before figuring out the first reflection points, make sure to set your monitors at the correct height and distance. The ideal distance depends on your specific monitor model, and this information is usually covered in the owner’s manual. For near-field monitors, the recommended distance is typically 1 meter to 1.5 meters away (around 3-5 feet).

Don’t aim the monitors directly forward so that they face a back wall—tilt them slightly toward your ears. Ideally, the tweeter elements of your monitors should be at ear height and facing directly toward your ears to give you the clearest sound.

Gain Staging

You’ve already begun gain staging during the recording phase by setting your input gains to optimal levels and ensuring that nothing is clipping. Now that all your recordings are in your DAW, everything should sound as raw as it did when recorded. For this section, we’ll assume we’re working in a fully digital environment.

At this point, listen through all your tracks to make sure nothing is clipping. If certain elements are hitting too high on the meters compared to others, turn them down until they match better. I recommend adjusting levels by adding a small plugin to your track's signal chain as the very first plugin, and turning the input volume of the plugin down. This way, your volume faders can remain at the 0-position, which will give you more flexibility during the actual mixing process.

This method also ensures that the adjusted signal level will hit any processing or effects you might add to the track afterthe level adjustment at the correct volume. This way, your plugins and processors will work more effectively, avoiding any unwanted distortion or artifacts caused by an overly hot signal.

If your meters are showing that individual tracks are hitting high volumes, you’ll want to adjust the input volume for every track. Start by balancing out a rough mix to get a general sense of the levels, then uniformly reduce the volume for each track—say, by 3dB across all tracks. This will give you more headroom for your mix, ensuring that your tracks don’t clip or overload any of the processing that follows.

Gain Staging: Understanding Headroom and Unity Gain

Gain staging is not just about preventing clipping—it’s also about creating enough headroom for your mix. Headroomrefers to the space between the loudest peaks of your tracks and the 0dB clipping point. Having enough headroom ensures that you have more flexibility when adding effects, EQ, and compression later in the mixing process. Without it, you run the risk of distortion, muddiness, or unwanted saturation when processing your mix.

Unity Gain: Why Faders at 0 Matter

When gain staging in a digital environment, it's essential to maintain unity gain—this means keeping the faders at the 0-position (or unity) while adjusting levels through the input volume of plugins. By doing this, you're not artificially altering the gain structure of the track and instead leaving the faders available for more fine-tuning during the mixing process. Unity gain ensures that each track's signal passes through the signal chain as cleanly as possible, giving you more control over the final output without overloading any part of the chain.

Digital vs. Analog Gain Staging

In analog setups, gain staging is critical due to the physical limitations of the equipment, where pushing a signal too hard can cause distortion. In the digital world, while we don’t have the same hardware limitations, gain staging is still crucial to prevent digital clipping and maintain proper signal flow through plugins and processors. Overloading a plugin with a signal that's too hot will still cause distortion or unwanted effects, so having properly staged input levels is key.

Post-Gain Staging Considerations

Once you’ve properly gain-staged all your tracks, it’s essential to monitor your signal levels throughout the mixing process. Keep an eye on your levels and aim to maintain them at the same starting point as they were after gain staging. This ensures that any changes you make during mixing (through EQ, compression, or effects) don’t inadvertently change the overall volume.

To help with this, use the auto-gain feature of plugins wherever available. Auto-gain adjusts the output level to match the input, preventing the common mistake of thinking that louder is better. By keeping levels consistent, you can focus on the quality of the sound rather than being misled by a louder signal. Always remember, louder doesn’t mean better—focus on clarity and balance instead.

Group or Bus Gain Staging

Group tracks and busses are an absolute necessity in metal mixing. With so many layers—multiple guitar tracks, drum mics, and vocal takes—grouping similar elements together helps manage your mix more efficiently. Gain staging applies here just as it does to individual tracks.

When multiple elements are routed to a group or bus, the combined volume may become too high and lead to clipping, even if the individual tracks are gain-staged correctly. To prevent this, apply the same gain staging principles to your group tracks or busses. Make sure that these groups don’t peak too high, and maintain headroom for any processing you might apply to the group as a whole.

For example, if you’ve routed all your drums to a bus, check that the drum bus isn’t clipping. Use a small plugin to adjust the input levels of the bus, just as you would with individual tracks, ensuring the overall group stays within optimal volume ranges.

By properly gain staging your group and bus tracks, you ensure consistency and balance across all the elements in your mix. This control is essential in metal, where clarity and separation of instruments in a dense, heavy mix are key to a professional result.

Mixing: The Art of Balance and Clarity

Now that you’ve completed gain staging and prepared your tracks, it's time to dive into the actual mixing process. This is where everything comes together, and your song starts to take shape. The following steps will guide you through the key aspects of mixing, ensuring you have a solid foundation.

1. Balancing the Levels

The first step is to balance the volume levels of each track to form the foundation of your mix. You should start by listening through all the tracks and adjusting the faders to create an initial rough mix. This means getting the basic levels right before you apply any EQ, compression, or effects.

If you've grouped instruments into busses (e.g., a drum bus or a guitar bus), make sure you manage their levels as a unit. This will simplify things later when you’re adjusting the entire group. Take your time here—getting the balance right is the cornerstone of any good mix.

2. EQ (Equalization)

EQ helps carve out space for each instrument and ensures they don't compete for the same frequency range. Here are some key areas to focus on:

• Low End (Bass & Kick Drum): The low end can easily get muddy if the bass and kick drum clash. Use EQ to carve out space for each—usually, the kick will sit around 60-80Hz, and the bass can dominate below and above that range.

  If your kick drum lacks power and you want it to "knock" more, experiment by boosting around 100Hz and slightly cutting the bass at the same frequency to give the kick more space. However, if you’re using samples, there’s often already plenty of knocking, or even too much, so you might want to seat the kick drum lower in the 60-80Hz range and let the bass take over the higher lows.

• Midrange Clarity: This is where a lot of important elements live, including guitars, vocals, and the snare drum. Make sure each has its own space by adjusting the EQ. Guitars often need some midrange (500Hz to 2kHz) cut to allow vocals to shine.

• High Frequencies: Cymbals, vocal presence, and high-end guitar tones reside here. Make sure they’re clear but not harsh. Be mindful of frequency masking, where two instruments compete for the same range, making one or both disappear in the mix.

Experiment with cuts and boosts in each frequency range, but always trust your ears.

3. Panning

Panning helps create width in your mix, making it feel more spacious and defined. Here are some general guidelines:

• Guitars: In metal, rhythm guitars are typically panned hard left and right to create a wide stereo image.
• Drums: The snare and kick are usually panned center, while toms and cymbals can be panned slightly left or right to create depth.
• Vocals and Bass: These should be panned center, ensuring they remain the focal points of the mix.

By properly panning, you help separate instruments and avoid a cluttered sound, allowing everything to have its own space.

4. Compression

Compression helps control the dynamics of your tracks, ensuring that the quieter parts don’t get lost and the louder parts aren’t overpowering. For metal, compression is especially important to glue everything together, and it’s a must for building strong, punchy drums.

• Drums: For metal, it’s essential to use both aggressive compression and parallel compression on the kick, snare, and toms. Parallel compression allows you to heavily compress a duplicate of the drum track and then blend it back with the uncompressed or less compressed original track. This method retains the natural feel of the drums while adding power and punch. Aggressive compression on the kick and snare ensures they cut through the mix and remain impactful. Without this, the drums will lack the necessary power and punch in a dense metal mix.

• Bass: Bass needs to be tightly compressed to stay consistent in a dense mix. Keep the attack slow enough to let the transient through, but not too slow that the bass feels loose.

• Vocals: Aggressive vocals need strong compression to maintain clarity and power. Use a fast attack and release to keep the vocal punchy but controlled.

5. Reverb and Delay

To add depth and space to your mix, you’ll want to use reverb and delay. Here’s how:

• Drums: In most cases, you’ll likely only need reverb on the snare drum. A good approach is to set up a parallel reverb channel for the snare, sending the dry snare signal to the reverb and balancing it with the dry sound. This allows you to create the right amount of depth without washing out the natural snare tone. You can also experiment with the reverb to create stereo width for the snare, giving it more space in the mix without losing clarity.

• Vocals: Like the snare, vocals are also best mixed with a parallel reverb channel. Sending the dry vocal signal to a separate reverb track gives you more control over how much reverb you want to blend in. Additionally, you can experiment with delays to add width and thickness to the vocal track. Delays can help create a sense of doubling or stereo width without overwhelming the mix.

• Guitars: You can add some reverb and delay to guitars as well, but keep it subtle to avoid muddying the mix. For lead guitars, a short delay can add depth and space without washing out the tone.

Remember, subtlety is key when using these effects. You don’t want your mix to sound overly distant or smeared.

6. Automation

Automation helps keep your mix dynamic and engaging:

• Volume Automation: Use automation to adjust the volume of certain tracks throughout the song. For instance, you might want the vocals to stand out more during the chorus or bring down a guitar lead during the verse.

• Effect Automation: You can also automate effects like reverb, delay, or EQ to change subtly between sections of the song. This helps create variety and makes the mix more interesting.

7. Final Checks

Once you’ve finished your mix, it’s important to do a few final checks:

• Monitor at Different Volumes: Listen to your mix at low, medium, and high volumes to ensure everything is balanced. What sounds good loud may not translate well at lower volumes.

• Test on Different Systems: Listen to your mix on different speakers and headphones, including car speakers, earbuds, and even phone speakers. The goal is for your mix to sound good across all playback systems.
• Take Breaks: Your ears will tire, and you’ll start to lose perspective if you work for too long without resting. Take regular breaks to come back with fresh ears.

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