hey, folks. matthew weiss here — weiss-sound.com,theproaudiofiles.com. welcome to the ask weiss series, and today,we have a question coming from sammy sabbah, and this question comes to us via the proaudio files' facebook page. sammy writes, “when mixing hard rock ormetal, how can one achieve the thick and dense sound without sounding messy? in other words,how to get a full and powerful sound?†well, this is a vague question, and it's adifficult question to answer in one quick video. i of course have my own thoughts onit, and would be happy to correspond within the comments section below, but i do wantto say that when it comes to metal in particular, i don't have a lot of experience in the subject.
fortunately, i know somebody who does. so,this ask weiss question is going to be answered by a really, really great metal engineer.great engineer in general, and also the designer of a really cool plug-in series called thejst series. he is joey sturgis, and i am going to now pass it on over to him. hey joey, how are you doing?joey: hey, howis it going?matt: very good. joey: so, yeah. there's a lot of variablesto achieving the goal of this question, and it mostly lies in the low end, which is whati've found to be true for metal and heavier styles of music. so, what a lot of people get wrong with thelow end, is you've got guitars that are tuned
low, you've got bass that is tuned low, andyou have the low kick. these three things fight each other, right?so one of the waysthat i do it, is i try to keep the guitars pretty much in the mid-range space, becausethe guitar was designed to be a mid-range instrument. i'll do that with a high-passfilter. somewhere around maybe 80 to 150hz. even on low tunings i'll do that. now, youhave to be careful. use your ears of course. don't just put the numbers in and expect itto be perfect. you need to make sure that you're not taking stuff away from the guitarthat's intended to be there based on what's being played, or how the people want it tosound. you know, if they want to have a – let'ssay they're playing in drop a, and they want
to have a beefier sound, then maybe you willkeep some of those lower frequencies. but it all starts off with filtering, right?so you're going through all of your various tracks, you're doing your filtering. obviouslycut out all of the low end on the vocals, all the low end is going to get cut out onbasically every track except for your bass and your kick. that's the first step to really achievingsort of a clear area of the frequency spectrum overall, okay? now with the bass, if you're recording a realbass, which i hope that you are, because i don't think programmed bass is that great.[laughs] now, if you're recording a real bass,
do you really trust the bass players abilityto be consistent enough to give you the low end that you want to hear – the consistencyof the low end you want to hear in your mix?because if the answer is no, then you need to do somedynamic modification and some dynamic automation on what's happening with those frequencies. so, the way i like to do it is to take thebass signal, and duplicate it twice. so, you've got your – the first – you've got twoversions of the same performance. the exact same performance twice. then what you do isyou take the first one and you do a low pass filter, and you take the second one and youdo a high pass filter. this effectively creates a crossover. so you'vegot one track that you can treat differently
than the other. so on the low end track, youcan go in and you can compress that differently than you're going to compress the high endtrack, which allows you to kind of tame that low end and make it more consistent and nothave these areas where the bass just suddenly jumps up, and the bass suddenly dips down,and you lose that energy that's happening there. so, i'll – a lot of times i'll distort thehigh end of the bass because i like the sound of a distorted bass, but if you distortedthat bass without having two separate tracks, you get this really messy low end, so it'snice to keep that low end very clear. then i'll use a limiter or a compressor to kindof tame that and to keep it more consistent.
then the next thing i'm doing is i'm beingvery conscious of the eq decisions that i'm making on the kick drum, because if i'm boostingfrequencies – if i'm boosting bass frequencies on the kick drum that are living in the samearea that the bass sort of performs notes in, then i'm creating a situation of fighting.you're going to get frequency fighting where the bass plays this note, and the kick drumhas that same note boosted, and now you get these weird sort of resonances that poke throughyour mix, and it's starting to sound muddy. so, the idea is to kind of – you can doit in a couple of ways. one way would be to automate so when the bass starts to play notesthat get down in the same area as the kick drum, then you can start to automate thatbass track down a little bit, right?
now, if you don't want to go into that muchdetail, which is fine, you can use a multi-band compressor and you can set the side-chainso that it would trigger the bass to get turned down when the kick drum comes in, or you coulddo vice versa. it depends on what you're wanting to prioritize. so if you want the kick drum to have morepriority, then maybe you set it to be the key on the side-chain of the low end of thebass, because the bass gets turned down when the kick comes in, then when the kick goesaway, the kick comes up. or you can do vice versa. so it's just a decisionyou have to make. the other decision that i think is very important in this scenariois do you want to have – there's sort of
two areas of the low end. you've got the sub,and then you've got the bass, right?i like to say the sub goes from 20hz to maybe 80hzor something, and then the bass goes from 80hz to maybe 160hz or something like that. so, where do you want your kick to live, andwhere do you want the bass to live? they can't live in the same place. so it depends on thetuning, and it depends on maybe the drum sample, or how you tuned the actual kick drum itself,and based on those variables, you'll make a decision. so i like to have my kick drums generallylive in the sub area, and i like to have my bass live in the bass area.
matt: cool! so, i'm a big fan of your plug-ins.i have pixelator, the clip plug-in, and gain reduction, which is an awesome compressor.real quick, where can people get those plug-ins? they're very affordable, by the way, so anyonewho's watching this who just wants to get a quick, excellent upgrade for their plug-incollection, joey, where can people get that stuff?joey: so, you can find all of our plug-insat joeysturgistones.com, or you can actually just go to joeysturgis.com as well, and ittakes you to the same place. we currently have a thing called “producer bundle 2,â€which is actually all of our plug-ins for one low price of $249, so the – if you wereto buy every plug-in one at a time, it would cost you $324 dollars, so you can get allof them for one price of $249 for just bundle
2. matt: cool. alright, guys. so this has beenanother installment of ask weiss. special thanks to joey for stopping in and helpingus out with that question, and if you or anyone you know have a question, feel free to leaveit in the comments section below, or on the pro audio files' facebook page. alright, guys. until next time. joey: thanks for having me!