Djent Mixing Adventure 1: Source Tones are clutch!

Hey Steemies/steemers/steemites , this will be my first official post ever!

I thought I'd dedicate part of my blog to documenting my journey in the pursuit of getting better djent/modern metal production results.

Without further ado, SOURCE TONES.

I tried the 'polish a turd' method and realized....meh.... it really wasn't working for me. Fixing sounds that just weren't right for the mix in the first place will almost always result in failure. I'm learning that a mix should sound pretty damn close to an end result before you've even done any drastic mixing.

As soon as I switched to taking my time and selecting/ crafting the appropriate source tones I came out with a damn good result! It's on it's way to sounding more like those professional heavy mixes which gets me all kinds of stoked! Hope you guys agree.

So how did I select the tones? Make sure you reference (through good studio monitors, not only headphones) a few different recordings that you like the production on. Use this as a reference while selecting a guitar tone. Do the same for Drums and Bass. It can be particularly helpful to record a few bars of your song in your DAW and loop it while referencing your ideal track. Once I did this I noticed a lot of the time in modern metal the guitars are fairly bright and snappy with wayyyy less bass than you'd expect once you isolate the track! Most of this low end information seems to be coming from the kick and bass, and when combined together, give this wall of sound.

Anyways, hope this helps anyone with the goals as me. Let me know what you think! Or any thoughts you might have.

Chris