I produce electronic music for the most part, but I genuinely have no idea how people have mastered metal guitar production, the EQing alone looks like rocket science to me. Really helpful tutorial, thank you!
It’s definitely a bit crazy sometimes, though it’s quite simple once you understand where problems typically lie in the spectrum. For example, around 150 ish to 250hz typically has a lot of mud for distorted metal guitars and cutting it will instantly bring forward an improvement! If you have any questions just let me know and I’m happy to help 🙏
@@BlakeLW Weirdly enough, I think Buster Odeholm usually boosts those frequencies. For example: Humanity's Last Breath guitars sound a bit muddy, bass boosted, and overly saturated, but it works really well in the mix.
Buster throws in some WILD techniques and I definitely draw heavy inspiration from his mix style. Dude makes some of the best mixes I’ve ever heard and I wouldn’t doubt he breaks “rules” like that haha. That’s what makes all this so fun though in my opinion. Everyone has their own way of doing things and not many right / wrong ways to do things.
Subscribed my dude. Love when metal musicians use reaper. Alot of metal tutorials seem to use protools (not that it matters, just nice to see some reaper love).
Thank you very much man! Reaper is not nearly as talked about as it should be. I’ve tried so many DAWs but I simply just cannot say anything comes close to Reaper!
Thanks for the tutorial! How do you approach writing the riffs? Do you make em in sections and then throw them together piece by piece or do you just jam out the whole thing out ”at once”?
I can try to make a video on how I go about it this week! Basically, I will write sort of as if I’m sound designing. It helps to think of it this way since you’re just basically throwing random guitar sounds in with bends, chugs, tremolo and so on. I tend to write a drum track first and use bass to find where I want chuggy parts or open notes, chord progressions and all. Then just follow with guitar and fill in the gaps with ambient guitar and random typical thall sounds to make it a more interesting riff! This is a bad example in the video as it’s mostly just a section of the song I’m working on that I think hits hard and is just mostly open notes lol.
I can try and make something on that for sure! I write it very chaotically but I guess that comes with the gig when something in that style is usually quite chaotic
I can see why there is kinda only one tutorial on it. I've watched Andrew Baenas so many times and just can't seem to fully grasp it. The production alone becomes mind numbing and I applaud anybody that can remotely play and produce thall. @@BlakeLW
That weird high end info you were getting rid of with Pro-MB could very well be RGB in your keyboard, try turning the keyboard RGB off and on with no gate on your guitar tone and see if it disappears and reappears. Speaking from my own experience here!
No worries at all, hope it helps! Another thing to try (once again with your gate turned off) is moving your guitar around in the room, different angles to the computer screen/electronics in your room. It's super frustrating stuff but having a clean signal to start with makes life so much easier!@@BlakeLW
@@BlakeLWfor me it was the guitar pickups facing the Pc Monitor and Pc Tower, so i had to turn my back while recording… Recently made the switch to a MacBook and the issue is nonexistent now!
@MrTheog1989, dude you literally saved my ass, I had been having these problems for two years, and when I turned the RGB lights off, BAM, no more noise! It solved my problem entirely!
interesting, so no use of Saturn on the guitar parts? I could've sworn Buster was using Saturn on guitar so ive been doing it, but it makes the guitars sound more shrill to me? even after hours of trying to dial it in.
It depends on what you’re going for. Honestly I wanted to update this tutorial with a new tone I’ve been crafting since this one is a little wonky. I tried Saturn on the guitars but just couldn’t get it right. It’s a lot of trial and error
i pretty much know nothing about mixing so i want to ask, how do you hear whether something is awful or clean? or how to distinct whether a signal is "high end " or "low " or "mid. i would like to know
This would vary depending on your own threshold of quality you want to have. A clean signal for me is no noise in the background when there’s silence, no extra strings ringing out that I’m not playing when tracking, and should be comprehensible without any processing. Timings being off is a natural way of things, but playing as on time as possible is a huge important variable as well.
I was using the PRS Holcomb SE for this actually. The reason the DIs sound so different is mostly the style of picking I did. I was pushing the strings into the pickup (literally) when I recorded this because I liked how scratchy it sounded
That sounds really good! And the bass sound is really heavy!, But in my opinion, your IR is not adapted to the context in question, let me explain, many IRs on the market emit very aggressive frequencies between 2khz and 5 khz, the fact of applying so much eq distorts the very essence of your ir, especially on the frequency range in question. Personally I proceeded like this before, because I wanted a tight sound, without unpleasant frequencies, so i think that the title “how to remove the aggressiveness of an ir on your guitar” would be more suitable for your video, because in this context, you confirm that making guitars sound is "complicated”. I think each ir is adapted to a different context and that you have to choose each element carefully to avoid so much post-processing, besides, do you think that Buster uses so much eq for his guitar sound?
Hey man thank you for commenting 🙏 These tricks are honestly directly related from what I learned from Buster himself. He may not do as huge of boosts or cuts, but that's also because I'm using super bad pickups haha. The IR is from Buster himself as well, so I'm more or less just reiterating everything he's shown off before in a way.
Always open to criticism. Without it nobody would improve 🤙🏻 What you commented and recommended with IRs does make a lot of sense, and I should try to “eq” using the mic placements and such more. So you’re absolutely right. IRs are crucial to a tone and the wrong one will never sound right. I appreciate you man!
@@BlakeLW thanks man ! What sound card do you record your guitar with? some sound cards can be misleading when mixing, because they don't respect your DI signal in its entirety and as a result you can find yourself having certain frequencies that sound weird or bad due to poor conversion, I've heard too many people tell me "any sound card will do" and I realized that it was wrong after changing mine, I had a Steinberg urr22 and I changed it for an RME babyface pro which is better, the difference is not huge but it is there, All that to say that the mix starts from the take and I think that when mixing extreme modern metal guitars there is a minimum requirement to have for all the details!
I’m using the focusrite octo pre, so it’s not quite low end and not quite high end. The DI is not going to be the best regardless as it was recorded using a stock $200 guitar’s pickups to be honest haha.
Thank you very much 🙏 I’m using the GGD PV kit. I went over how I mixed it in this video: Getting a massive drum mix / / Drum mix walkthrough th-cam.com/video/EA68icFyX3A/w-d-xo.html
I have tried to see how it sounds tuned higher but in my opinion the settings I have are geared towards this style. That being said, everything with EQ and all that I went over can absolutely translate to a more thrashy style if done right.
Some EQ is without the amp sim, but I always check before and after I add the sim to double check. Sometimes I need some adjustments here and there but since I track with the same gear all the time, I’m able to more or less get it pretty close without the amp sim. The trick with this tip I gave is to really understand and know your gear you have 🙏
That's just the result of me being overly meticulous with my process and trying to make things "perfect" I suppose! It was especially difficult to mix because I was doing a different chug style where you push the strings into the pickups to make it sound super aggressive and dirty 🙏
Why don't you just spend more time getting good tone in the first place? I've spend 25 years doing this, starting on analog tape, and we tried to get good tone from the getgo.
@@KingCharles-o6z Do you have some kind of weird mental problem towards people on what they wear in videos for tutorials? your advice is irrelevant to the video..pay attention to the words and his monitor..not the shirt. next you probably want him to do a tutorial on making a shirt look better.
@ uhhhhh no. To be successful on TH-cam, you need to consider everything (thumbnail, hashtags, video length, recording quality, set and setting, scripted or non-scripted, etc). His tutorials are great! But sometimes that only gets you so far. Look at the difference in local bands and most pro bands. Locals have Ill fitting clothes and sloppy unplanned stage performances. Their music might be great, but the visual aspect is lacking.
1:30 - this is real cringe. Nobody ever equalizes anything in such a crazy way. Not only does it literally barely change the sound (especially after distortion), but you also did it not on a linear phase. I don't know what kind of oversampling you have, but the point is that you simply cut frequencies in vain. The unpleasant hum at 200 and 900 Hz can be removed with just two regular cones (Oh my god, why did you so boost the sub-bass on the guitar... You even cut it out later!). After all, these guitar resonances are not audible in the mix. They can be heard by someone when the guitar is played separately. But there is also big bass and big drums in the mix. So manually cutting out all these separate hellish resonances is, one might say, a separate kind of procrastination. Sorry if I seem rude, but really. This is completely unnecessary in commercial production.
People have been using all sorts of crazy EQ curves before the guitar amp since the 90’s - ON commercial recordings. Boss HM2 for starters… It sounds like you are trying to give bad advice because a lot of people like the end result, which is what matters
I produce electronic music for the most part, but I genuinely have no idea how people have mastered metal guitar production, the EQing alone looks like rocket science to me. Really helpful tutorial, thank you!
It’s definitely a bit crazy sometimes, though it’s quite simple once you understand where problems typically lie in the spectrum.
For example, around 150 ish to 250hz typically has a lot of mud for distorted metal guitars and cutting it will instantly bring forward an improvement! If you have any questions just let me know and I’m happy to help 🙏
@@BlakeLW Weirdly enough, I think Buster Odeholm usually boosts those frequencies. For example: Humanity's Last Breath guitars sound a bit muddy, bass boosted, and overly saturated, but it works really well in the mix.
Buster throws in some WILD techniques and I definitely draw heavy inspiration from his mix style. Dude makes some of the best mixes I’ve ever heard and I wouldn’t doubt he breaks “rules” like that haha.
That’s what makes all this so fun though in my opinion. Everyone has their own way of doing things and not many right / wrong ways to do things.
It's about using your ears.
Trust me it’s not rocket science
unrelated but the contrast between your soothing voice and that absolute behemoth guitar tone in the intro was just funny to me lol
It’s always the quiet ones 🤓🤙🏻
Came to write this one LMAO
Fascinating. As a side note, recently I've been learning over time that I've had too much bass in my guitars.
And here I am adding huge amounts of bass to mine haha. As long as it sounds good, it is good!
@@BlakeLW yeah yours sounds great!
Alot of neural presets have alot of bass by default
Subscribed my dude. Love when metal musicians use reaper. Alot of metal tutorials seem to use protools (not that it matters, just nice to see some reaper love).
Thank you very much man! Reaper is not nearly as talked about as it should be. I’ve tried so many DAWs but I simply just cannot say anything comes close to Reaper!
Your eq-ing is a little wild but God damn your mix is slammin! Those guitars are on point
That is a wild Tone. Very well crafted
Crazy mix my dude
Thank you kindly 🙏
How much EQ you want on your channels? YES lol, love the video man!
What's an EQ for if you're not absolutely gutting the signal? 😂
On a serious note though, thank you kindly! I really appreciate it
Killer job! Thanks man
Anytime! 🙏
Man, I can't thank you enough for this video. Thank you!
Anytime at all 🤙🏻
Nice video mate and probably nice PP too
Facts
Thanks for the tutorial!
How do you approach writing the riffs? Do you make em in sections and then throw them together piece by piece or do you just jam out the whole thing out ”at once”?
I can try to make a video on how I go about it this week!
Basically, I will write sort of as if I’m sound designing. It helps to think of it this way since you’re just basically throwing random guitar sounds in with bends, chugs, tremolo and so on. I tend to write a drum track first and use bass to find where I want chuggy parts or open notes, chord progressions and all. Then just follow with guitar and fill in the gaps with ambient guitar and random typical thall sounds to make it a more interesting riff!
This is a bad example in the video as it’s mostly just a section of the song I’m working on that I think hits hard and is just mostly open notes lol.
How many plugins do you need on the channel? YES!
Hell yeah! Would love to see a thall tutorial/tips and tricks. As in how the hell to play it on the guitar. lol
I can try and make something on that for sure! I write it very chaotically but I guess that comes with the gig when something in that style is usually quite chaotic
I can see why there is kinda only one tutorial on it. I've watched Andrew Baenas so many times and just can't seem to fully grasp it. The production alone becomes mind numbing and I applaud anybody that can remotely play and produce thall. @@BlakeLW
@@rickjames5684 I'll do my best 🙏
@@BlakeLW You can never let me down. Thank you for even attempting it, because I know content isn't easy. 🤍
That bass sounds T H U N D E R O U S! I'm assuming Lundgren pickups in the guitar as well?
Thank you man! The pickups are just stock pickups on my $200 guitar so they’re pretty barebones. It’s all about working with what you got 🙏
We definitely want the video of splitting the bass by routing it.
Noted. I’ll make something about it soon!
Fuck yeah, dude! That sounds really close. *Thall* 🤘
That weird high end info you were getting rid of with Pro-MB could very well be RGB in your keyboard, try turning the keyboard RGB off and on with no gate on your guitar tone and see if it disappears and reappears. Speaking from my own experience here!
Hey man thank you! I'll give that a shot. I've been pulling out my hair trying to find the issue.
No worries at all, hope it helps! Another thing to try (once again with your gate turned off) is moving your guitar around in the room, different angles to the computer screen/electronics in your room. It's super frustrating stuff but having a clean signal to start with makes life so much easier!@@BlakeLW
@@BlakeLWfor me it was the guitar pickups facing the Pc Monitor and Pc Tower, so i had to turn my back while recording…
Recently made the switch to a MacBook and the issue is nonexistent now!
@MrTheog1989, dude you literally saved my ass, I had been having these problems for two years, and when I turned the RGB lights off, BAM, no more noise! It solved my problem entirely!
@@AnarkhosOfficial awesome!!!!
I’m subscriber 888. It’s meaningful to me. lol.
Nice work on your channel.
It’s very much appreciated, thank you so much! 🙏
interesting, so no use of Saturn on the guitar parts? I could've sworn Buster was using Saturn on guitar so ive been doing it, but it makes the guitars sound more shrill to me? even after hours of trying to dial it in.
It depends on what you’re going for. Honestly I wanted to update this tutorial with a new tone I’ve been crafting since this one is a little wonky.
I tried Saturn on the guitars but just couldn’t get it right. It’s a lot of trial and error
i pretty much know nothing about mixing so i want to ask, how do you hear whether something is awful or clean? or how to distinct whether a signal is "high end " or "low " or "mid. i would like to know
This would vary depending on your own threshold of quality you want to have. A clean signal for me is no noise in the background when there’s silence, no extra strings ringing out that I’m not playing when tracking, and should be comprehensible without any processing. Timings being off is a natural way of things, but playing as on time as possible is a huge important variable as well.
That would be totally uber-sick if the drum mixing part was included. Now its just sick 🙃
I got you already!
th-cam.com/video/EA68icFyX3A/w-d-xo.html
i followed all the steps but for some reason my guitar tone still manages to sound muddy, what could be causing this?
Do you have this preset for purchase ?
That tone is nasty
Love Reaper.
It’s the best daw hands down!!
thank you so much for this u helped me alot , i just wanna know how do you program bass i have no clue
Honestly I just follow the root note of what I’m playing on guitar. Is there any specifics about what you struggle with? I could possibly help!
@@BlakeLW thank you , i just dont know how to sync the guitar record with bass patterns
how can i get this theme
what guitar are you using? Your DI/pickups sound so much different than mine
I was using the PRS Holcomb SE for this actually. The reason the DIs sound so different is mostly the style of picking I did. I was pushing the strings into the pickup (literally) when I recorded this because I liked how scratchy it sounded
That sounds really good! And the bass sound is really heavy!,
But in my opinion, your IR is not adapted to the context in question, let me explain, many IRs on the market emit very aggressive frequencies between 2khz and 5 khz, the fact of applying so much eq distorts the very essence of your ir, especially on the frequency range in question.
Personally I proceeded like this before, because I wanted a tight sound, without unpleasant frequencies, so i think that the title “how to remove the aggressiveness of an ir on your guitar” would be more suitable for your video, because in this context, you confirm that making guitars sound is "complicated”.
I think each ir is adapted to a different context and that you have to choose each element carefully to avoid so much post-processing, besides, do you think that Buster uses so much eq for his guitar sound?
Hey man thank you for commenting 🙏
These tricks are honestly directly related from what I learned from Buster himself. He may not do as huge of boosts or cuts, but that's also because I'm using super bad pickups haha.
The IR is from Buster himself as well, so I'm more or less just reiterating everything he's shown off before in a way.
@@BlakeLW ok that explains things! Its cool to see that you are open to criticism, best wishes !
Always open to criticism. Without it nobody would improve 🤙🏻
What you commented and recommended with IRs does make a lot of sense, and I should try to “eq” using the mic placements and such more. So you’re absolutely right. IRs are crucial to a tone and the wrong one will never sound right. I appreciate you man!
@@BlakeLW thanks man !
What sound card do you record your guitar with? some sound cards can be misleading when mixing, because they don't respect your DI signal in its entirety and as a result you can find yourself having certain frequencies that sound weird or bad due to poor conversion,
I've heard too many people tell me "any sound card will do" and I realized that it was wrong after changing mine, I had a Steinberg urr22 and I changed it for an RME babyface pro which is better, the difference is not huge but it is there,
All that to say that the mix starts from the take and I think that when mixing extreme modern metal guitars there is a minimum requirement to have for all the details!
I’m using the focusrite octo pre, so it’s not quite low end and not quite high end.
The DI is not going to be the best regardless as it was recorded using a stock $200 guitar’s pickups to be honest haha.
What drums plugin did you use in this video? That sounds huge to me.
Thank you very much 🙏
I’m using the GGD PV kit. I went over how I mixed it in this video:
Getting a massive drum mix / / Drum mix walkthrough
th-cam.com/video/EA68icFyX3A/w-d-xo.html
This work with six strings guitar to do some "thrash" in C# tuning ?
I have tried to see how it sounds tuned higher but in my opinion the settings I have are geared towards this style. That being said, everything with EQ and all that I went over can absolutely translate to a more thrashy style if done right.
Just out of curiosity, did you EQ your DI with the Gojira X on or off?
Some EQ is without the amp sim, but I always check before and after I add the sim to double check. Sometimes I need some adjustments here and there but since I track with the same gear all the time, I’m able to more or less get it pretty close without the amp sim. The trick with this tip I gave is to really understand and know your gear you have 🙏
where did you get the HLB IR?
If you look up Odeholm Audio, Buster’s website comes up and in his store he has 2 IR packs. It’s the IR pack 1 I believe!
Good work done brother
I like the tone, but it sounds kinda overproduced from so much EQ.
But the tone is monstrous
That's just the result of me being overly meticulous with my process and trying to make things "perfect" I suppose!
It was especially difficult to mix because I was doing a different chug style where you push the strings into the pickups to make it sound super aggressive and dirty 🙏
@@BlakeLW the sound is fantastic bro, really good
What is this DAW software?
I use Reaper!
why are we whispering
To save my energy for explosive riffs of course
3:24 - 😅
😭
thall
@3:24 lol
Why don't you just spend more time getting good tone in the first place? I've spend 25 years doing this, starting on analog tape, and we tried to get good tone from the getgo.
@@Wizardofgosz it was just a super odd palm muting technique that was causing some gnarly DI issues 😅
bro clean up yo desk haha looks like my teenagers room.
Yeah it got bad 😅
Already taken care of though!
One kind piece of advice: videos are a visual medium and so I would suggest wearing a better shirt for the next one.
Hey man, thank you for the tip! I'll keep that in mind 🙏
@@BlakeLW yup! Didn’t wanna be rude. But if you’re going to make awesome content then the presentation is going to be important as well
Nah I totally get it. I’ve been going through it but I had the realization as well. Your comments are appreciated 🤙🏻
@@KingCharles-o6z Do you have some kind of weird mental problem towards people on what they wear in videos for tutorials? your advice is irrelevant to the video..pay attention to the words and his monitor..not the shirt. next you probably want him to do a tutorial on making a shirt look better.
@ uhhhhh no. To be successful on TH-cam, you need to consider everything (thumbnail, hashtags, video length, recording quality, set and setting, scripted or non-scripted, etc). His tutorials are great! But sometimes that only gets you so far. Look at the difference in local bands and most pro bands. Locals have Ill fitting clothes and sloppy unplanned stage performances. Their music might be great, but the visual aspect is lacking.
1:30 - this is real cringe. Nobody ever equalizes anything in such a crazy way. Not only does it literally barely change the sound (especially after distortion), but you also did it not on a linear phase. I don't know what kind of oversampling you have, but the point is that you simply cut frequencies in vain. The unpleasant hum at 200 and 900 Hz can be removed with just two regular cones (Oh my god, why did you so boost the sub-bass on the guitar... You even cut it out later!). After all, these guitar resonances are not audible in the mix. They can be heard by someone when the guitar is played separately. But there is also big bass and big drums in the mix. So manually cutting out all these separate hellish resonances is, one might say, a separate kind of procrastination. Sorry if I seem rude, but really. This is completely unnecessary in commercial production.
People have been using all sorts of crazy EQ curves before the guitar amp since the 90’s - ON commercial recordings. Boss HM2 for starters… It sounds like you are trying to give bad advice because a lot of people like the end result, which is what matters
I bet all you do is Complain Complain Complain to everyone and anything everyday