Metapop - Taking on #Trailblazer - Part 3

Metapop - Taking on Trailblazer
Part 3

Here I am again! Still taking on Metapop’s #Trailblazer challenge. I promised you in the last post, that this one is going to be a rant about cutting edgy riffs in order to make them sound even more edgy. So let’s start with this right away:


I mean, look at this. As most of you know, if you zoom out of your projects in your DAWs you will reach a point where not every cut is visible anymore. To be fair: this is not the hardest thing I had in terms of cutting yet, but it did in fact take me some time to cut the guitar tracks accurately. I am in the comfortable position that I made quite a few recording experiences, so playing tight and in time is not an issue for me anymore. Having to move a few notes to the right timing position is a very rare occurrence for me now. Nonetheless: Cutting guitar tracks is essential when it comes to mixing as you’d never want the bare buzzing sound of electricity in your track when the guitar is not playing.

As I wanted the chords of the main riff to be very crisply and really cutting through the mix together with the rhythmic pattern, I cut them a little too hard on purpose – like really on the digital grid instead of cutting the actual played notes. This gave this specific riff a very electric, digital vibe which fits the arrangement pretty well I think. It looked like that:


What the hell. You do not even see 2 complete bars in this picture... Why do I compose rhythmic patterns with so many pauses in there all over and over again? Cutting pauses in guitar riffs is not entertaining. Not. Entertaining. In fact, it can get very annoying but once I am into it, the workflow improves and I will stop whining about it eventually… (It’s not that bad, I’m just making fun of myself.)

In contrast to that, there was a part as described in the last post where the stems of the original sub bass texture actually constructed the rhythmic pattern for a riff. This riff is not very complex, rather simple but it needs to sound natural and tidy at the same time. In my opinion slow riffs always need subtle grittiness, in order to keep them lively. This is why I did not quantize the notes – playing as tight as possible is more than sufficient for a riff like this. So what I did here was cutting according to the actual notes I played, even if they were slightly off the grid:


This is even less entertaining than cutting “on grid”. You have to focus not only on what you see, but what you hear as well. …why don’t I just play chords without any stops… (jk: I somehow love editing. Hearing the progress of accuracy is very satisfying to me.)

Not only did I apply two different approaches in terms of cutting guitars – I had to learn a new approach in terms of frequency balancing as well for this tune. I still haven’t heard the original track, but I suppose that the low end of this track is massive compared to my regular rock/metal/whatever productions. Since it has been easier for me so far to add more tight warm low end on synthesizer basses I found myself facing a new challenge, since I was actually playing a real bass for this track – and every bass is sounding different. Having a 5-string bass and being able to play low notes doesn’t necessarily mean you have a rich warm low end actually. What really helped me in terms of “warming up” the bass was the EQ-chart of Abletunes’s EQ WISE+. I am quite satisfied with how much “boom” the bass itself has on its own now, without actually interfering with the kick.

Another challenge I had to face was mixing the guitars for this track – although the adjustments I had to made were really subtle. Like, REALLY subtle. And this is something that I was not used to beforehand. For recording guitars, the channel strip only consists of IK Multimedia’s Amplitube (oh, how I love my setup of the ENGL Powerball with the Orange PPC 412 Cab) and a LoCut at around 100Hz (depending on the tuning it might be 70Hz or up to 120Hz). At the time of recording, I do not have specific EQing, transient shapers, compressors, tape saturation, whatsoever on the channel strip as this would only decrease my RAM for no reason at all. …as heavily distorted guitars are not that common in electronic music I just went ahead with my regular presets and wanted to adjust them accordingly to the track. HUGE. MISTAKE. You know, I really like guitars sounding hard and punchy. But context is keyword here. In connection with the stems and the warm bass, the guitars in my regular settings just sounded like a disk saw destroying my eardrums. So I removed all the settings and went back to recording settings – and this sounded so much better, still colourless but way better than with my usual approach. What helped me out there was a very simple article on 441k.com.

So instead of adding and shaping frequencies, I only set a light decrease at around 1,5khz. According to theory this would make the guitars lose presence in the mix. As a guitarist, you would never want that. Hahaha. BUT: This was the healthiest decision I could’ve made for this mix! Since the “surroundings” of the guitars were sounding so warm already, too much presence in guitars would have destroyed the picture. With less presence, I was able to raise the volume of the guitars just right so the impression they make is bigger and wider without being obtrusive. A transient shaper and a compressor were a wrap then for guitars.

When it came to mastering the track, everything went smooth and easier than expected (thanks to the above mentioned hints in terms of mixing). Thanks to iZotope's Neutron and Ozone plugins I was able to get a rich and defined sound with the amount of pressure in it, that I felt was just right! So… sorry for a possible disappointment, but mastering this track went rather unspectacular without any surprises worth mentioning… haha!

Up next: FULL RELEASE OF #TRAILBLAZER! …anyone else excited apart from me?

This is me right after shooting the video on Sunday evening:

(tired af...)

STAY TUNED FOR THIS!

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