Update XVIII

Back from holiday and ready to start the next stage of this project - mixing & mastering. Literally loads to think about for each song. With the advent of streaming platforms, it is so important to get LUFS correct, and also ensure that you have a good mono mix for common bluetooth speakers.

But first up is getting a group template up and running so each song sounds like they belong together. You should have consistent processing for guitars/drums etc across the entire album so it all flows together and doesn't feel like a random playlist. Below you'll see what I've done so far, and what I'm gonna start with. This may change as each song gets mixed but it's a good starting point. A couple of points : 

1) I'm making some further processing on the guitars to bring them out a bit. Compression, little bit of high end distortion, saturation, and a stereo enhancer after the quad guitars have been EQ'd in two separate groups. I've also added some parallel distortion to grind things up a bit, and hopefully this will add more grit without creating a mess.

2) Drums group is using parallel compression to create the "drum smash" effect. Basically you compress the shit out of the signal, then bring some of it back into the group which adds to the loudness. I'm using the Rough Rider VST for this.

On the note of distortion, I've just seen that the Ohmicide plugin is now available for free. It's a superb multiband distortion unit and I highly recommend you get it if you are a producer. It makes such a difference to channels and I'll be using it a lot in this project.

Still a bit undecided on whether to have the delays as sends or inserts. I know it's not the proper way but I like having them as inserts, especially as you can EQ the output in the units easily now. Anyway, enough rambling, let's get to it :)