D.D.M.

In Mikseri.net: D.D.M.
In Soundcloud: D.D.M.

So, this is a demo of a demo, and the first one where I really got to incorporate Audio Assault's Reamp Studio. I've made this song as such I'd play it myself, kinda for practicing again since it's been what, 10 years since I last recorded something I played myself (that would be the few songs I made for Left side of the track). I'm so rusty that I just couldn't lay the tracks down, so I made a sampleset and tracked the song for now. And there's also quite a few things I did differently than what I've done so far. That applies also to the mindset when I can get those guitars and bass recorded for good; I'm aiming to play each part of the song in full, so there will be no repetition in the performance. But that's for the future.

First thing that was different was that I recorded all samples direct, so I could apply any effect to them if the initial sound wouldn't work. That is an idea I've been tinkering with for years; to have a comprehensive, clean sample pack, so I could use whatever amp sims I see fit.

Second thing was that I basically mixed this in Modplug Tracker. I demoed the sounds there and then just copied them to Reaper when the song was done. Only sounds I crafted in Reaper itself was the clean guitar, since for a brief moment I had this song mixed without intro and outro, despite the fact that I had them composed already.

Third thing is that I switched the file format from .it to Modplug's own .mptm module. That change I did because it handles the tempo better and it seems to work quite similar to .it in other aspects. So now I can make songs in any tempo and not rely on few select ones that hit even numbers (like 90bpm for example, which this song is in for the most part) with the speed and tempo variables.

And lastly, the fourth thing I did differently happened in Reaper; this time I didn't use any group tracks. I found out that the individual tracks' sound affects that of the group track (which now when I think of it is like "duh!"). So when I have a bass for example that already has some modeling going on and then group it for some more modeling, we end up with a sound that is different on the group track even if I'd put the same effects on the individual track. So just to stay clear from any of that, I kept all tracks separate and applied all effects directly to the tracks. So for instance, there are two instances of same effect on different tracks going on in the song instead of one on a group track. But that is not something my pc couldn't handle, so we're good.

So, soundwise this song turned out kinda garage-y, which isn't such a bad thing because it's in line with the first D in the abbreviation of the song title.
I wanted this song to be muddy and I think it turned out better than I had hoped.
There was only a clear vision of the guitar sound in my head when I doodled these riffs; there should be no nice-and-clear high end in the guitars. That was the driving idea behind it all. Everything else just basically (almost) fell into place after that.

At first I thought (and tried) that I'd just put bass, depth and mids on ten and roll off all treble and presence. That didn't work because there was too much bass at that point in the guitars, so I just left bass halfway and depth on ten. That seemed to be a good spot where the guitars became gritty and muddy but not boomy.
I kinda had hit jackpot with the amp model at the start when I went for the AD30 with matching cabinet. Don't know why, but I thought right from the start that Orange would have a gritty sound to it, despite the fact that I've never played real one myself.
After that I just boosted it a bit and added a compressor to tighten the sound. And that's where the right and left channel differs; they have different booster pedals assigned to them, though with same settings. That adds a little flavor there, to not have the exact same sound on both sides. And it's something I like to play around with every now and then.

Bass was giving me a bit of hard time at first. What I had set up for it just didn't work with the rest of the mix, it didn't fit in there. So I scoured through the clean amps, despite the fact that there are two dedicated bass amps in the Reamp plugin. I had the settings for the bass done already; all boom and no blingbling. So, full on everything that goes boom and zero on everything else. Now it was just the matter of finding the right amp and cab for the job because there were no pedals involved. So I scoured first the amps and found out that the Jazz Chorus on bass goes enough boom without distortion, so that was our amp. For cabinet I knew it had to be one of the Marshall's the plugin has.
1960 with Vintage 30's was too much boom, since bass is loud in the song, Greenback cabinet turned out to be a great one; not too much boom and an interesting sound for a low tuned bass (this can be heard before the third verse). Kinda lo-fi in my opinion but that was just perfect for the soundscape I was going for. Now it sat really nicely in there, providing a great low end for the song.

Drums in this song are the ones who really bring the garage to the soundscape. They couldn't be nice and clean and punchy; there had to be dirt in them. So what a better way to put dirt on anything than to drive them through a guitar amp. In this case I used Audio Assault again, this time Grind Machine II. There are only a few clean amps in that plugin, so not much to choose from (and two of those clean ones are from an expansion pack), but then again the cabinet is the one what really shapes the sound, so nothing to worry about.
I had only an idea for the bass drum sound to be kinda "thud"; like you wouldn't have a too good recording space or skills. And it wasn't too hard to find since I have played around with that plugin quite many times in the past. Bassmaster amp and Fat German cabinet -> Fat Bass. ;)
Then just more bass from the eq and mids for some snap and roll off everything else and voilá, garage bassdrum.
Snare, hats and toms were basically trial and error around the bassdrum; just playing with the clean amps and feeling them in the role; what felt good, stayed. After that I applied EQ accordingly; boom to toms, crisp to cymbals and mid(town) madness and crisp to the snare. It was all-in-all pretty straightforward and didn't take long to have a nice garage kit to go with the guitars and bass.

So that was the song for quite some time because in my initial sample recording session I didn't record the notes for the clean guitar. But after I finally got to do it and laid the parts down in Modplug, I went and crafted the sound for it in Reaper.
At first I didn't know what to do with it; should the sound retell the sound of the distorted guitars or be clear as day? So once again I just went with trial and error with the clean amp section in Reamp Studio.
I had recorded the clean guitar direct just like everything else, but with the singlecoil neck pickup instead of the bridge humbucker because the only things I did know were that they would be softer than anything else in the song and they should have the same cabinet as the distorted guitars. That is because in many cases when I compose or mix songs I always think what they would be like to play live. So what I ended up with was a Highwatt DR100 model with a couple of pedals.
At first there was only compressor to even and boost the sound a bit. But it felt like it needed something so I tried a mid boost. Still the sound was somewhat thin and dull, so I thought to put acoustic simulator there for the fun of it. And that worked, it made the sound kinda like a dull, distorted glass of sorts, if that's a way to put it. So in the end I didn't use the mid boost at all. The sound isn't crystal clear by a long shot and it wasn't quite what I might have thought it would be. But I think it works in this context and I really, really like the sound by itself, so that's the main reason it stayed.

So, there we have atleast one song released for quite some time, and blogpost too after like 3 or 4 years. Enjoy the experience.

Self-Inflicted Extinction

Song in Mikseri.net: Self-Inflicted Extinction

This song has been dormant for 3 years. I first pitched the idea of a death metal song where the bass would be just outrageous in 2014. Had couple of riffs in there and I liked it, but I couldn't come up with anything, so the idea eventually died.

The same idea came to me again some time ago while I was working, but this time it was more refined; I wanted to incorporate death metal, doom metal and that outrageous bass.
So the initial end result for the death metal parts was that one guitar would be laying some groundwork with slower doom-like rhythm, other guitar would be tremelo picking some figure in the key of the rhythm. And bass would be doing same as the "lead" guitar, just in a different pattern.
The whole song is based on triads, it's actually a childish, simplistic idea. The speed is the factor here that makes it sound the way it does. Slow it down and it's not so exciting.

At first I thought it would be just a blasting death metal song with the idea of the bass going throughout the song in triads, but when I got the death metal part done, I needed something to transition the song from verse to verse. At first I thought the bridge part would be slow doom-like piece, so at first I made a doom part, but that didn't work. Then I remembered that I had written down the tremolo-part of the verse, so I just took that and made the guitars play it in harmony, so I got my bridge.
I took the doom-part, now unused, and made it into pre-chorus, but what I came up as a chorus just didn't go well with the pre-chorus, so I changed places. It works better that way.

What comes after the chorus is just something I was doodling with, but I thought that it would be just hilarious to have an acoustic part in a song like this (propably there is bunch of bands that have done such thing (Arch Enemy comes to my mind), but I haven't) and it gives a nice contrast.
The acoustic part is the only one that is NOT based on triads in this song. :D

Oh well, so, about the bread and butter of this blog; the mixing.

I had a rough idea of what I wanted this to sound like; fat guitars, clangy bass and big drums. Well that was the initial idea atleast. But it got refined as I started fooling around.
The first mix basically had everything I mentioned above, but I didn't like it as much I thought I would, so I had to come up with something else.
I still wanted to keep some of the elements there, so I tried and found a nice sludgy sound for the rhythm guitar.
This song is mixed basically just with Blue Cat Audio's Destructor, only bassdrum has Reaper's own EQ with the Destructor.

Rhythm guitar achieved the nice, dirty and ugly sound pretty much the same way as the lead guitar; with Destructor's bass amp presets. Since Destructor is basically 2 EQ:s and a distortion module, there is no reason to stick to the "guitar" presets when dealing with guitars.
The lead guitar has a clean bass preset called Aluminium Man, at first I used it for bass too, but it didn't work that well in the mix, so I changed bass to the dirty version of the same preset, so the bass has some distortion in it... Again.

Drums had, well, drum presets at first, but I wanted something else for them. I wanted them to be clear and gritty, so I just shuffled through the presets and eventually set with different prestes of "tape emulations" for the drums. I added some EQ to the bassdrum to make it more prominent in the mix. Some 60Hz boost to give it some oomph and some 4KHz boost to give it some (oh) snap.

This time I didn't do anything to the acoustic guitar. Just raised its levels to match it with the other instruments.

When all that was done I added Destructor to the master track and fooled around with the "mix" presets until I found something I liked. Then I just adjusted the compressor a little and leveled it so that the mix doesn't hit red.

So that was the story of this song in a nutshell. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Miehen Kivinen Tie

Miehen Kivinen Tie
Dynamics are for pussies. ;)

This is my first release with new DAW and plugin that I bought. I got Reaper for DAW and Blue Cat Audio's Destructor mainly for guitar and bass use... But I noticed that it has presets for so much more, so I used it. So basically this is kind of a test run with new equipment. :)

My new workspace ^^

At first I wasn't sure how I would proceed with this song, so I just went with trial and error. As I was testing I decided to just blast the shit out of the mix, so I did.
The drums are the most prominent example of this approach. I played only with the presets here because they are extremely good, there is plenty and well... I haven't gone in-depth with the plugin yet.

For bassdrum I used "Bassdrum Oomph"-preset which turned it kinda like it's from some house song or such... Not so metal. :D
But it's great for this mix because it's easy to pinpoint and it's so out of place here... To me it's so wrong it's great.
I put the same preset on the toms just to make them go BOOM!

Snare and cymbals got 2 versions of "Smiley Exciter"-preset which, as you might guess, is a V-shape EQ curve. It worked nicely as it took both aspects of the drumkit out from the frequency spectrum where bassdrum and toms are, despite the bass boost.

After all that destruction, I made a Drums Master-track where I applied Vladislav Goncharov's Limiter no6 to compress and limit the drums. I compressed the drums with 3:1 ratio, long attack and short release. I also engaged the high-frequency limiter to keep the cymbals in place.

As a pre-caution I also used the peak limiter in multiband mode and the protection module as a final "master limiter" for the drums.

For guitars I used the "Convolution Amp/Cab modeler" provided with Reaper. Left guitar got Fender Deluxe amp with Marshall Cab and right guitar got JCM 800 with the same cab as the left track. After that I looked at the frequency spectrum of the guitars and as a result applied EQ to them. What happened as a result is a bit wide notch around 100Hz to remove the boom from the guitars.

For bass I used the BC Destructor's "Aluminium man" preset that gives bass the grit you hear. As with guitars I checked the spectrum and as a result I basically cut everything around 50Hz, but the notch grows exponentially, so the notch affects degradingly all the way to 500Hz.

After all that it was time for the Master channel. There I also used Destructor and found a preset called "Oomph mix". It basically boosts the whole spectrum, balance leaning towards bass. Afterwards I just applied Limiter No6 again to limit the whole thing to -0.5dB. Destructor has a built-in limiter, but there's no control to it, so I just wanted to make sure the red light doesn't flash, that's all.

The result is something that I haven't done before, but I'm satisfied with it and had a lot of fun fooling around while mixing this. Watch out for your eardrums and enjoy!

Slow In Motion: Stories from a deep place

Slow In Motion - Stories from a deep place

The second installment from Slow In Motion is finished at last! I'm going to talk about the last song of the package, since it's the one that took most work mixingwise and because every individual element explained here is the same in every song where applicable. So, let's get started.

I had a clear vision of what I want from the sound of the second package; fuzz! A LOT of FUZZ! And I got what I wanted.

As you can see, the last song took some doing, since there were many elements to take into consideration.


First of all, to achieve the FUZZ I was after, I went for the guitars. The bread and butter of the resulting sound is Distorque Audio's Face Bender. I was so happy to see that it actually has 2 stompbox effects modelled, so naturally I put one to left guitar (fuzzface) and the other (Tone Bender) to right guitar. I then tweaked the pedals settings individually to go together. The amp sim I used was just some quite random amp I have. To that I didn't do any individual tweaks, just a working base tone to build upon. The result was even better I had hoped, but to keep the guitars in check I put GVST's Multiband Compressor to the group track and squashed bass, middle, and treble frequencies.


The bass (as usual for me) turned out to be a hard one to get sounding good. I've been playing with TSE Audio's BOD for some time before I started working on the sound for this package and decided to use it since every other method didn't seem to work at all. I'm not sure that I can say I'm happy with the result, but it works in this context, so why not? I worked fairly long with the BOD being the one bringing the distortion to the sound, but at some point I decided to turn it around, making BOD more like a booster and eq.
EQ on the bass is well... Bass. I didn't want any clang and sparkle to the sound, since it just sounded weird with the guitars (tried it at one point). After all I put multiband compressor in there, let all the bass frequencies through with some compression (as you can see) and cut the mids somewhat and almost all of the treble. So all-in-all the bass is like a layer of distortion here. And you can hear it clearly at some points throughout the package.

Drums were fairly simple to do because I knew exactly what I wanted and how to achieve it. I just put the drums through Shattered Glass Audio's Ace. Individual settings for different parts of the drums and that was it. The result is very basement-like, but I really like what that amp sim does to that particular set of samples. After that I just put a compressor on the drums group track in Cubase and tweaked it to perfection.


I had some idea of what to do with the piano. There were 2 things on my mind; need to get some life and space to the sound and put it a bit to the background. Well, succeeded on the first and ultimately "failed" on the second. To have some space and life to the sound I used Soft Amp's Flextron DC14. Once again a guitar amp simulation, but who cares?
Most pleasing sound I achieved with the 2000's model paired with 1x12 cab, since I didn't want it to sound "big and bassy" with the 4x12. The life to the sound came through that with heavy middle and treble boost and the space to the sound came with the built-in reverb and ambiance of the cabinet mic. After that I just put a compressor on it and tweaked it a little. The compressor doesn't actually compress but brings it's own twist to the sound. The same thing was actually with the drums, since I used the same plugin called Max Synth's DSP-3. I really liked how it fitted to the soundscape and at first the piano was in the background (in the 9th song, since it was the first to have it) and I thought it was fine. But coming to the last song with all the other elements (mainly the strings) I noticed that guitars pretty much buried it in combination with the strings, so something had to be done. Solution was fortunately simple as to just bring up the level of the piano quite a bit. I had to remix the 9th song because of the changes to the piano and at first it felt like the piano was too loud. But I got over it so quick that I decided to leave it like it is. So the piano sure as hell isn't in the background anymore.


The first "new" thing to work on this song was the violin, which also does something that I haven't had in these songs before; playing a solo. I didn't want to assign one of the guitars to the solo because I wanted it to sound constant, so I had to come up with something else. I remembered that I have many times used a certain violin samples when I've needed one, so I decided to go with that. I've tweaked the violin so that one (the original) is really short on sustain and the other has a buttload of sustain. Because of that their attack (and thus sound) is a bit different from each other. I used the long sustain in the longer notes and the short one in the faster runs.

The solo came to be as I just felt that this song could really use one, so I played around for some time before coming up with the pattern. It's simple, but that's how my solos mostly are as I never see myself as a solo player, so I'm not so good at composing them. Also I have much limitations when it comes to solos since I don't know many scales or anything like that. The solo part is kind of an combination of something older (the rhythm part) and newer (being the solo itself). As I was playing around with the melodyline, I got the idea of combining it with that rhythm. That opened up some possibilities to me since the whole part goes mostly on triplets. I really used that to my advantage on the drums and that's why they sound the way they do in there.

I had the same idea with the violin as I did with the piano; life and space. But this time I didn't use an amplifier simulation. Instead I got the life from Digilogue's ancient Blueline Chorus and the space came from same serie's reverb. I tweaked them to really have an impact on the sound and then leveled it with some compression. But then I had to brought it up aswell since it is after all the one to play the solo and shine in the spotlight.


Last but not least was the strings. I first had them only in the solo part and I really really liked it. But then I thought that it would sound more epic and be more constant if they would be layered all over the song. So I did that and I heard it was good. The strings were fairly simple to get to fit into the soundscape as I only used the DSP-3 to give it some colour and then just searched for the right level for them to be present but not dominating. All-in-all I think I succeeded pretty well. The result is more like an epic melodic metal song than a sludge song, but it fits for the theme of the song a lot better that way and really stands out as a closer to the package.

So, there you have it, long story about a long musical journey. Enjoy!

Black Metal Army of the Seven Nations

Black Metal Army of the Seven Nations

This got started sometime in fall last year, can't remember exactly when. I had the base of the sound done beforehand because I was working on another black metal song.
The initial sound isn't so kvlt, but I liked it, so I worked some (black) magic in Podium.

The sound you hear is the result of shitloads of VSTs. There's first Grease Tube on the guitars and bass. Guitars are "tight and compressed" as the settings say in the plugin. The bass is complete opposite, being "open and crisp" with "far" mic placement that gives it depth and even more bass.
Drums are layered with my presets in 50rcery, which I've come to conclusion, is a compressive multiband EQ. :D
Then in Podium I put some more compression on the drums and EQ on the bassdrum. For the EQ I Boosted 60Hz, 500Hz and 2kHz.
But the real black magic came from the 50rcery in the master channel with most boost on low-mids and treble.

Mostly this is just me trying to remember what I did as most of the parts of the song were already made last year. Today I mostly just made some re-arranging and re-working the parts already done. The only new thing from scratch was the solo. At first I had no idea what to do with it, but after a while I got the idea of using bass on it. But the bass I used on the song already didn't work on that, so I got the other sample set I usually use in my songs.
Then it was just decision of what to do with the sound. But that wasn't a big problem, because the answer to life and everything in the universe if FUZZ! I just put Face Bender on it, tweaked it to perfection and went with it. At first I thought to follow the original solo, but then again since I don't do it with the riffs either I just intrepreted it. It sounded wicked in the tracker already and propably not in a good way, but I wanted to make it just outrageous so I put some phaser and reverb on it in Podium and the rest is history. :D

I finished the song after the solo because I felt like it had nothing more to offer. So here you go, a quick and dirty explanation of a quick and dirty raped song.

Slow In Motion: Things yet to come.

02. Pressure of Becoming

I'm going to write only one post regarding this forthcomihg "album" because the sound is initially the same on every song.

I've learned that you can get interesting sounds when you put already amped guitars and bass through an VST guitar or bass amp. And in this case (as in most of my mixing work lately) I put the drums through an guitar amp simulation aswell.

Guitars went through an AXP Flextron clean channel with the '90s mode. When I took the "bright"-setting off I got that mud'n'dirt to the sound. After that I tweaked the EQ in such a way that the curve is almost flat (as seen in the following picture).

The EQ on the amp is almost the one I always use; bass halfway and mids full. The only difference here is the highs that I reduced a lot to cut the hiss'n'sparkle. Only real difference between the channels is the tube position which is Post-EQ for one and Pre-EQ for the other.

Bass went through Shattered Glass Audio's Ace which is a Fender Tweed rendition. It gave a nice growl to the bass; it breaks nicely to distortion. There's nothing much to tell here; I just played with it until I was satisfied with the result.

I put drums through AXP's FM25 which is a rendition of Fender's Frontman 25. Not the most aftersought amplifier, but excellent for this purpose. Everything went through the clean channel with individual tweaks to EQ and cabinet.
Bassdrum and toms got 1x10 cab with hard mid-scoop EQ; 10-0-10. Ten seemed to be the key for that. :)
Snare was just flat-out full blast EQ with 2x12 cab.
Hats got some reverb (half-way), not that it can be heard. :P Cab was 1x10 with full mids and treble. Bass I cut completely out.

So that was the initial sound in Modplug Tracker. It clipped somewhat heavily, but since individual tracks did not, I went with it. After I got that done I ported the whole thing to Cubase for final tweaking.

In Cubase I didn't do too much. Since the guitars have somewhat different sound (left being much more muddy) I boosted the level of left guitar 3dB compared to the right one. Bass got some compression to make it even and constant. The only other major thing before master channel was the snare which sounded quite thin on it's own. So I put some EQ with low-mid boost and some sparkle at 2kHz. And after that some compression to bring it up in the mix.

Master channel included a compressor and limiter to push the mix and prevent it from clipping. Dynamically this is a murder, but that's what I was going for; a dirty wall of sound.
I got what I was after, I hope you enjoy.

Death to Terrorism

Death to Terrorism



At last I have something to write again! I have another song finished aswell, have to consult the archives before I can release and write about it though. It's been finished for some time now, so I need and try to remember how I mixed that one. But that's not this song, so let's get to the point here.

This was originally just a test of a plugin type I hadn't used before; a gate.
I had experimented with it in 2 other songs-in-the-works, but this one was the first to be complete.

At first I had the gate on drums as well as on bass. On drums it was so tight it killed all sustain and at first I was happy, since it was going to be a fast song right from the start. But then I noticed that the bassdrum had some kickback because of the gate. It wasn't audible in the fast parts and barely in the slow ones, but it still bothered me a lot. So I opened up the gate somewhat so it left some sustain to the drums and also returned some of the original sound of the samples. And I saw it was good.

The gate on bass made it distorted in a very sweet way (for my ears), sounding like a bit crusher. I liked the way it sounded and was very happy... For a while. It turned out that the gate didn't work in the long run; the sound became really odd after some time into the song. So ultimately I had to think something else for the bass.

I had an idea for the guitar after reqular EQ proved not to work as I wanted in this situation. I got the Grease Tube VST plugin and tweaked the guitar sound with that. And it made wonders for it, making the guitar track extremely dirty.

So the next idea was to put the same plugin on the bass track. And it proved to give a really decent result. I have to admit I'm still sad that the gate didn't work because with the guitar track it would've propably been a killer sound. But all-in-all this was a really good alternative since the plugin gave some nice distortion to the bass.

After I got all done in MPT I exported the tracks to Podium for the final mix. And that proved to be a pain in the ass... A big one too.
I had already done some mixes with the gated bass, so at this point it was just tweaking the levels, but that turned out to be quite a job to do. All-in-all I had to mix this shit almost 20 times before it was finished. The mixing was a bigger job than the composing or coming up with the sounds. :P

In Podium I added EQ on the bassdrum, snare and cymbals, but this time I boosted only ranges from around 1kHz to 4.5kHz. As follows:
Bassdrum: 6dB boost at 2kHz.
Snare: 3dB boost at 1,25kHz.
Cymbals: 4.5dB boost at 3kHz and 3dB boost at 4.5kHz.

So in that matter too this was a different way for me to do things. I wanted to make a clear dirty mix, so that's why I didn't make the drums so snappy and crispy. It wouldn't have fit for the atmosphere of the song.

I had really hard time with the drums on this one, they were being buried all the time. So after like 15th or 16th mix it was clear to me that I need to bring the guitar and bass down. So I made a 3dB reduction to them and got the drums' levels up a bit in the process. Now it sounded really neat on my AKG K-44 headphones and I was so happy.
But then I listened it through my KRK Rockit 5's and it became clear that the snare is barely audible at times. :/
Some listens more and I realized that I can't do too much to it or it becomes too dominant on the other parts, so I left it as it was.

This time I used compression on the master track along with the usual limiter. That's how I mixed all the mixes before the last one. I noticed that the compression cut some of the low end, so I exported 3 files from Podium: drums, bass and guitar. Drums I exported the way I had mixed the song: with compression and limiter. Bass and guitar got out without compression, although they both are extremely compressed already because of the Grease Tube.

After that I imported those three tracks back to Podium, applied the limiter to master track and made some reduction in levels and that was it. Finally.

So there's little problems with the snare, but I'm still very happy the way this turned out to sound. And composing-wise I'm also satisfied, I think there's some nice things going on, especially with the drums. Also something bit different at times.

Enjoy this little piece of heaven. ;)