What I learned From Mixing Melodic Metalcore on Tiny Speakers

I’ll be doing regular segments on Dueling Mixes from now on.

More specifically, I’ll share with you what I learned from mixing their song each month. I’ll try my best to give you some examples of what I did and let you listen to the progression of my mix throughout the month.

Crappy Speakers First

This time I made a challenge for myself.

I decided to mix this song first on my tiny Alesis Elevate 3 monitors. They’re really small and it’s one of the systems I use to check my mixes on.

I also wanted to work fast and get a mix going as fast as possible.

So I used my Eventide Channel plug-in that’s kind of an all in one channel strip that’s becoming really useful lately.

They also have a very extensive preset band you can work from and tweak to your satisfaction.

Then it was a matter of bussing, simplifying and adding some effects like reverb, distortion on one of the vocal parts and parallel compression on the drums.

So after an hour and a half I had a pretty good rough mix going I thought.

Then I switched my big reference monitors on and my mix fell apart…

• No lows
• Not enough highs
• Way too much reverb

*Sigh*

I turned my computer off and went to bed.

The day after I spent another half hour tweaking it to sound at least as good as I thought the rough mix was. The bass needed more low-end, the vocals needed adjustments and there was way too much distortion on the screamo vocals that I simply didn’t notice when I used the smaller speakers.

I also added a master buss boost in the high frequencies just to compensate for the lack of highs. When all you’re hearing is highs from those small speakers you don’t add them where they actually need to be.

I’ll be going back to fix that high frequency problem individually but for the example I prepared I did the quick-fix.

Here’s a small snippet of the rough mix I’ve got going so far.

In hindsight I should’ve bounced the small speaker mix for comparison.

The mix still needs a lot of work. I’m not happy with the way my guitars are sounding, the drums need more power and the overall low-end needs fixing. Joe and Graham were getting some tasty guitar tones on their mixes so I’m checking their videos out today to see what they did.

If you want to download the multi-tracks for the song and practice on your own, in addition to getting mix secrets from Joe and Graham, sign up for Dueling Mixes here below:

www.audioissues.com/duelingmixes (yep, that’s my affiliate link. Why wouldn’t I endorse something I use myself!?)

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Music Mixing