Mixing metal with a "non-metal" sound engineer?

[crushingpetal]

Honestly, a country album of just drums and bass might be nice.

Edit: ah, maybe not:

 

[prlgmnr]

Honestly, a country album of just drums and bass might be nice.

was going to say "how about Country Drum & Bass" for an obvious joke, but of course that actually already exists

 

[RevDrucifer]

Machine engineered Ashes Of The Wake after doing mainly hip hop, then LoG had him do Sacrament as the producer. I don’t think he got a lot of metal bands in between those two albums, but he’s done a shitload since.

 

[crushingpetal]

Machine engineered Ashes Of The Wake after doing mainly hip hop, then LoG had him do Sacrament as the producer. I don’t think he got a lot of metal bands in between those two albums, but he’s done a shitload since.

I was thinking Machine too. I love listening to how he thinks about engineering, he's great. He did White Zombie and Clutch before LoG, but still good example.

 

[Drew]

This probably happened before, but can you give me some examples?

Under "non-metal", I mean how doesn't label themselfs as such, and work mostly with pop, rap, folk, or EDM musicians.

I think it could give cool results, since they don't use the same cliche things, the currently trendy plugins, they don't follow or learn from the coolest youtube metal sound engineers, etc...

Or they would be clueless how to mix metal drums and guitars?

What are your thoughts?

Thanks!

I think a good - like, a legitimately talented and knowledgeable - producer from that kind of background could do it, with paradoxically pop probably providing some of the most similar challenges. But, I think there'd be a learning curve and they'd have to do their homework, both to really get their heads around some of the specific challenges in metal (kick/bass overlap at high tempos, guitars dangerously close to white noise territory, massive mix space conflicts), and to learn some of the mix conventions (distorted, steady-state bass, heavily scooped and click-y kick drums, etc).

I think if you took an average local studio engineer with a lot of experience doing folk, and gave them basically a young Metallica without much studio experience of their own, you'd have problems. And I think that's exactly as true as if you gave one of the better engineers around here, oh, Billy Strings, and told him to make an album. You could do it... but you'd want to see a LOT of work done before the band came into the studio, and it would probably still take a lot longer than an engineer experienced in the genre.

It's a risk because knowing what the conventions of a certain genre are, from a production standpoint, arguably in some ways can cramp creativity by giving you a "default" set of answers... but you also kind of have to know the rules before you can break them, and get away with it without doing a fuck-ton of trial and error along the way. Like, maybe some of those approaches get cliche... but they're cliche because they work, and if you approached bass the same way you would on an Old Crow Medicine Show album while tracking Rivers of Nihil, it's going to sound weird.

EDIT - rereading that last bit, I guess fundamentally what I'm saying is all genres have their cliches, and they're cliche because they just happen to work well for that particular genre so a lot of people tend to do them. And, with an average-talent engineer very familiar with one set of cliches but not familiar with another, you'll probably get bad results. an average-talent engineer very familiar with one set of cliches and willing to put the time in to learn another set of cliches, you'll do better but you probably won't break any new ground. Where it could get interesting is if you take a truly brilliant engineer in one genre, and have them spend some real time learning the stylistic challenges/norms of a genre but maybe spend less time learning specifically how people tend to get there, and turn them loose.... Yeah, you might get something interesting there... but a truly brilliant engineer is probably going to get something interesting with anything they touch, and they're a special breed anyway.

 

[Fox Dieane]

Despite featuring In Flames, I want to say this song was produced by Rob Swire who is the main member of Pendulum, which is a DnB/EDM act. They actually had some really cool live shows as far as EDM artists go. Then they swapped to doing Knife Party which had significantly more boring live shows typically associated with EDM acts. Probably the only song they did in that vain, though.

 

[power^of28]

I think to get a "non" Metal Engineer to go Metal you would suggest/ make more dynamic choices in EQ , Compression and Volume.

 

[TheBolivianSniper]

I agree: post an example of your work.

Let me get some stuff together since it's not mastered. I have 2 projects right now that I think are a decent representation

Here's a link to a board mix of the raw, unedited tracks for the one project. No processing, no sample replacement, all real instruments. It kind of sounds like shit since it's grindcore and I haven't cleaned things up yet but I'm working on editing things up and doing a proper mix at the moment.

 

[crushingpetal]

Let me get some stuff together since it's not mastered. I have 2 projects right now that I think are a decent representation

Here's a link to a board mix of the raw, unedited tracks for the one project. No processing, no sample replacement, all real instruments. It kind of sounds like shit since it's grindcore and I haven't cleaned things up yet but I'm working on editing things up and doing a proper mix at the moment.

Also, don't forget to post in the demos section to get some ears.

 

[TheBolivianSniper]

Not to hijack the thread, but I figured I'd back my talking up. The first link is kind of a joke band (please ignore the name and lyrics), but it's really ugly grindcore that's blown out and nasty. Second band is the band I currently play bass for, but it's not me on this track currently. They're more a weird progressive metal band with a slightly 90s inspired sound, hard to put in a category. I think both are good representations of my work that I engineered, produced, and mixed. Still currently works in progress and not mastered, but I'd like to think it's at least different. Does SSO have a place to advertise recording related services? I don't wanna endlessly plug myself but if I can help anyone out I'd be glad to.

 

[crushingpetal]

Does SSO have a place to advertise recording related services? I don't wanna endlessly plug myself but if I can help anyone out I'd be glad to.

That's a good question. I would think "musician's classifieds" section or "general classifieds" section, but someone else may have a better idea.

If nothing else, participate in the "recording studio" threads and post your stuff in the "live performance and stage and sound" threads.

 

[SalsaWood]

Really the original question should have led to the further questions of who exactly and how much time do they have. An actual sound engineer should have zero or very few issues switching from style to style given proper time for procedures, but if you give the best style dedicated engineer in the world only 20 minutes to do their fucking job it's probably going to let everything down a bit.