Chris Lord-Alge

Two more albums that have come out this year that i think sound really good are My Chemical Romance's Danger Days and Stone Sour's Audio Secrecy. It was only until i looked at the mixer of Audio Secrecy that i realize that it was the broth of Tom Lord-Alge, Chris Lord-Alge. That i looked up My Chemical Romances and it was the same guy as well. What a coinkydink!

Chris Lord-Alge is a mixer who is known for his use of dynamic range compression in both hardware and software plug-in versions. He says one of his ways he gets the sound he ways is he listens to things quietly. "Listening at low volumes prevents fatigue and you can hear better what's going on," he said. "When you turn things up, after a while all your moves become a smear. So when you're doing really critical moves, do them at a low level." He also says that when you listen to things at a low volume, you have to work that much harder to make things really pop out at you.

It seems to be working for him seeing as Waves Audio released a Chris Lord-Alge Artist Signature Collection of audio plug-ins, which is a collection of 6 application-specific audio plug-ins for Bass, Drums, Effects, Vocals, Guitars, and Unplugged.

Chuck

Following the non-metal trend, another album i owe a lot to is Sum 41's Chuck. Before i was into metal i was big into punk, and the heaviest bands i would listen to were The Offspring and Bad Religion. Chuck is Sum 41's not by any means a metal album, but it's their heaviest album and was one of the albums that provided a gateway to heavier things for me.

Chuck was mixed by Tom Lord-Alge, one of the most famous mixers around. He is a three-time Grammy-Award winning record producer and mixer and helped pioneer a method of digital tape editing known as "flying" vocals, which is using a piece of the chorus to accent a different part of the song. Other bands he's worked with include Blink-182, Hoobastank, Avril Lavigne, and Weezer.

One of the things i've learned from listening to Chuck is that Tom Lord-Alge is really good at layering vocals. At the end of the song No Reason there's at one point like 4 different vocal lines going on at the same time, yet he layered them so well that you can tell each one apart quite easily. Another thing i like is the sound of the guitar and bass together. They fit together perfectly and create a really meaty, crunchy sound.

All of these things together made a really good album that I keep listening to regularly.

Lady Gaga

Moving away from metal bands, one of my favorite albums of late is Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster. Aside from Lady Gaga being one of the most talented singer/songwriters out today, The Fame Monster sounds really good.

The Fame Monster was mixed by Mark Stent, who is a british mixing engineer. Stent is one of the most sought after in the business and has worked with oher bands and artists such as U2, Maroon 5, Linkin Park, and Muse.

Normally you don't expect pop songs or albums to sound really good sonically, but there's an exception here. Everything is crisp and you can tell everything apart from each other. The lows are bassy, which it should be considering the tracks are geared more towards dance songs.

The only thing i didn't like about the mixing is on the song "Dance in the Dark" the bass drum sound is too bassy and over powers the speakers i listen to it on. I don't know if it's the song itself or the EQ settings i have on my iPod but it's slightly annoying. Besides that everything else sounds great.

Tips and Tricks

Just for fun i searched "sound mixing tricks" into google and a few websites showed up. Some of the things that were said i already knew about, and some i didn't. The ones i didn't know were pretty interesting.

One trick that is really simple, but very important is to listen to your mixes on a bunch of different speakers. The speaker that you do most of your mixing on might sound really good, but they definitely don't sound the same as iPod earbuds, so trying to get the best possible sound for every set of speakers is ideal.

Another tip would be to always back everything up. It should be common knowledge but it sucks when you forget to do so and the worst happens. It's happened to me before.

Tweakheadz has a really good article on their website on how you should record, place, and edit every part of a band. It also talks about what you should do when mixing and mastering.

Here's the website: http://www.tweakheadz.com/perfect_mix.html

...And Justice For All

One of the more famous and funny stories that has to do with mixing i think is the album "...And Justice For All" by Metallica.

Why is it funny? Firstly, it's one of, if not the album Metallica is most know for for having a very bad mixing/production job on. Secondly, it's the record that bassist Jason Newsted first appeared on after Cliff Burton died (that isn't a funny part) and apparently because of it being his first, one of the hazings on him James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich did was make the bass on the album inaudible. Thirdly, and last of all, no one knows if that is the right reason, and if it isn't, what the real reason is. Apparently when recording it James and Lars would argue over wanting the guitars and drums being louder than the other.

I actually don't think it sounds that bad. It could definitely sound better than it does, but it's one of those albums where the sound of it fits perfectly with the music being played which makes it that much better. And Justice For All was mixed by Steve Thompson, who also did Guns N Roses's Appetite for Destruction, and that is one good sounding record, so i doubt it's his fault for having And Justice for all sound like it does.

Andy Sneap

Another famous mixer that has done numerous jobs for big bands is Andy Sneap. Sneap has received a Swedish Grammy for his work on Opeth's Deliverance album, as well as US Grammy nominations for his work on Killswitch Engage's The End of Heartache, Megadeth's Endgame and Megadeth's Sudden Death. Other bands he's mixed include Arch Enemy, As I Lay Dying, Killswitch Engage, and Trivium.

Andy Sneap got his start by first doing live sound for bands and then wound up working with Colin Richardson. One of the big things i read in an interview with Andy Sneap on maelstrom.nu, is that he believes that even though having all these tool to be able to "cheat" your way around the recording process is nice to have, but at the end of the day if you can't play what you record, then there really isn't any point to recording it. He also talked about using triggers for just the kick drum with samples which was pretty interesting.

Out of all of Sneap's works, i think what he did on Trivium's Ascendancy is the best. It was one of the very first metal CD's i listened to and i remember thinking that the drums sounded amazing and i've never heard anything like it. One of Sneaps more recent projects, Megadeth's Endgame, has similar drum sounds.

Andy Wallace

When it comes to albums that have come out this year, i think Alter Bridge's newest, AB III, sounds the best.

AB III was mixed by Grammy award winning Andy Wallace. Andy Wallace is a very well known mixer who got his big break after his work on the Aerosmith/Run DMC "Walk This Way collaboration. He's worked with bands such as Slayer, Foo Fighters, Nirvana, Avenged Sevenfold, System of a Down, and many more.

The thing i like about AB III is that's it's a heavy album, but it doesn't really sound like it. What i mean is that it has the bass to be heavy, but doesn't overpower anything. In an interview on mixonline.com with Wallace, they describe him as having a "very present, crisp drum sound; part of it is that the guitars are brutal and outragious; and part of it is a dynamic sense that comes from your own musicality." That describes him perfectly after looking through his catalogue of cd's he's mixed.

Another thing i like is how he places little things perfectly. For example, in the beginning of Isolation there's this riff/fill of the guitar that he pushed away from the rhythm guitars to make it sound good. Of he didn't it would have blended into the mix easily.

Metallica

I've talked about it before on my other blog, but Metallica's self-titled album still remains one of my favorite albums sonicly. The Black Album came out in 1991 and because of that it's one of the albums I've grown up listening to. After almost 20 years since it first came out, it still holds it's own against records for having the best sound.
I read Classic Tracks: Metallica's Enter Sandman on mixonline.com by Sarah Benzuly, and article about how Enter Sandman and really all of the Black Album was recorded ans it was pretty interesting. It was told by Bob Rock, the producer of the record, and Randy Staub, the engineer. They didn't really talk about what equipment that used, but rather the methods and techniques both Rock and Staub used to get the sounds that the record came out with. One of the things they said that they changed was the guys in Metallica would record verse by verse, chorus to chorus, and so on, but they wanted them to play through the whole song so the the songs themselves what have that long feeling to them and not broken up.
Another interesting tidbit was how James Hetfield wanted a crunchier sound to his guitar and how it was acquired. Randy Staub said that "to Bob and myself, crunch was more of a high-end thing, but to him crunch was more bottom end. What he wanted was when he hit the low strings, he wanted to have some length to it. And the only way to get that length was by curtaining off this small room around the cabinets and we’d have some mics farther away to get some ambience.”
It's always interesting to learn about things that you grew up with and the article i read was no exception. It provided a neat insight on what when on when recording some of the most famous songs around. I mean who hasn't heard Enter Sandman at least once? It's iconic.

Colin Richardson

Looking back, i can say that Colin Richardson has been an engineer/mixer that i've grown up with and i owe a lot to him. Colin Richardson is a pretty big producer, mixer, and engineer whose worked for big metal bands such as Trivium, As I Lay Dying, Bullet For My Valentine, and Cannibal Corpse.

Without knowing at the time, when i was first getting into the metal scene Trivium and As I Lay Dying were the two big bands that i was first introduced to and loved. I quickly moved onto other stuff and looking at his resume, i've found out that a good amount of other records i listened to at the beginning of my metal days were mixed by him as well, like Machine Head's The Blackening.

The most noteworthy album that he's done would be Trivium's The Crusade and Shogun. I love those two albums and love the way they sound. The guitars are thick and tasty, the drums are precise and pounding, and the bass fits in perfectly without being buried in the mix. One of the ways people say he gets his sound for the drums is layering 3 different tom sounds to make them sound bigger.

One of the things i like about Colin Richardson is that he's done a bunch of different records, with each band having a different style and he emphasizes that with each band, but if you listen to enough of his work, you can tell that's it's him by the little things, like the snare drum. Everything is just tweaked a little bit in each situation.

First Post!

First things first, this blog i've created is for a school project and in that project I have to talk about ten different sound engineers. This first post is going to be about a more recent release, Avenged Sevenfold's newest album Nightmare and it was engineered by Brent Arrowood. I had never heard of him before just looking him up now, but he did wonderfully on Nightmare, and looking at his previous works he has a sort of distinct style that he goes for, whether or not it's entirely his doing or not.

With Nightmare, Arrowood got pretty close to what i'd consider an ideal sounding album. The rhythm guitars are thick, the lead guitars stand out without sounding too thin, and the bass and drums are pounding. Everything has it's own place, and it sounds like that. He definitely did a great job on the drums. One of my main complaints on a good amount of records are how the drums sound bad and Avenged Sevenfold's previous records are in that bunch. On Nightmare though he fixed them. The bass drum sounds thick and precise, just how i like it.

I also found out that he did the engineering for the movie 28 Days Later, which has a really good soundtrack. Even though the soundtrack is orchestral i can hear the simlarities between Nightmare and it. Besides the style of music being sort of the same, they both have that same feeling of everything having it's own place, which is even more important in orchestral pieces.