Full disclosure: Eyal Levi, who you may know from his work with Daath, is one of the realest motherfuckers I've ever met in the music industry. After Daath went on an indefinite hiatus, Eyal moved to Sanford, FL to join the team behind Audiohammer Studios, joining the ranks of mega-producers Jason Suecof and Mark Lewis.
Now, he wants to help you figure out how to record your one man polka grind project.
Eyal just launched a new Tumblr page, Unstoppable Killing Machine, with the main feature being that you can ask him any production question your heart desires and he will answer to the best of his abilities.
Even though I am not a musician, I am fascinated by some of the questions and answers. For example:
Any tips for getting guttural death metal vocals to cut through in the mix? I'm finding that they share a lot of space with the guitars
They not only share space with the guitars but also with the bass and the snare and the toms even. I would highly recommend a greater focus on your song arrangements. Writing parts that compliment each other will put your music leagues closer to being mixable. Take Black Dahlia Murder for example. When Trevor goes low you can still hear every word and he cuts through. That’s because it’s written in a complimentary way to the drums, guitar, and bass. His vocals are tailored to the music.In the land of eq and compression let me just say that you may want to isolate exactly where the beef of the vocal is and maybe cut just a hair of that beef off of the guitars and bass. But it’s a balancing act and don’t go nuts.
Your objective more than anything is to get the vocals to POP. So I would resort to some pretty heavy dynamics processing. Needles buried. Distortion. More compression. And then more compression. And remember, 1k is your bud.
I really respect that Eyal takes the time to answer even the most general of questions:
What plugins (if any) do you use on your rhythm guitar mix bus to make them more spicy (spicy could mean anything)
Most of the “spice” in a guitar tone is gonna come from the guitar player himself. 80% of your work is going to be before the signal ever gets to the computer. So spend as much time as possible making sure the guitarist, the guitar, the strings, the pickups, the amps, the cabs, the overdrives, the preamps, and the cables are right. And after that you shouldn’t need more than just a little eq to make your guitars spicy as fuck.
He even has a sense of humor:
How to achieve that huge modern Joey Sturgis/Chango studios snare reverb ?
Hire Sturgis/Chango to get you a snare sound
Head over to Unstoppable Killing Machine to read on as Eyal fields more questions and submit your own production question for the master to answer!
