Mixing Heavy Rock / Metal Review

In this series Grammy-winning engineer Kenny Gioia, mixes a track from the band Days Of Samara. A vast scope of instruments is covered: drums, guitars, bass and vocals plus strings, synths, choirs and other less common sounds.

Manufacturer Groove 3
Price $45 Download and stream
Contact via website
Web www.groove3.com

The series starts with a heavy focus on organising your project to have a pain-free workflow. Although Kenny uses Pro Tools throughout this series, he does a good job of describing the techniques and how they can be used on other platforms, so the information here is fairly universal. Kenny goes from the mix files arriving on his computer, through renaming, basic editing, adding locators for navigation, grouping tracks and sets up a very basic mix in the first section of his process. None of this is sexy, but you get to see how important all of this is in context as he explains his reasoning for each task.

Once the project is prepared, the first port of call for Kenny is the surprising choice of setting up his mix buss processing. With a touch of compression he uses a level meter pre-chain and then gets a basic mix level to work with from here. Then he focuses on the basic vocal sound as the focal point. These are female, Evanescence-style vocals and once they sound solid, he spends over 70 minutes on drums which are then followed by bass. The rest of the series covers guitars, other sounds and some different vocals too. There’s a huge amount of information here and Kenny does a great job of explaining the tools and how they operate while offering content specific techniques. His delivery is clear and well paced and if this style of metal is your bag, you’ll find some good applied techniques here to put into your own work.