We used Remo coated skin on the Snare and transparent ones on the toms, kick I don't remember to be honest.
I have the iZotope Music Production Bundle and to be honest, I barely use it - Neutron takes too much processing power and because of this they are no longer in my workflow, Tonal Balance Control from iZotope was helpful when I mixed music that I didn't knew at all and I use the Ozone plugins like vintage limiter to make things louder, but they are just a part of my mastering if they even make it in
I'm happy about all those helpful "hitech" plugins like Gulfoss because they allow more people to Mix their own songs and can be used to learn more about Mixing and Mastering.
Yeah that's the beauty on mixing, some do it technically only, some see it as an art, both aspects are correct.
Haha yeah often there are trade off's and it's interesting to find workarounds, during those years I implemented a style that don't need much processing thanks to making just a basic balance and enhance what's already there with plugins afterwards.
For heavy compression like parallel busses I control the volume of every Aux send individually (Let's say for the Drums, cymbals down, HiHat etc., snare up)
this always worked out fine for me, when I doubt, mute as much sources as possible
I think I went bananas with this recording and had 16 mics - as mentioned at the beginning, this was the need for the Band, the value behind the good quality and what I mean is this: I showed them that they are important by setting up crazy mic's and made it not too serious at the same time by just throwing one mic through the room and said:"That's the experimental one"
This emerged after talking & Listening to their needs and their past experience where a Band paid a lot of money and had nothing to say during the recording process.
The "Shitty mix" approach is the same for me and here is one truth that might hurt many engineers: Many people / listener don't care if something is "pumping", if there is "12K missing for air" or if the "snare is buried" in the background
As long as the song comes out of the speaker and is good, it's good.
Tim Palmer, Warren Huart and many others always reminds us of this:"A good Song can't be broken with a bad mix and a good mix can't safe a badly written Song"
and I think it's true, so here it's really mostly the focus on the Bands needs according their reference tracks
The rest is always a lot of speculation that I love to avoid haha
This includes different listening levels from the point of view of the public!
Cameron Webb (12 year Motorheads Producer) said this:"When they like the track, they will crank it up!" and I agree from my experience as a listener, how about you?
The other side is, if a mix is in lower Volume it loses different perceived frequencies (Fletcher Munson Curve - google it
) so as much as it's said "Hallelujah Spotify with -14 LLUFS, you stoped the Loudness War, the reality is that top notch engineers still Master with their VU meter's cranked up as loud as possible.And I did the mistake, my last masters this year were made for -14 LUFS and they go down between commercial masters and I couldn't figure it out...
.. until I talked with some professionals! And that's the answer, they don't care about -14 LUFS
Thanks for the Illemium band I will check them out, never heard about them
Yeeeeah regarding our Project, at first thanks for checking out!
I work almost with no compression! There will be 40+ hours of mixing tutorials from our journey on Promix Academy in December 2020
https://promixacademy.com/mentor/adrian-ady-parzentny/
That's why I did the journey as well, to learn to mix different styles and to record in every possible environment, now I got rid of all the mind barriers about "You can't do this, you should do only that, it's not possible to record like blablablablabla"
You can do whatever you want, wherever you want
That's also the main point in Sylvia Messys Book "Recording Unhinged" who is btw also a big fan of our project <3 We all love Sylvia for the records she produced and the positive, encouraging energy she gives to us Great I will check out the tracks that you sent me, hope this answer brings some light to your questions, appreciate your input my friend!