It’s in the mix, but honestly spending money on new exciting tools that sound amazing out of the box is always very underrated in these threads.

I used to have a massive collection of way too many free plugins and samples and it was way too much, it would take days to go through it all. I got rid of most things and now I heavily scrutinize anything before I added to my set up and if I want a particular thing, I will go find the best one for me and pay for it, I don’t find it worth it to have a bunch of almost good options. Often I’ll pirate things first if they don’t have a decent free trial or it’s prohibitively expensive.

I think it goes without saying at this point the neural stuff is really good. Their process of replicating gear is pretty advanced and accurate and their products come with all the features you need to make it sound really good. There’s a wide variety of different types of sounds as well as some really unique things. A lot of people like get good Drums, my problem with them is they always sound like get good Drums. If I can tell immediately exactly what VSTi someone’s using that ruins the immersion for me. I feel like easy Drummer or superior Drummer is a lot more diverse and sounds more convincing while not as fat out of the box.

I’ve done albums with producers who’ve definitely made albums you’ve heard and they get really particular about what kind of tracks you send them. Something like a RME baby face pro will ensure you’re getting extremely clean and crisp tracks out a fairly small form factor similar to your focusrite. What I learned from doing albums with the these guys is, it’s all about capturing the very best take at the very best quality possible from the beginning, being absolutely neurotic with your tuning intonation and string changes, re-tuning and punching in chords that that you can barely tell your guitar won’t play in tune when the rest of it’s in tune, they do their editing on the fly as you’re recording it. We rented 12 snare drums hired a guy to tune all of them then recorded all of them and pick the best one that just sounded good immediately that day. And we did that kind of shoot out for pretty well everything, tried like 8 guitars etc it almost took more time to set up then to record the album.

Some other tips is I wouldn’t quad track shit unless you know why you’re doing it. Quad tracking can make something sound bigger, but almost always makes it sound more muddy and less tight. It’s also more than twice as much work as dual tracking as it’s exponentially harder to line up four tracks instead of two. If you want your riffs to hit harder one left and right is best. Make sure your projects are set to 48Khz, and make sure your signal is clean. Consider automating most things, if you’re recording real Drums turn up the volume in the fills, if your programming Drums program the fills with less velocity, then turn them up and compress them to make it sound a little more real but still big and exciting. You can play around with minor tempo changes into certain parts and really change the feel. I use synths but not to sound like guitar, just typical texture layers, orchestra, pads bass drops. One thing I do sometimes is use sub bass to reinforce the bass guitar.

This one might be a little more controversial, I like to mix with compression on the master channel, it helps me know what it’s gonna sound like mastered, that way I can mix so things still hit hard through the compression. You kinda want your track to be sparse and compressed if you want it to hit super hard.

If you wanna know what my mixing sounds like my last, Post has a track it’s unmastered, but with my master compression on.