Last Updated on January 9, 2025 by IDS Team
You may be a bedroom producer wondering how to mix heavy guitar, or mixing metal guitar for your own band. Or, you may be a producer working with other musicians who is mixing for this genre for the first time as part of a larger variety of work. Whatever the case, mixing metal guitar carries with it some unique challenges that mixing other genres does not. All genres have their own mixing conventions, but the challenges that come with metal often stem from the genre’s unique points as a whole.
From dealing with large numbers of instruments to building intensity, muddy sounding mixes and clashing tracks can be just the start of your challenges. Hopefully, this article should break down some of the main ones involved in the metal guitar mixing process. And – give you a primer as to what to expect, regardless of whether it’s your first time, or whether you’re trying to fix longstanding problems.
How To Mix Distorted Guitars: Dealing With A Crowded Mid Section
Due to the amount of guitars and other instruments in a metal track, a crowded mid section can very often occur when you are mixing. Furthermore, the unique nature of many kinds of metal vocals, such as deep growls, can add to the middle section. This is a phenomenon where normally vocals would be sitting higher in the mix, but metal guitar mixing has to account for lower vocals at the same frequencies as guitar. All in all, the general setup of your average metal track means you are often dealing with a more crowded mid section than you might otherwise in another genre.
If this is the case for you, here’s how to deal with a crowded mid section wen mixing metal guitar and thin it out while still keeping your track sounding good:
If you have multiple different layers of guitars, this can be one of the main causes of a crowded mid section. However, this particular challenge is one that is better dealt with during the recording and arrangement process, as it is less easy to fix in the production stage without cutting crucial parts of your mix.
- Practice minimalism. You may be creating metal, but due to the unique nature of metal vocals you may often have the vocal line competing with your gruitars in this section in a way that you won’t with other genres. Therefore it helps to practic eminimalism and consider what you truly need within this section.
- Get the tracks right in the first place! A track that isn’t mixed crisply and cleanly will be harder overall to slot into your mix and will end up sounding crowded and amateur. Furthermore, if you record your tracks right, you have a higher chance of getting them to pop out without having to duplicate them, another thing which can lead to a crowded mid section. This is one of the biggest things to conider when planning how to mix a heavy metal guitar tone.
Mixing Metal Guitar And Other Instruments: Dealing With Competing Drums
Maxing your drums stand out in a track is a challenge for any producer of heavier music. Those wanting to get an authentic, raw sound may want to focus on ensuring real instruments stand out and pop within the mix. One method some producers use to achieve this is by layering drum sounds. For example, duplicating a kick drum in a mix. Furthermore, a complex and quick drum part may also be present in a metal mix.
These characteristics can unfortunately often lead to different parts of your drum bus competing with each other. This means that you will have to deal with a lot of unwanted noise and the individual hits may not be as clear as you like.
Here are a few common pointers as to how to deal with competing drums when mixing metal guitars and other instruments:
- Isolate the ‘note’ of the drum. Doing this and minimising the amount of frequencies you allow so they are almost totally restricted to just the note can prevent your kick drum clashing and competing with bass and guitars.
- Look at your ASDR. If you feel things don’t stand out enough, drums compete with other instruments, or other frequencies compete with the main frequencies of your drums, reducing decay and increasing attack can go a long way to making your drums punchier.
- Don’t be afraid to reduce some of the low end of the bass. You can side chain the bass with a compressor so it ducks the kick drum, but only apply this to the bass’s lower frequencies. This can ensure the kick drums don’t compete and are able to stand out, but also doesn’t totally eviscerate the bass.
How To Mix Heavy Guitar: Choosing The Right Reverb
Choosing a reverb for metal can depend heavily on the context, subgenre, and desired atmosphere of your track. Reverbs vary between room, plate, chamber, and so on, but it can sometimes be more challenging to choose the right one for metal as the intensity and amount of sound you are working with can easily result in reverb becoming very thick, very fast.
In addition, your subgenre dictates what kind of reverb you may be best suited to, so if you are stuck, this is a good place to start. Remember that you may need to use more than one type of reverb on the same instrument, and without a duob ton the same track.
Here’s how to work with reverb right when mixing heavy guitars:
- Use a basic spring reverb or even a room reverb for the bread and butter of your mix. This assumes you are mixing relatively mainstream modern metal, alternative rock, nu metal, or similar, and not black metal or death metal. The characteristics of these genres are punchiness and heaviness – you don’t want too much reverb or a reverb that is too colorful because it will reduce the distinctiveness and therefore power to your guitar.
- In this instance, if you do want to add reverb, it can help to add it in an analog format – e.g. use a reverb pedal or amp reverb in the recording process. This can sound more natural, will fit easel with the track without you having to make tons of choices, and is also easy to tidy it up during the mixing process
- Alternatively for atmospheric genres like black metal, dealth or doom metal, or even symphonic metal, you might want to use more reverb. This is where you can use hall reverb, chamber reverb, plate reverb, and reverb pedals and/or delay creatively. This is one of the areas where setting up reverb in your pedalboard will do a lot of the work for you in your mixing process.
Dealing With Muddiness During Metal Guitar Mixing
Muddiness is an unwanted characteristic of many amateur mixes, but it can be a particular difficulty for metal, grunge, alternative rock, and similar genres. Muddiness come from when you have many frequencies competing with each other = particularly low end frequencies, or those in the low mid section.
Here are some tips surrounding dealing with muddiness when learning how to EQ heavy guitar:
- Priorities the kick and bass. These are some of the msot common elements of the mix that become muddy and often blend together. Isolate each of the tracks and EQ tem or mix them into a bus together to compare and see how you can made the elements pop.
- Pan your mix. It may not necessarily work all the time, but panning your mix can easily create space. However, don’t make this a substitute for proper EQ’ing and using filters
- Balance between adding and subtracting frequencies. One of the main temptations is to increase the volume by a couple of dB of the instruments you want to stand out when you are EQing. However, this is often a situation where instead, a less is more approach is needed. It is often much more affective to subtract frequencies than to add them. Focus on the areas, normally between 200 – 500 hZ, that are causing the biggest problem and try lowering the volumes of the guitars in this area. Your drums and bass, being marginally lower in the mix (in general) should pop out more.
How To Mix Metal Guitars: Managing Unwanted High End Noise
Unwanted high end noise is a problem that affects metal far more than other genres. WHilst pop, singer songwriter, soul, and other kinds of music don’t always stray too far into the high ends, the high frequency guitar lines of metal can generate a lot of noise that goes above the usual frequencies you may be working with.
If you’re wondering how to mix distorted guitars to sort out unwanted high end noise, here are some tips:
- First, the most obvious solution here is using a low pass filter. This can be adjusted so it has a relatively high frequency threshold and can get rid of a lot of the noise.
- Second, try a dynamic EQ. If you find that a filter creates too much of a contrast or makes the high end sound empty, a dynamic EQ will apply only when you desire it to. This can help tame sharp stabs of noise in the high end or unwanted noise that only peaks at certain points such as during a guitar solo, without stripping back this entire area of the frequency curve.
Final Thoughts
You may have come to mixing metal from another genres, or you may be looking for genre specific advice. Often, searching for advice on mixing in general does not apply to metal tracks due to the unique qualities of the genre. Therefore, hopefully this guide should have broken down some of the main challenges and what you can do about them.
If you like tutorials and how to articles, we have a whole section here. And, if you like metal in general, we have other great articles including this one on pedals, as well as this and this.
