Seeking EQ advice

[rtm]

I was asked to simulate a mastering for an artist so they can get a general idea of what their song might possibly sound like after mastering. It is metal and I am wondering if anyone can offer some jumping in points as far as frequency bands to boost/cut to enhance a generally flat lifeless mix? I know this should be done by a mastering house and it will ultimately.Any advise would be helpful.The song has alot of distorted guitars as you may have guessed and it is a wall of mid/lows coming at you.

[DigiTechSupt]

There is no possible way anyone could give you any specific advice without hearing the song. Generalizations as far as mastering goes are almost nearly impossible.

[EGS]

Originally Posted by rtm

... a generally flat lifeless mix ...

There's the problem. Fix the mix, first and foremost. Mastering will bring up the average level, but won't magically repair a so-so mix. My 2 cents.

[Roland Clarke]

I have done,(and still do) a lot of mastering. As pointed out above, it's impossible to say what needs to be done without hearing the mix.

On occassions I've had great mixes where there is little improvement to be offered, just subtle tweaks, on the other hand there are times where I've had mixes that sounded truly awful and yet through mastering have come up with results that have surprised even me. As a rule of thumb, if there are balance issues little can be done to resurrect the track, however if it is issues due to a general monitoring fault (i.e. lack of bass/too much bass) often this can be straightened out in mastering.

Recommend that your client seeks a good mastering engineer, it shouldn't be too expensive and anyone who is worth his salt should be able to give advice as to whether remixing will be of benefit prior to mastering, they should be able to be fairly specific as to where the issues lie and what changes need to be addressed.

Good luck!

Regards


Roland

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by rtm

I was asked to simulate a mastering for an artist so they can get a general idea of what their song might possibly sound like after mastering. It is metal...

Take a Massey Limiter and squash it until there's only 6dB dynamics left. If it kills the sound, you need to remix. If it sounds "okay but more distorted than before" your overall balance is good. You might even find that distorting that metal song more "adds" something to it... :) Point being, check the dynamics. If there's room for squashing it more, it's all good.

Until you EQ it on another room monitoring thru another pair of speakers, there's no point in tweaking the EQ to "simulate" something. You have your listening environment and you do decisions there. Unless you have something else, you have nothing more. You have to trust YOUR ears and make decisions where you work. Go somewhere else and you still have your ears but another listening environment.

[rtm]

Thank you for replies.