If you are looking for a career or hobby behind the knobs in the metal world, you've surely heard of Nail the Mix – a site created by top professionals in the genre to teach you mixing techniques for heavy metal with live mixing classes.
In the past, they have had classes that included Daniel Bergstrand and Meshuggah, Adam “Nolly” Getgood and Periphery, Jens Bogren and Opeth, and Logan Mader and Gojira. It's quite a resource that seems almost unimaginable 20, even 10 years ago. Next month, the educational site is hosting two big classes involving Converge and Lamb of God.
On September 1st, Converge guitarist and renowned producer Kurt Ballou (who's worked on High on Fire, Skeletonwitch, Kvelertak and Code Orange to name a few) will teach a class centered around Converge’s “I Can Tell You About Pain”. Here is some more info:
On September 15th, mega-producer Machine (who has worked with everybody from Clutch to Suicide Silence) will teach a class centered around on the biggest metal anthems of the new millennium, Lamb of God’s “Redneck.”
Machine offered these comments on what you can expect from his class:
It was important to me to come out for the first time with the right song, and I feel we made the right choice with Lamb Of God’s ‘Redneck.’ My goal as your teacher is not just the technical but even more important the attitude that I put into my approach. And how that mind set has defined my success with all kinds of bands.
“Things to Know:
- “This was the first time I got Chris Adler to fully agree to deconstruct his drum parts in his mind and record drums as overdubs (like how anyone would do in a studio with guitar parts, vocal parts, etc.). I saw how many crushing badass benefits there were to this method and we got to fully see it through.
- “There is no real kick drum ever recorded on this and believe me, that was not short of trying. At the time I was very envious of how the band Meshuggah had their own signature kick sound. The kick drum is so important in LOG, so I wanted very bad for us to have our own signature sound as well. We must have tried dozens of ways to get it from a kick drum itself, like duck taping metal plates and other materials to the drum. It was all a fail, so in the end I put a couple of samples together that I thought did the trick. To this day over a decade later, I still think of ways we could have pulled it off from the drum itself.
- “This was the first time we recorded all rhythm guitars with the intention that they were all going to be reamped. I learned big lessons on the right and wrong ways of working this method. The main guitar Di’s are included and I would love to hear your re-amps for this song. I would even like to use one of your reamp tones when I get to remix the song live.
- “There were many times I immersed Randy (vocals) in a method acting approach to getting the right emotion out of his vocal takes. If it was pissed off lyrics, I wanted him really pissed off. He hated me at the time for this, but thanked me later.”
If your interest is piqued, sign up for Nail The Mix here.
