Noitavaino

Noitavaino EP is now released on bandcamp containing its every alternative mixes. Later on the album will be released on Spotify etc. Reason for three alternative mixes is that I wanted to delegate my songs for professional mixers for the first time and learn more about the mixing process myself as well. Overall this album has been a practice project for myself to produce metal music.

During the process my end mix progressed quite a lot as well. Even if my final mixes could have somewhat qualified alone for the album in the end, I would not have gotten here without the support of other mixers in the album. For example I learned to use sidechain compressing and understand a bit more about dynamic equalizing. But still, I have quite a long way to go to actually develop my mixes to sound pro. Hopefully I will be getting started better next time. Mixing has for long been a necessary evil for me because I have not been able to achieve my goals with respect to how much I usually waste time for mixing. But now I have some new tricks to keep myself interested and I am slightly wiser to overcome some errors.

In terms of mixing, metal is probably the most advanced genre I produce/listen to. Metal has quite a lot organic elements and it takes much effort for raw recording to make into polished mix. (Even though electronic music can incorporate complex mixing the soundscape is usually relatively clean to work with.) Although, despite my hardware synths and bass guitar my metal production is inherently electronic software music in nature. As a solo artist I am obviously not able to play all the metal instruments live for the progressive stuff I compose, so I have to make compromises. But still, I will aim to make my metal stuff sound as organic as possible and… ruin it with my electronic elements.

So, if I can handle basics of metal mixing, I think I am able to control any other project I work with as well. For example electronic ambient has usually clean and straightforward source material and when it comes to classical influenced stuff (piano solos etc.) any kind of post-production is conventionally discouraged. These are the reasons why this metal album has probably been my most important project mixing-wise so far.