Studio Journal
Behind-the-scenes perspectives on the art and craft of modern metal production.
Metal Home Recording In 2024 And Preparing Stems For Your Mix Engineer is your end to end playbook for tracking tight parts, avoiding hidden mix killers and delivering export ready stems that translate. You will learn how to structure a session for heavy music, set reliable levels, print both character and safety options, name and [...]
10 Tips To Record a Killer Vocal Part In The Studio gives you a clear, repeatable plan to capture emotion without strain. You will set up a singer first cue mix, warm up with purpose, choose friendlier mic placements, pace the day so energy peaks on the right takes and comp with taste. Each step [...]
Say No To Vocal Strain and Perform Better in The Studio is a practical guide for heavy and melodic singers who want powerful takes without pain. You will learn how to warm up intelligently, set a headphone mix that stops over singing, choose mic placements that support your voice, pace sessions to protect stamina and [...]
Double Kick Drumming 101 is about efficiency, control and musical intent. Speed is only useful when the notes lock with guitars and bass, land with power, and stay clean throughout a set. This guide gives you a complete framework for technique, setup, practice design, sound, recording and live translation so your double bass work feels [...]
Programming Realistic Metal Drums is not about tricking listeners. It is about understanding how real drummers create impact and then translating those decisions into MIDI with intent. In this deep guide you will learn the pillars of realism for heavy music: shell tone that speaks in the mix, cymbals that breathe, velocity and timing that [...]
Drum Triggers and Samples: Cheat Code or Legit Tool? The short answer is that they are a legitimate engineering tool when used with taste and a clear goal. Triggers and samples can stabilise inconsistency, add weight, and make dense guitars feel tighter without steamrolling the drummer’s dynamics. The problem is not the method. It is [...]
How to Tune Drums for a Heavy Sound is about clarity, weight and control. The heaviest drum sounds are not just low or muffled. They are tuned with intention so every hit lands with punch, translates through guitars and bass, and stays consistent from rehearsal to the record. In this guide you will learn a [...]
Best Drum Heads for Metal isn’t about one magic product—it’s about matching head construction, damping and tuning to the way you hit, the room you’re in and the mix that will frame the kit. This guide breaks down ply counts and coatings, explains how built-in control rings compare with external damping, and gives practical, repeatable [...]
Dialing In Amp Settings for Metal is about developing a consistent workflow that produces tight low end, articulate mids and controlled high-frequency bite at any volume, with any guitar, on stage or in the studio. This guide gives you practical starting points for gain structure, EQ, presence/depth, boost pedals, gates, and tuning-specific tweaks, alongside quick [...]
Prepping Your Guitar for Recording is the difference between fighting noise and pitch in post and capturing takes that drop into a mix cleanly. This step by step guide gives you a reliable checklist you can follow before every session so your tone records consistently, edits quickly, and translates across monitoring. You will learn practical [...]
Crafting a Thunderous Metal Bass Tone is not luck. It is a sequence of smart decisions that start at the instrument and end at the stereo bus. In this master guide you will learn a reliable signal flow for modern heavy music, exact frequency ranges to target, compression and drive strategies that keep punch under [...]
The Magic of Double-Tracking Guitars is not a myth or a trick reserved for big studios. It is a repeatable process that widens riffs, clarifies rhythm parts, and lets vocals and drums breathe without losing weight. In this guide you will learn why doubling works psychoacoustically, how to prepare tight takes, the panning and phase [...]
Killer Tone with Less Noise is a realistic goal when you treat noise as a system problem and tone as the result of many small, consistent choices. In heavy music, high gain exaggerates every flaw, so hum, buzz, and hiss creep in from pickups, cables, power, gain staging, and computers. This guide gives you a [...]
Guitar Amp Sims vs Real Amps is a decision about tone, workflow, and repeatability that directly impacts how fast you track, how tight your doubles sit, and how reliably your rig translates on stage. This guide cuts through opinion to explain where each approach excels in modern metal, how to set levels for clean DIs, [...]
6-String, 7-String, or 8-String? is a practical decision that shapes your tone, your writing vocabulary, and how quickly your guitars track in the studio. More strings extend range and change tension, scale length, and pickup response, but they also affect arrangement choices, editing effort, and mix headroom. In this guide you will learn how to [...]
Active vs Passive Pickups for Metal is one of the most argued topics in heavy music, but it does not need to be. Pickups are just front-end gain and filtering devices that change the way your strings excite amps and sims. Once you see how output level, magnet pull, inductance, and onboard preamps shape attack [...]
Tuning Down: Setting Up Your Guitar for Drop Tunings is more than twisting machine heads. To make heavy riffs track tight and mix clean, you need the right strings, a measured neck relief, precise nut work, accurate intonation, and sensible pickup height for your gain structure. This guide walks you step by step from string [...]
Choosing the Right String Gauge for Metal Guitars is one of those deceptively simple decisions that shape everything else you do as a player and as a recording artist. Gauge affects how hard you can pick before things flub out, how stable your tuning stays under palm mutes, how easy big bends feel, and how [...]
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MODERN MISERY
Production, Writing, Mixing, Mastering