Metalcore Case Study

I’m currently working on a Metalcore EP with the Brisbane based band Rare Words. As someone who has never worked within creating something of this genre before, it has been an important process for me to look into how tracks within this genre work sonically and justify how these tropes found through my analysis has affected certain choices.

Metalcore is a genre of music which is often described by many as a hybrid between the two pre-existing genres of metal and hardcore types of music. This means although it still shares many elements of heavy metal, it is often much more melodic and emotional sounding compositionally though still retains many of the same sonic characteristics of heavy metal.

For this case study, I will be analyzing the track “Doomed” by Bring Me The Horizon, one of the most popular Metalcore bands at the moment. As does with many other Metalcore bands, Bring Me The Horizon uses metal drums and guitars mixed with more melodic hardcore guitars and a decent amount of electronic elements. I have chosen Doomed as the track for analysis as upon hearing the demo from Rare Words, which I found strong similarities to and therefore chose it as a reference.

Drums

One of the biggest things I’ve had to focus on was how the drums in These types of tracks were recorded and what gives them the sound that they have. In Doomed we have both a mix of electronic and live drums which have been processed in a number of ways, these two types of drums work together and give off a particular aesthetic which is similar to the Rare Words project that I am working on. One particular thing that can be noticed in many of these tracks is the use of triggers, which essentially take each drum hit and replace it with a sample so that we are getting almost the exact same sounding drum each time (this process was written about in my previous blogs if you are interested!). This is particularly noticeable on the kick and snare sound of this track. Another thing on this track which was uncovered is the unboxing video is the use of quite a large drum room which help to give the drums a bigger, full sound with a natural reverb tail. For this I’ve chosen to use the NEVE studio as it has a bigger live room to achieve this type of effect.

The track starts with an electronic kick that has a good amount of low end and not much high end, this continues until about 30 seconds in where we hear some of the recorded acoustic drum kit. The kick has a lot of low and and punch to it, and I find this to be similar to pop or electronic types of music where it sits rather clearly in the mix compared to most other genres with live drum kits. It sounds as though this could also have been layered with the electronic kick to give it an extra punch. The snare on the other hand has a very sharp attack sound, there is still some body at around 1Khz, although I’d say overall it is relatively bright and crisp sounding, we can also hear that the kicks and snares align with the electronic elements as they are sounding almost exactly on the grid. These types of processes are very common within the Metalcore genre, especially the use of electronic drum elements and very quantised editing

Listening to various tracks within this genre has allowed me to have a heavy focus on my drums in order to get that clear sound but also to put aside some time for the editing so that they can be as on time as in the reference. I found big comparisons to Metalcore and pop music, for instance, certain elements can and often are copied and pasted in certain sections so that it sounds perfect and tightly recorded, which is a similar practice I've done before in previous projects and found that it helped me better this practice to see how heavily edited and processed sounds can work in other genres. I tried to record these as cleanly as possible with minimal bleed by looking at how the microphones I picked out responded to bleed, separation would be a great thing to have in the mix to achieve the sound that these tracks have, much more to work with digitally in the box which will give me the digital sound that these tracks have. Electronic kicks were also used in this track in certain elements, but for this project, I did not create a majority of the electronic elements but rather were given them by the band. To give the drums the extra electronic punch some of the samples I crafted were also layered with EDM samples (though blended pretty far down in the mix so that the main sample is still prominent) to give them an extra punch.

Guitars

Luckily for me, BMTH has released stems for doomed via URM Academy and a video has been uploaded on their channel showing the various guitar elements.

As can be seen in the video, Quad Tracking has been done on the guitars, Quad Tracking is essentially where 2 different tones are played 2 times each to add up to 4 different recordings in total (Lewis, n.d.). This is done to create a wide stereo image and is a technique that is used in many types of heavy genres of music, heavy metal also seems to do this a lot and metalcore has adopted this as part of the metal influence. The way this is done is so that we have 2 recordings of each guitar tone, but one of each tone is actually panned either hard left or hard right, so that we have a stereo image in the end, this is why in the URM video we can see Riff L and Riff R.

For 'Doomed' we can actually see that they have not only quad tracked, but done doubles of the main riff on the left and right too, so in total there are 6 heavy guitars. These create most of the base layers of the guitar sound and these are layered with lead guitar sounds, which in metalcore are often less distorted to add that slightly more melodic element to the tracks, we can see this after the 6 layers in the URM video. This is also where more ambient and creative guitar sounds will sit, which are a big part of metalcore music as these often have more experimental and ambient guitar sounds mixed in with heavy sounds.

For the tracks I created we followed the same kind of approach but instead, we didn’t do the extra 2 doubles of the track, so we in total only had 4 of the heavy riff guitars recorded. If we listen to doomed, although aesthetically much of the track is mixed in a pop style, with many of the elements being clear this doesn't mean that we can hear all 6 of the guitar tracks playing, but rather they blend in with one another and sound like one cohesive sound. In order to do this in my production, one the left and right tracks of each tone were completed and comped together, I bounced the whole tone as a stereo file so I instead had 2 tracks containing 4 tones rather than 4 tracks. This I did so that not only was I dealing with a bunch of extra tracks that I didn't need, but I mixed the left and right takes as a whole so that it sounded more like a singular guitar. On top of this, I did mostly complimentary EQ-ing for the guitar tones, which is a technique often done in electronic music so that each element has a presence within the frequency spectrum. To do this I listened to each guitar tone and decided which one had more of a mid-range frequency response and which had more of a high end ‘crunch’ frequency response and EQ’d the two together so that they could sound like one full tone. Basically, Wherever I would boost a frequency in one tone, I would take it out of the other, so I would take some high end out of the tone so that the high-end tone could shine through in those areas and vice versa. This was done so that I could blend the two tracks and instead of sounding like, well 2 tracks it sounded more like one cohesive guitar tone like the guitars in Doomed do. The other thing is these guitars have to have a lot of drive to them as they are going to be the heaviest ones in the mix, so I applied a lot of distortion and driving mixing processes to these guitars so that lead and clean guitars had more space in the mix to be heard.

Vocals

Vocals in this track have many layers from double takes as well as multiple harmonies which also have doubles on them too. On Doomed and presumably a few of BMTH’s tracks we can also see that another member of the band Jordan, has done some backing vocals and these have been layered. In metalcore, there are often layers of softer vocals which harmonize with the metal style screaming vocals. There is going to be quite a bit of a dynamic range with these two types of vocals so I can imagine that lots of leveling and compression are used to reduce this dynamic range as it goes from soft vocals to screaming vocals. The lead singer, Oli Sykes can be seen using the SM7B for vocals in some sources ("Bring Me The Horizon - Shadow Moses in session", 2013), and fortunately for me, we have access to this on campus, So I'll likely be using this for my vocals too. The softer vocals in this track sound to have quite a bit of high end in them and are rather bright compared to most classic metal tracks. They also seem to be pretty well-tuned, in the first phrase of the song at around 22 seconds in when he says the word enough the note seems to sustain a little too perfectly which makes it seem like this might have been tuned digitally.

According to an article written by Sound On Sound magazine which analyses the track Throne by Bring Me The Horizon (which is also one of my key references for this EP) the vocals “almost all have the SSL Channel and CLA-76, and several have the Puigtec EQ. The Puigtec is boosting at 16k in the main verse, which gives a really cool vibe that the SSL can’t really do, as it can be a bit cold. The Manny Marroquin Drive adds some distortion. The CLA works mainly on the lower octave, and I am using it as a spreader” (Tingen, 2015)

Fortunately for me, I have access to all of these plugins so It’s a great starting point for what I can do with them. The Band I’m recording with doesn’t have a backup vocalist so I’m actually thinking of using a female session vocalist for the harmonies and other backing vocals in combination with the lead singer, much like the guitars do, the vocal elements blend together really well and you can’t tell that there are 2 different vocalists singing really, that means I’d probably apply a similar method of processing as I did with the guitars, but also try to align the vocals as perfectly as I can with one another so that it sounds more like one voice as they’re closely in time.

Electronic Elements

This track has a lot of MIDI and synth elements throughout and quite a few metalcore bands also use a lot of electronic elements in their tracks, such as the one I’m currently working with. This track starts off with electronic elements and we don’t hear any acoustic instruments (excluding vocal) until about 30 seconds in. There are samples of breathes and vocal chop moans which are rather high end and whisper sounding, these sound to have a reverb effect on them to give the sounds some room although the decay is very short and we don’t hear much tail of this. In the background throughout this we can here a rolling synth bass, that has a low pass filter over it, as the intro progresses the filter automated to reveal more of the sound and we can hear that it has a rather gritty texture with a presence sitting at around 3khz. From about 30 seconds we can hear use of some of the vocal chops in the track, for those who don’t know vocal chops are described as “fragmented vowels that act as melodic or percussive pseudo-vocal elements http://blog.sonicbids.com/music-production-tutorial-how-to-chop-vocals” and these can be heard very frequently in modern pop music tracks. The rhythmic chops sit fairly far down in the mix and pan from the left to the right relatively harshly. These sound to have a ping pong delay on them, and a reverb with a long decay time. The vocal chop I’m referring to is mentioned in the URM unboxing video at around the 10 minute mark. On it’s own the sounds are rather ambient and atmospheric which I think are a trope specifically of genres

The snare (sampled and not acoustic) we can hear in the background has a heavy reverb on it so that its washed out and blends ambiently in the mix. Aside from this there are many random glitch and sometimes almost foley like sounds that play in this intro, some of these have interesting panning on them and will be placed to the left or right and some even be automated to pan from one side to the other, when the first verse starts we also hear a lead synth which has some filter automation on it. This is pushed back in the mix by using a heavy reverb and seems to maybe have some of the high end also taken of as well to clear space for the crisp vocal sound, however this may also just be an effect of the reverb itself. Some of the other elements in this track are strings and piano sounds. The strings blend in with the synths and can be heard in the frequencies from about 350 Hz to 400 Khz, adding some middle range warmth to the mix. The violin and cellos have credited performers in the credits of the album so this means that the string sections were actually recorded live rather than done through software and MIDI. Judging by the electronic and loud nature of the rest of the track I could assume that there is some compression on the strings so that they are still a clear layer without being lost in the rest of the elements.

These elements were relatively important in regards to my project as aesthetically they are what makes a close comparison to the reference tracks but also Metalcore as a genre itself. By completing a case study on one of the reference tracks, and by finding a video unboxing the stems of said track I was able to have a better insight about how to make a track in this style, especially since it’s something I haven’t worked in before.

Thanks for reading!

References:

Bring Me The Horizon - Shadow Moses in session. (2013). Retrieved 28 August 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8IKbATZy0g

Bring Me The Horizon "Doomed" multi-tracks [UNBOXING]. (2018). Retrieved 28 August 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00h6Sdbcg7Q

Doomed. (2016). Retrieved 28 August 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Oc0ja19_GU

Lewis, K. Layering Guitars for Maximum Impact | Universal Audio. Retrieved 28 August 2019, from https://www.uaudio.com/blog/studio-basics-layering-guitars/

Tingen, P. (2015). Inside Track: Bring Me The Horizon. Retrieved 28 August 2019, from https://www.soundonsound.com/people/inside-track-bring-me-horizon