First Impressions - brand new eyes

[Harry]

@Jon (or anyone else that wants to read it really) : Well admittedly, I'm not into "warm" at all, unless it's suited for the genre.
With something like Paramore, warm simply wouldn't fit.
Chris Lord-Alge (mix engineer) and Doug McKean (tracking engineer) are set an assignment, which is to make everything sound great.
"Warm" in this context would simply translate to muddy, muffled and wooly, which is not going to be an acceptable result for guys like Chris Lord-Alge and Doug McKean who are getting paid to deliver nothing less than the best results possible.

Do I dislike "warm" totally? Well, I'm a fan of Kyuss, Pelican, and sludge/doom metal bands, so that should tell you something. As I said, it's a sound that's genre specific.
Works great for stoner metal, some post metal, some doom metal and sludge metal, particularly for bands like Kyuss which were heavily based around the guitars and rhythm section anyway and that had the vocals as a secondary kinda thing, so they could afford to have masses of dirty, wonderful and sludgy lower mids happening.

With music where the vocals are up front, such as Paramore, you can't really do that, otherwise it's going to sound like complete dog shit.
Balanced, rather than being particularly bright or particularly warm, is the key here.
Same goes for a lot of metal, particularly in modern stuff where the guitar is quad tracked and things are tuned down/bands are using 8 string guitars and playing stuff almost an octave down below normal E standard, things can get messy really fast, so getting that balance right is essential.
As a 7 string guitarist myself, who sometimes tunes down to drop A ( as well as my bass guitar), I really understand how important it is that clarity is to be maintained even if it's at the expense of a little sub 100Hz content.

If you compare a lot of modern metal mixes very very closely to the last two Paramore records, especially Riot!, they'll sound kinda thin, and at the point, you wont take the the "warmer" sound of Riot! and BNE for granted.
Riot! especially has a lot of low end content going on as well as a nice lower mid with the bass guitar.
In fact, I remember the first time I started really comparing Riot! to many of my metal albums production wise (most of my collection is metal really, I don't have much music of a similar genre to Paramore to really compare to anyway to be honest), I was positively shocked at the amount of low end content, as well as how amazingly well the guitars were gluing to the bass.

I also thought it was cool that despite how loud BNE was mastered, there are no issues with the audio.
Transients are under control, but yet there is no lack of punch, and no problems with artifacts with the low end.

Post your clip up in the covers thread, I'll give it a fairly in depth critique and analysis there if you want, since I don't think this thread is really the place to discuss your Crushcrush cover.

[Itsgettingcloser]

I have not really read all of the previous post but I guess I listen to a lot of post rock and indie rock that has a more raw and natural feel rather than overproduced and overpolished. I prefer these types of recordings more.