When listening to Ghost’s new album Skeletá, the word ‘pristine’ comes to mind regarding the quality of its production.
Its silky sweet vocal harmonies (Cenotaph, Guiding Lights) and top tier guitar tones throughout are matched only by its deeply satisfying and punchy low end, and in an interview in the new issue of Sound on Sound, mix engineer Dan Malsch dives deep into how it was achieved.
“One interesting thing about Ghost is that they have a subkick that changes with the chords, around 40, 50 Hz,” Malsch reveals. “It’s quite unique for a hard rock metal band.”
It’s not uncommon for producers and artists to stack kick drum sounds in order to either create something more unique, or use the punch of one to flavour another, for example. But as Malsch explains, stacking elements in your low end can lead to mud in a mix.
“Clarity is a huge thing for me,” he says. “I want to have as much bottom end and sub as I can, but if I hear any mud in a mix, I don’t enjoy it.”
He goes on: “I’ve been called a clinical mixer because I need to hear every instrument clearly. If it’s there, I think you should hear it. Sometimes you’ll have to shave off a little more than you might want to, because there might be three or four different guitar parts or different key parts, and to make sure they are all heard, you have to take out some 300 Hz, 400 Hz or 500 Hz, which are problem frequencies in a lot of music I work with.”
Malsch and veteran mix engineer Andy Wallace received rough mixes for Skeletá which were recorded at Stockholm’s Atlantis Studios, the location of early ABBA recordings as well as work by Opeth, The Hives and many more.
“The production and rough mixes of the Ghost tracks that we received were great – in my opinion, probably good enough to release,” Malsch says. “Andy and I would look at each other like, ‘How are we going to make it sound better than this?’”
The answer lay in carving out more space in the mixes. “What you’ll notice most from the rough mixes to the main mixes is more space and a depth and a width,” he says.
Elsewhere, Ghost recently made headlines when they announced that shows on their tour supporting Skeletá – cleverly dubbed Skeletour – would be a phone-free experience.
“If you have 10,000 people at a concert and 8,000 of them are holding a phone, there’s something deeply disconnected,” said frontman Tobias Forge.
The post “It’s quite unique for a hard rock band”: Producer reveals the secret trick Ghost use to fill out their low end appeared first on MusicTech.
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