I was checking my stems collection recently, and come across this “Early Grave” Architects stems by James Statham, which he originally posted on the UltimateMetal forum back in 2011:
http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/threads/architects-early-grave-dis-midi-here.728578/
The link in my stems list was dead, and I decided to make a re-pack of the raw tracks to re-upload the cover.

I also mixed that cover in 2013, and here is that mix:

There were Metal Heads EZX cymbals and Chango FOP drum samples used. For the bass I took the provided Trillian printed track, just added some parallel distortion to it. The guitars were reamped using my favorite (at that moment) Poulin LeGion with a Catharsis IR.
I’ve left all the tracks almost unedited, just fixing the guitars timing in the ending part, where only one guitar’s playing on the side. Slightly humanized the drums MIDI part.

This time I’ve started a new mix from scratch. I decided to analyze the same raw tracks first and prepare them well before mixing. As a result, I edited the guitars’ timing and tuned them, since they were slightly out of tune especially on the lower notes, which were G#.
It is always better to make raw tracks sound as good as possible at a recording stage, but in this case some accurate editing can make a significant difference.

Since the old mix has plenty of popular stuff from 2013, the new one utilizes some of the popular plugins and samples from these days (2020). The bass MIDI is voiced by Djinn bass (I’ve also added some slide notes to make the part sound more realistic), the drums are GGD – PIV (the MIDI part is humanized for that library now) and the guitars are reamped using Neural DSP’s Nolly and Plini.

So here is the new mix:

Due to different players, the newer mix sounds quieter, but that’s even better.

Check out the re-pack of the Architects stems here.

Posted by Nikolas Quemtri

2 comments

The link is still dead for those Repacked Stems

Nikolas Quemtri

Hey, try the one at the bottom of the post.

Leave a Reply