I know these guys have their own studio now, I wonder how much of this is DIY’d?
I blame the overall production style more than an AxeFX, it’s that compressed to fuck and back, edited to be clean as hell and has no space for anything to breath, big beefy guitars don’t fit in a mix like that, never mind Richardson’s playing style that seems to fit perfectly in that tonal area. The amount of high and low end added to mixes these days isn’t at all realistic with what you hear in a room coming from an amp, the barometer on realistic in that context is fuuuuuuucked at this point.
I will say though, something I had to break the habit of was dialing in my presets to be record-ready, so by the time you introduce the mastering chain it’s like processing guitars that have already been processed even if I had no EQ on the guitar tracks. They might sound great during the tracking process, but once you hit that final step things shift a bit. I’ve found it’s easier to stick with a raw guitar tone with all the warts and 80hz, then treating it like you would a mic’d guitar track.
