Mixing on THP?

I've only listened to it twice, but it's my least favourite album. I'll grow on it, but I seem to remember enjoying Hybrid Theory, Meteora and Living Things the first time I listened to them. I like the rapping, and the whole album surprisingly sounded how I expected it to sound; different, varied, slightly boring to listen to first time, the occasional song that wove it's way into my heart

 

My only problem is with the end of A Line In The Sand. You can hardly hear Chester.

 

That's actually a plus for the song, IMO.

 

I only have a few nitpicks here and there, mainly Brad's guitar on GATS and UIG suffering from Living Things Syndrome.

 

I feel like the overall sound on this album is honestly more of a result of the production side of things than the mixing side this time around (which is the opposite of what I said about Living Things).

For starters, the drums on this album were all tracked live to tape (along with an unknown number of other instruments - not the whole album though). This introduces a few things you simply don't deal with in an all-digital recording. There's no limit/ceiling on the front end of the recording when you record to tape - however loud it is, that's just how it comes out on the recording, it only hits a limiter when it gets transferred from tape to computer for editing. There's also a much different low end character to tape recordings, and there will always be some degree of a background hiss/hum on tape too, which actually adds some character to certain recordings if you know how to do them properly.

I've seen a lot of people comment on the sound of the vocals on this album, for better or for worse. While listening to the acapellas, I realized that almost NONE of the lead vocal tracks on this album are doubled. That's practically unheard of on a Linkin Park album. A lot of the "power" people say Chester's voice is lacking on this record is nothing more than a result of there not being two Chester's singing everything for a change.

As far as mixing goes, everything is more or less at the volume it "should be," I feel like. Some of Brad's lead guitar parts get buried when there are vocals going on at the same time, but other than that, I don't really have any gripes with what was done during the actual mixing phase. On Living Things, Manny Marroquin took all the poppy sampled drum parts and keyboards and cranked them way up in the mix and left the guitars and live drums to flounder in the background. On this album, it sounds like they pretty much had what they had by the time they got to the mixing phase, and all they did was make sure everything was relatively balanced.

 

I'm not saying you're wrong, but Chester often sounds overpowered by the instruments. So, couldn't they have just kicked them a bit higher up in the mix?

 

I was speaking more about the tonality of Chester's voice rather than its volume relative to anything else. I do notice that a lot of the short "pick-up" words at the start of lines on songs like Mark the Graves and Final Masquerade are hard to hear in the full mix, but the main bulk of the vocals still sit in the right place. You just end up with "THE DAAAAAAAAARK. THE LIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT." Instead of "In the dark, in the light," etc.

 

I think it sounds better without really noticing them, but that's just me.

 

It's too raw for my liking. I like things sound more polished.

 

Obviously, as stated the lack of mixing was to go for a raw, real, "live" sound. Though, there is still a ton of mixing and everything we hear is 100% intentional. I don't think Chester really gets washed out on this album. I can see on MTG how that might be the case, but for not being double tracked vocally on a lot of this stuff, it all sounds good.