Metal Mix Checker — Is Your Wall of Sound a Wall, or Just a Wall of Mud?
Metal is the genre that punishes subtlety the most. You stack four or six rhythm guitar tracks, run a double kick at 200 bpm, scream or growl a vocal over it, and expect all of it to read as power rather than mush. MixDiagnose maps where your wall is collapsing — and shows you the exact band that's costing you the bite and the separation you've lost.
The Frequency Zones That Decide a Metal Mix
Five bands where metal mixes consistently fail — and where they differ from rock:
- 50–80 Hz — Sub-bass drop territory (modern productions) and the lowest octave of a tuned-down kick. Too much and it flubs; too little and the low end loses weight on big systems.
- 80–150 Hz — Double-kick attack and bass fundamental. This is where tightness lives — overlap with the bass guitar turns a blast beat into a rumble.
- 200–500 Hz — The densest part of a metal mix. Quad-tracked high-gain guitars dump enormous energy here. Buildup = mud; scoop too hard and the guitars sound hollow.
- 2.5–5 kHz — The "mosquito" zone. High-gain amps generate harshness here, and it stacks across every guitar track. This is the #1 cause of ear fatigue in metal.
- 6–12 kHz — Cymbal slice and pick attack. Over-brightened and the mix turns abrasive; under-brightened and it sounds closed-off and dark.
Common Metal Mixing Mistakes
Quad-tracked guitars swamping the vocal. Four rhythm tracks fill the entire midrange, and a screamed or growled vocal still needs to sit on top. When 1–4 kHz is owned by guitars, the lyric disappears. We flag that masking with severity in dB.
Double kick and bass guitar blurring. At blast-beat speed, kick and bass share 80–150 Hz for milliseconds at a time. Without separation the low end turns to mush and the double kicks lose their definition. We detect which instrument dominates which frequency.
The 2.5–5 kHz mosquito. Stacked distorted guitars generate a harshness that doesn't show on one track but multiplies across four. We flag buildup in this exact band so you can de-ess the guitars instead of the vocal.
Clipping for loudness. Metal is loud by tradition, and pushing a limiter into clipping destroys the transient that makes a snare crack. We report loudness, true peak, crest factor, and sample-peak clipping so you know how much impact you're trading away.
No low-end tightness. Metal needs the opposite of a boomy low end — it needs controlled punch. We flag sub-50 Hz energy that adds rumble without weight.
What MixDiagnose Checks for Metal
- Vocal vs. guitar-wall masking at 1–4 kHz, with severity in dB.
- Double-kick / bass separation at 80–150 Hz.
- Guitar mud — buildup at 200–500 Hz from multi-tracked high-gain amps.
- Harsh high-mid stack — the 2.5–5 kHz mosquito band, measured across the full mix.
- Loudness and clipping — LUFS, true peak, crest factor, and sample-peak clipping detection.
- Sub-bass control — energy below 50 Hz flagged as rumble-without-weight.
- Streaming fit — LUFS vs. Spotify (-14), Apple (-16), YouTube (-14), Tidal.
Every finding comes with a fix. "Your rhythm guitars are 4.1 dB louder than your vocal at 3.2 kHz — cut the guitar bus 2.5 dB at 3 kHz, or the lyric is gone." Upload a rough mix and get the full report in under a minute.
MP3, WAV, or FLAC. Full diagnosis in under 60 seconds.