In The Studio: Mixing “Sideration” by Face Yourself with Joey Sturgis

This article was authored by Aiden Wren-Pierce and Joey Sturgis

Navigation

• Rising to the Challenge - Backstory and mixing the drums
• Bass - Into The Depths - Mixing the bass and bass production tricks
• Guitars - A Tale Of Shootouts - How we made double drop C# work
• Vocals - Engineering Extremity - Organizing and blending vocals
• Powerful Post Production - Getting the complimentary elements right
• Mixing & Mastering - Glued, Loud & Proud - Bringing it together
• Breaking New Grounds - Revelations, breakthroughs, and final thoughts

Rising to the Challenge

When Face Yourself decided to record their debut single for Sumerian Records, they found an unexpected champion in Joey Sturgis. Despite having never worked with the band before, Sturgis knew within minutes of hearing their material that he could help shape their sonic vision. "I hit play on their Spotify for about 10 minutes and thought 'I could work with this and do some pretty cool stuff with this band,'" he recalls.

Extreme Measures

The band's mission was clear from the start: establish themselves as an uncompromising force in deathcore. "This is their time to think about identity," Sturgis explains. "What are the things that represent how you want to be presented through your music and art? You want to do those things in these songs because it's your opportunity to say hello."

For Face Yourself, that meant embracing what Sturgis calls "metal athletics" - the sport-like technical precision required in modern deathcore. "You're playing these really fast 16th or 32nd note kick drum patterns, drop tuning your guitar two octaves. There's a sportsmanship portion and an athletic portion that has to be expressed with extreme sound design ideas. Through the mixing and mastering and production, you are basically showing off the extremes of metal."

Democracy in Action

The project presented unique challenges, not least the band's diverse musical tastes. "All six members have extremely different influences," Sturgis explains. "It ranges from Lady Gaga to underground New Jersey hardcore bands with 4,000 listeners." Rather than letting these differences create tension, the band took a democratic approach to decision-making. "They're willing to listen to an idea, understand where it's coming from, and give it a chance. That maturity allowed me to approach producing from a pretty easy perspective."

Clean Slate

For this project, Sturgis made a bold decision to abandon his usual workflow. "I decided to just start over," he reveals. "I didn't use any presets, any previous session templates - nothing. I just literally started adding new tracks and routing them as I went and built this all from the ground up."

This fresh approach paid off. "My friend Tyler Smyth, who's an awesome producer, told me 'Yeah, it sounds like Joey Sturgis, but evolved.' I'm excited about that aspect of it."

Drums - The Digital Beast

For most producers, recording live drums for a deathcore record means wrestling with multiple microphones, challenging acoustics, and the physical limitations of acoustic drums. Face Yourself presented a different scenario: their drummer Eric has recorded the past 3 EPs with an electronic kit, which proved to be the perfect starting point for Sturgis.

"I absolutely love drums, but I [also] hate them because they're just terrible animals that are hard to control," Sturgis admits with a laugh. "When I found out Eric plays an e-kit in the studio, I knew this was the perfect project for me. Being able to have complete freedom over the drums in the sense of MIDI data saved us a lot of time and money."

Building From GetGood

Sturgis began with GetGood Drums P4 as his foundation and later replaced the cymbals with JST Masters One. "I wanted to start with a good, solid drum library that I felt would work out of the box, thinking I'd probably end up replacing everything during mixing," he explains. "That's not what happened."

As a self-described "mix as you go" producer, Sturgis found himself constantly tweaking and refining the drum sound. "Towards the end of the tracking stages, we had the drum sound pretty much locked in. At that point, I didn't want to undo that work and start over." The processing chain ended up being surprisingly straightforward, with DF-SMACK by Drumforge playing a starring role. "It's really simple actually. DF-SMACK is on everything and it's cranked - that's pretty much it."

Creating New Strategies

The extremely fast nature of deathcore drumming presented unique challenges. "I had to build a system that could handle low-end buildup for really fast kick parts," Sturgis reveals. His solution was a carefully tuned multiband compressor with relaxed settings that only engaged during intense kick drum passages.

Rather than apply aggressive processing across the entire track, Sturgis took a more nuanced approach through automation. "You could either have the drums be punchy all the time, which is not really good - I wouldn't recommend that because then it's overkill - or you can have the drums be the right level of punchiness and then automate in the areas where you need it to be punchier."

This attention to detail extended to how the automation was implemented. "I set up various layers of routing so I can do relative automation moves. If I want a kick to be twice as loud, I don't have to know what volume it's going to be at today or where it's going to end up tomorrow. I can still put those automations in and then change the level of the kick later while still having those relative adjustments happening."

Bass - Into The Depths

When it comes to modern deathcore, "low" is a relative term. Face Yourself pushed even those boundaries by performing in double drop C#0 tuning - and then going even lower. For Sturgis, this presented a fundamental challenge: how do you maintain clarity when you're dealing with frequencies that are felt more than heard?

The Twin Titans

Sturgis's solution involved a carefully crafted dual-layer approach. DjinnBass 2 by SubMission Audio provided the core bass tone, while Sub Destroyer handled the subsonic frequencies. "I did a shootout of all the wave shapes and various different types of low-pass filters," Sturgis explains. "I ended up with the triangle wave shape and a basic low-pass filter. It just sounded really good together with DjinnBass 2, layered up."

Breaking With Tradition

The extreme tuning forced Sturgis to abandon one of his usual techniques. "I played around with removing the low end from DjinnBass 2 and having the low end only come from Sub Destroyer," he recalls. "After doing a couple mixes that way, I didn't really end up liking that idea. At these tunings, it made more sense to actually have the low end from both DjinnBass 2 and Sub Destroyer."

Finding The Sweet Spot

The final signal chain emerged through careful experimentation. Hellraiser provided the perfect amount of grit, while strategic EQ moves kept the sound focused. "We're using EQ to cut out some 250 Hz," Sturgis explains. "I also rolled off some frequencies around 68 Hz on the DjinnBass 2, and I didn't do any rolling off on Sub Destroyer."

This careful balance of frequencies allowed the bass to maintain both power and definition, even in the most challenging sections of the songs. "They just ended up sounding really good together, layered up," Sturgis reflects.

Guitars - A Tale Of Shootouts

When dealing with guitars tuned low enough to register on seismographs, every step of the signal chain becomes critical. For Sturgis, this meant starting at the very beginning: the DI signal. "When you're dealing with these tunings, I need these DIs to be amazing - super crisp and clean and clear, with no hum or buzz." This led to an extensive DI shootout, testing everything from Quad Cortex to various preamps and direct-to-interface options.

The winner? An Aphex preamp in a lunchbox configuration. "There was just something amazing about the responsiveness of it," Sturgis recalls. "It had this lively sound where it was capturing the energy of what the guitar was doing. Other options sounded really flat - the Quad Cortex was just like 'Yep, there's a guitar DI.' But the Aphex was more like 'Whoa, there's life in this.'"

The Tone Wars

With clean DIs captured, attention turned to crafting the perfect guitar tone. Sturgis organized another shootout, this time pitting various amp simulators against each other in a blind test. "We tried all the Neural DSP products, the Toneforge stuff, STL Tones, basically a bunch of different popular options that are out there," he explains. "I expected it to be down to tiny differences, like 'Oh, this one sounds just a little bit better.' But it wasn't that at all - it was freaking night and day."

Toneforge Guilty Pleasure emerged as the clear winner. "When you got to Guilty Pleasure, you were like 'Yep, that's the one,'" Sturgis says. "What's interesting is that when we designed that product, we weren't working with guitars in double drop C sharp. To know that it can handle those low tunings is pretty interesting."

Taming The Beast

The extreme tunings brought unique challenges, particularly during sustained chugging sections. "Once we started recording the riffs, we'd hear that some parts have these very long chug ring-out sections," Sturgis explains. "Over the course of that, you'll naturally hear whatever noise floor there is come up to the top."

After exhausting traditional solutions - trying different positions, exploring grounding options - Sturgis turned to Tominator. "The idea is that you have a low-pass filter that moves. It opens up to allow all frequencies through for a brief moment, and then across an envelope, it moves down to a certain frequency." By placing this before the amp simulation, Sturgis could control the high-end noise without compromising the guitar's attack. Sturgis explains, “During the session, I made a quick video breaking down this technique, to show people how they can replicate it in their session and achieve the same clarity found on the track”.

"It sounds super smooth," he notes. "On some songs, it's just set it and forget it. As a guitar is playing, the filter kind of opens up and sits there. And then as soon as the guitar stops doing anything and just is holding a note, it clamps down [to stop any hiss or high-end noise]."

Tone Perfection

The guitar chain basically stops there. "The guitars came in really bright, as they often do, and I like them bright because you want the aggression and excitement" Sturgis explains. "There's no EQ on the guitar because we built the tone right from the very beginning. And then by the time the tone was finished, it already had the right amount of high end."

During final mix and mastering, there were a few slight adjustments made to bring up the top-end a bit in order to balance it out since other areas of the mix also got brighter.

Vocals - Engineering Extremity

When it comes to recording extreme vocals, conventional wisdom often goes out the window. "I was kind of concerned that maybe the vocals would be the part that would be extremely challenging," admits Sturgis. "But it turns out that Yasmin was a really great vocalist. She has a lot of control over her voice."

The Physical Approach

Rather than opt for a typical condenser setup, Sturgis chose the SM7B microphone running through a Crane Song Phoenix preamp. "Yasmin is very comfortable with it, and she likes to hold the mic," he explains. "She likes to contort her body in different ways and control the shape of her mouth as well as control the angle of the microphone. We couldn't have done it with a stand-up condenser."

The Crane Song's step gain feature proved invaluable for handling the dynamic range between vocalists. "Since we had three vocalists in total, and some parts were a little bit louder than others, I could just step it down one notch for really loud parts, then step it back up. Having those two positions was pretty important."

 

Building The Framework

Sturgis' vocal mixing approach starts with a fundamental principle: always maintain one pure vocal track. "There's always one vocal that has nothing on it except for compression and EQ," he explains. "I always want there to be one voice in there somewhere in the mix that is just the vocalist through the mic, through the preamp, compressed. I want you to hear that person, I want you to hear their voice, and I want you to hear what they're saying."

This philosophy shaped his entire vocal mixing structure. "For reverb on something, there has to be a double, and the double is what has the reverb on it. If I want this part to be super wide, I'm going to have two layers panned left and right. If it's supposed to have highs and lows at the same time, maybe we have the high in the center and the lows on the sides."

The Technical Architecture

The mix session contained around 35 vocal tracks, but organization was key. "Everything feeds into four groups," Sturgis details. "We have our mains, which are treated with Gain Reduction Deluxe. Then we have our double group, our vocal effects group for anything that's weird and requires support tracks - things like flangers, reverbs, distortions, lo-fi's. All those three groups go into one master group called G vocals."

This structured approach allowed for precise control over different vocal elements. "When you have eight vocal layers, you have eight times the amount of vocal volume," Sturgis notes. "You want to hear eight vocal parts, but you don't want it to become eight times louder."

Processing With Purpose

The main vocal chain remained surprisingly straightforward. "They all have Gain Reduction Deluxe with the default setting," says Sturgis. "The faders are all left at zero. That's all your mains." Effects and doubles received similar base treatment but with additional processing for character.

For managing the extreme dynamics of deathcore vocals, Sturgis employed strategic multiband compression. "From 545Hz to 4000Hz, I've got almost a wide-open compressor. When that area gets overwhelming, you need that area to be punched down. And when it doesn't get overwhelming, it's not touching it. That's a very important area where you get a lot of your intelligibility."

The low end required special attention due to the aggressive nature of the performances. "Because it's an SM7B and because there's no pop filter and because of these vocals being like screaming and low growls and lots of forceful consonants and plosives, we need to do a crazy amount of compression on the low end."

Powerful Post Production

The vision was to try and make the most impact we can," Sturgis explains of Face Yourself's sonic approach. But rather than simply cranking everything to 11, he took a more nuanced path to extremity.

Curating The Chaos

This song presented its own unique production puzzle. "If you go outside of a certain boundary line, it starts to become not deathcore anymore," Sturgis notes. This meant being selective with production elements, particularly synthesizers and effects. "You've got to be careful about the types of sounds you use. They can start to deviate from what deathcore is supposed to [feel] like - bust out an Attack Attack! synth, and suddenly it's dance music."

Instead, Sturgis often turned to heavily processed guitars for effect creation. "I like to use guitars for effects because it's a very easy way to stay inside the deathcore realm. You're not going to get a guitar to start sounding like EDM very easily."

Sonic Storytelling

The band arrived with their own production elements - some ideas meticulously organized, others more raw. Rather than simply keeping or discarding these elements wholesale, Sturgis took a curatorial approach. "For anything that feels like a sub drop or a snare bomb or a reverse snare or reverse crash, I'm going to replace all that stuff with my versions," he explains.

Each impact sound was chosen with purpose. "Every snare bomb is from the JST Snare Bombs Sample Pack, but we only used ones that had melody in them," Sturgis reveals. "They're not just big snares and big rooms - they have effects, ambiences, sometimes little notes. I wanted each snare bomb to be special."

The Lead Guitar Evolution

One of the songs defining sounds came from an unexpected source. "There's this part that almost sounds like it's a synth - it's actually a guitar," Sturgis explains. The sound in question started as a 16th-note picking pattern that required surgical precision. "We stripped it all the way down to the DI, time-stretched it back on time. It went into an amp sim, then an effect rack, then another amp sim and another effect rack. Then there was a pitch-shifted version. It's super, super processed to the point where it doesn't resemble a guitar at all anymore."

Finding The Balance

Throughout the production process, Sturgis maintained a delicate balance between aggressive impact and musical clarity. "When there were parts that felt a little boring, we would bust out a synth. But a lot of times we tried to create stuff from guitars to try and keep that style."

This methodical approach to production extended beyond just sound selection. "What you'll see is that the EP kind of has a story that goes from beginning to end," Sturgis notes. "Having the knowledge of how this was all going to play out from the middle of the project, I was able to ensure that none of the other songs have a bigger moment than this moment."

Mixing & Mastering - Glued, Loud & Proud

When mixing music this dense, conventional approaches crumble. Sturgis had to architect an entirely new mixing workflow to handle Face Yourself's sonic assault.

The Art of Carving

"One huge challenge was that they're playing in double drop C#0, [and then in some parts,] using a whammy pedal to lower it another octave," Sturgis explains. His solution involved an innovative approach to frequency management using soothe2 by Oeksound as a dynamic carving tool.

"I sidechain my kick, snare, toms and drum effects into the Carve Bus," he reveals. "It's set flat and hard with sharpness and selectivity at 10, using mid-side mode with the balance only on mid. This carves out space for the drums inside the bass and guitars." Rather than using traditional sidechaining, this technique allowed for more natural-sounding separation between elements.

Building The Infrastructure

Sturgis's routing setup was equally innovative. "The guitars are so crushed by the limiter, such that if you have two layers being [limited by the] same limiter, it won't work," he explains. This led to creating separate buses for rhythm guitars, lo-fi guitars, octave guitars, lead guitars, and guitar effects - each with its own processing chain.

"All the guitars, bass, effects, and synths except drum effects go into the carve bus," he continues. "Once you have that set up, there's a parameter called trim. When you move the trim up and down, you're changing the volume relationship between how much of that carving out effect and the volume of the stuff being carved out."

The Loudness War

Achieving competitive loudness while maintaining impact required strategic processing. "The band was like, 'This isn't loud enough,'" Sturgis recalls. "I really had to push a lot of things around to get it to that point and not sound like trash."

His solution involved careful multiband processing and maximization. "I'm using a linear phase multiband, boosting the low end by 2dB and lowering the low mids by 1.5dB. Then I'm changing the compression ranges to control deviation in these bands." This approach allowed him to push the overall loudness while maintaining clarity.

The final stage involved JST Maximizer with carefully tuned settings. "I ended up using JST Max 7 Smart version 3 with the character at 5% fast, bass enhanced at 30%, mono bass at 60Hz, and low end compressor at 10% with a 150Hz crossover." This combination allowed Sturgis to achieve competitive loudness levels while preserving the music's dynamic impact.

Evolution in Action

"A lot of these mix decisions are going to look like I [had planned] what I was doing from the start, but I didn't," Sturgis admits with characteristic candor. "I had to basically push the mix to that point and then go, 'All right, what's wrong with it now?'" This process of continual refinement led to something new - an evolution of his signature sound that maintains his core approach while pushing into new territory.

The result is a mix that's both crushing and clear, maintaining separation even in the densest passages. "Everything is cranked and everything is glued and everything is pegged," Sturgis reflects. "But it's all so beautiful together. That's my favorite thing."

Breaking New Grounds

What makes this single special, according to Sturgis, isn't just its technical achievements but how naturally everything came together. "Everything feels extremely glued, like it's all supposed to fit together," he explains. "It's all part of a perfectly sealed package." This cohesion didn't come easily - it required countless small decisions, from precise automation moves to careful balancing of frequencies.

Learning Through Discovery

One of the project's biggest breakthroughs came from an unexpected source: the studio's monitoring setup. "Having access to those large-format speakers plus the sub during the creation process made it possible for me to learn how far I could really push things," Sturgis reveals. "You can look at graphs all day, but it's totally different when you feel it in the room and it's in the air. That's when you can figure out if it's bottoming out, or if the kick is moving so fast that it can't make the bass note right."

The EQ Revelation

When asked for his top tip for producers working in heavy music, Sturgis challenges conventional wisdom about equalization. "I think EQ is sort of a problem solver, and it should be used that way, but it can also give you a false sense of security," he explains. "Too many people think of it as a tool to do something they want to be done, rather than solving actual problems."

Instead, Sturgis advocates for getting sounds right at the source. "My approach is to say 'oh, the guitar sounds muffled' - let's use a different guitar. What kind of pickups are there? Are the strings old? Do all that stuff first and then look at the EQ to solve problems."

A New Chapter

What sets this release apart, according to Sturgis, is its commitment to pushing boundaries while staying true to the genre's roots. "You can expect to hear something that is extremely well thought out and put together," he says. "Something that is very powerful, almost like a moving force. You can hear how everything is pushing the boundaries of sonic possibilities with the loudness and the low end and the compression. Each band member is contributing in their own way to push the boundaries, and then as a greater whole, we're pushing the boundaries with the production and the mix and the master."