Tight work! One of my favorites on the new album, too!
Just last night I spent a good hour and a half analyzing Tool with headphones on. What blew me away was how their music is mixed, despite different producers being responsible for it. This is getting away from the guitar tones a bit but I was surprised at how often the guitars are centered in the mix, even when there are vocals going on. Hard panning seems to be done more for an effect rather than filling up each side of the spectrum.
The cool thing about that is that it causes the song to take on the form of a living organism, shrinking and growing as the song changes. One second everything would be in the center, then starts fading to the sides, gets huge and spread out for a moment and then back in. There’s definitely not a standard “Ok, put the Diezel on the left side and a Recto on the right” approach. I know they use a ton of amps blended together to get the final sounds, usually no less than 3 and up to 8, but I’m more impressed with how they’re mixed in the stereo spectrum more than anything else.
Gave me a lot to think about. I’m mixing one song now that has a total Tool feel to it, purposefully and after digging into those songs last night, it totally changed how I plan on mixing this one. I had printed off like 6 different amps from the DI’s and was intending to do my regular, “You go on the left, you go on the right and that’s that” but that’s definitely not the case now. This one is particularly dynamic with really quiet verses, loud chorus and then finishes with long crescendo....so now I’m plotting how I’m going to make all that work while trying to create the ‘living, breathing organism’ sound.
Definitely check out some of their work with headphones, it certainly opened up my eyes considerably to how their albums are mixed and where they’d use certain tones for certain things.