Mixing Alestorm’s Pirate Metal Guitars with Lasse Lammert

Let’s be real, mixing metal guitars is a balancing act. You want them to be huge, aggressive, and full of bite, but they also need to leave space for everything else. This gets even trickier when you’re dealing with a band like Alestorm, where you have massive guitars fighting for space with a boatload of orchestral elements and synths.

We got a masterclass from producer/mixer Lasse Lammert on how he tamed the epic guitars on Alestorm’s track “Zombies Ate My Pirate Ship.” Forget broad, sweeping changes; Lasse’s approach is all about surgical precision, dynamic control, and knowing exactly which frequencies to tame and which to enhance. Let’s dive into some of the techniques he used.

Carving Space Without Neutering Your Tone

One of the biggest dangers in mixing crowded metal tracks is over-EQing the guitars. It’s so easy to start carving out frequencies to make room for vocals or synths that you end up with a thin, lifeless tone that has no teeth. It’s a classic case of winning the battle but losing the war.

Lasse’s goal was to create space for the strings and other orchestral parts, which live in the upper mid-range—the same area that gives guitars their aggression and intelligibility.

Finding the Frequency Clash

Instead of guessing, Lasse’s method is direct. He temporarily brings in the orchestral elements to audibly identify the exact point of conflict. By listening to the guitars and orchestra together, you can pinpoint the specific frequencies where they’re masking each other.

Once he finds that spot, he uses a surgical equalization to make a small, precise cut in the guitars. We’re not talking about a massive 10 dB scoop here. In the video, he makes a subtle 1.2 dB cut. It’s just enough to create a pocket for the orchestra to sit in without fundamentally changing the guitar tone. The key is to free up space, not to simply change the sound.

Taming Chugs with Dynamic Processing

Nothing kills a tight riff faster than a muddy, uncontrolled low-end. The “chug” of palm-muted guitars can build up a ton of energy in the low-mids, which can quickly turn your mix into mud. The common solution is to use dynamic EQ or multi-band compression to clamp down on those chugs.

But Lasse points out a critical mistake many producers make when applying this to stereo guitars.

The Duel Mono vs. Stereo Trick

If you’ve got your left and right rhythm guitars on a single stereo track, slapping a standard stereo multi-band compressor on it can wreck your stereo image. Why? Because a stereo-linked compressor will react to the signal from both channels. This means when the left guitar hits a palm-muted chug, it triggers the compressor on the right guitar as well, even if it’s holding out a sustained chord. This unwanted ducking makes the entire guitar bus pump in a weird, unnatural way.

The solution is to use a multi-mono plugin. This allows you to apply the same processing to both channels, but each side reacts independently. The left guitar’s chugs only trigger compression on the left, and the right guitar’s chugs only trigger compression on the right. This preserves your stereo width and keeps the dynamics of each performance intact.

Setting Up the Compressor

Using a plugin like the FabFilter Pro-MB, Lasse isolates a single band in the low-mid “chug” zone. He sets the threshold so that the compressor only engages on the aggressive transient of the palm mutes, tightening up the low end without affecting the rest of the guitar’s body.

The All-In-One Plugin Solution

While you can build a chain of plugins to do all this, Lasse also showed off an incredibly useful tool that does it all in one: the Klevgrand Amplified Instrument Processor. He calls developer Klevgrand a “demi-god” for a reason—this plugin is packed with useful features for shaping guitar tones.

The “Insufferable Mid-Range” Filter

Every distorted guitar has one or two harsh frequencies in the mid-range that just grate on your ears. The Amplified Instrument Processor has a feature specifically designed to find and eliminate them.

The process is simple:

1. Boost the “Insufferable” filter with a very narrow Q.
2. Sweep the frequency knob until you find the most annoying, piercing sound. For this Alestorm track, it landed around 2.2 kHz.
3. Once you find it, just reduce the filter until the harshness disappears, but be careful not to gut the tone.

As a bonus, the plugin has a “2x” button that simultaneously cuts the octave above the frequency you selected, which often contains related harsh harmonics.

The plugin also includes the same dynamic low-end processing we discussed earlier, plus high and low pass filters, and a “bite” EQ, making it a complete Swiss Army knife for dialing in aggressive guitar tones.

Bringing It All Together

With the individual tracks processed, Lasse’s final step is to create the blend. For Alestorm, he used two pairs of similar-sounding rhythm guitars. He levels them using the faders, constantly switching between listening to a single guitar and the blended pair to ensure they combine into one cohesive, massive rhythm sound. This blended group then becomes his main “Rhythm Guitar” bus for the rest of the mix.

These surgical techniques are exactly the kind of pro-level insights that can elevate your mixes from good to great. They show how a top-tier mixer like Lasse Lammert (much like his contemporary Jens Bogren) approaches complex problems with simple, effective solutions.

If you want to see exactly how Lasse applies these tricks and mixes the entire Alestorm track from scratch, you’re in the right place. With a Nail The Mix membership, you get to watch the pros work their magic on real sessions.

Ready to dive deeper? Grab the multi-tracks and watch Lasse Lammert’s full mixing session for Alestorm’s “Zombies Ate My Pirate Ship.”

And if you’re looking for more killer tips to take your productions to the next level, check out our free guide, Unlock Your Sound: Mixing Modern Metal Beyond Presets.

See what it takes to create a world-class metal mix, and get the Alestorm multitracks today