Learn to Mix From the Best Rock & Metal Producers
Taylor Larson mixes "Upside Down" by Jason Richardson and "Afterlife" by Holding Absence
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Join Now for $1About This Session
“Afterlife” is one of the standout tracks from Holding Absence’s critically acclaimed album *The Greatest Mistake of My Life* — a perfect blend of soaring atmosphere, emotional weight, and crushing intensity. This song captures the band’s signature post-hardcore sound at its most refined, with huge melodic hooks, dense guitars, and a dynamic vocal performance that required precise control and artistic balance during mixdown.
Mixed by Taylor Larson (Periphery, Veil of Maya, ERRA), this session showcases a mix engineer known for his ability to bring clarity and impact to enormous rock arrangements without losing musical nuance. Tracked at Stompbox Studios, Taylor’s mix emphasizes depth, saturation layering, and low-end contouring to ground the wide dynamic swings across the arrangement while preserving transient detail and vocal intelligibility.
From a production standpoint, “Afterlife” is a goldmine of advanced techniques. The session digs into complex vocal stacking with automation-driven atmosphere transitions, ambient guitar layers soaked in modulation and stereo imaging tools, tight double-kick drum dynamics shaped through surgical gating and parallel compression, and bass guitar saturation blending that creates separation in a crowded low-mid environment. Guitars are multi-tracked and dialed in using subtle multiband shaping to maintain aggressiveness without creating build-up or masking the orchestral elements. This is a masterclass in fitting dense emotional content into a modern mix that still slams.
Download the full multitracks for “Afterlife” and push your mixing skills in the real-world frontier between ambience and aggression. If you’re aiming to mix radio-ready post-hardcore with detailed production and emotional weight, this is the session you need.
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