Inside Saosin’s “The Silver String”: Layering Guitars and Crushing Drums

When you get your hands on the raw multitracks for a song like Saosin’s “The Silver String,” you quickly realize two things. First, the band’s performance is absolutely monstrous. Second, the raw tracks, captured and produced by the legendary Beau Burchell, sound so good out of the box that it feels like the mix is yours to mess up.

But a great recording is just the starting point. The real magic lies in how you enhance those killer performances to create a polished, powerful, and clear final product. We’re diving deep into the multitracks from Beau’s May 2017 Nail The Mix session to unpack the drum layering, clever guitar arrangements, and foundational bass work that make this track hit so hard.

Building a Thunderous Drum Foundation

Let’s get one thing straight: the drum performance on this track is the work of a certified beast. You can hear the sheer force in every hit, especially the snare. That kind of power is the bedrock of a massive drum sound, and Beau’s recording captures it perfectly.

The Power of Layered Kicks and Snares

Right away, you’ll notice the session isn’t just a simple set of drum mics. It comes loaded with supplemental samples to give you ultimate control. For the kick, you get three distinct tracks: a “Q drum print,” a “BB kick print,” and a “mega room print.”

This is a classic pro mixing technique. By blending these samples with the natural kick mic, you can dial in the perfect combination of beater attack from one sample, low-end weight from another, and room-shaking ambience from the third. It’s how you get a kick drum that’s both consistent and full of character.

As for the snare, the performance speaks for itself—it’s just hit incredibly hard. While there’s some natural hi-hat bleed, as you’d expect from a powerful performance, Beau Burchell drops an atom bomb of a knowledge bomb on how to deal with it surgically in the full Nail The Mix session. It’s a trick you’ll use on every mix going forward.

More Than Just Close Mics: Crafting Ambiance

A huge drum sound isn’t found in the close mics alone. It’s born from the skillful blend of the direct mics, the overheads, and the room mics. This session gives you everything you need, including a stereo “Room Violet” track and a ceiling mic.

Here’s a trick to try: take that “Room Violet” track and put some heavy, tasty, distorted compression on it. Crushing your room mics brings up all the low-level detail, adds sustain, and creates a sense of crunch and energy that helps glue the whole kit together. It makes the drums feel like they’re exploding in a real space.

A Pro Tip for Organization

Ever get confused by overheads labeled “Left” and “Right”? Are we talking about the drummer’s perspective or the audience’s? Beau sidesteps this common issue with a simple, brilliant naming convention: the overheads are labeled “overhead hat” and “overhead ride.” This instantly tells you which side of the kit each mic is on, no guesswork required. It’s a small detail that saves time and confusion.

The Secret to Clear, Heavy Guitars: Smart Arranging

Distorted guitars playing complex, extended chords can quickly devolve into a wall of indistinct, fizzy mud. So how do Saosin’s guitars maintain so much clarity while still sounding massive? The answer lies in smart arrangement, not just fancy plugins.

Splitting the Voicings

Instead of having one guitar play a full, complex chord across six strings, the parts are split between multiple guitars. In this session, you’ll find that one pair of guitars is often chugging away on the simple, low power chords—the foundation of the riff. A separate pair of guitars is then overdubbed playing the upper extensions and color notes of the chords, often with a slightly different, perhaps less saturated, tone.

By splitting the chord a̶p̶a̶r̶t̶ like this, you give each part its own space in the frequency spectrum. The result is a guitar sound that feels huge and harmonically rich, but you can still hear every note. It’s a total game-changer for writing and mixing heavy rock.

Textural Layering for Dynamics

The arrangement also uses a ton of different guitar textures to create dynamics. You’ll find noisy, atmospheric layers created with an Ebow, almost-clean tones in the bridge, and then all-out chaos with the “bridge blowout” tracks for the song’s climax. This shows how varying your guitar tones and textures is just as important as a loud/quiet dynamic for keeping a song interesting.

The Unsung Hero: Grounding the Mix with Bass

With so much intricate stuff happening in the guitars and drums, the bass has a critically important job: holding it all down. In a band like this, the bass is the anchor that provides the harmonic foundation. Without a solid, clear bassline playing the root notes, those complex guitar chords could easily get lost and just sound like noise.

To accomplish this, the session includes three distinct bass tracks: a clean DI, a nasty, distorted Amp track, and a special “Bridge Bass Axe” track for a different flavor in that section. By blending these, you can create a bass tone that has a solid low-end foundation from the DI and an aggressive, cutting midrange from the amp that helps it slice through the dense guitar wall.

The Beau Burchell Challenge: Mix, Repair, and Problem-Solve

Here’s something you won’t find in most multitrack downloads. Beau intentionally inserted some subtle clicks and pops into the audio files. Why would he do that? Because being a pro audio engineer isn’t just about pushing faders and adding reverb. It’s about being a problem-solver.

In the real world, you get tracks that aren’t perfect. You have to clean up bleed, edit timing, and fix technical glitches. Beau wanted to give Nail The Mix members a taste of that reality, forcing them to get their hands dirty with a little repair work using tools like spectral editors or surgical EQ. It’s a lesson in what it truly takes to deliver a professional mix.

Take These Tones to the Next Level

The techniques behind Saosin’s massive sound are right there in the raw tracks: smart layering, brilliant arranging, and a focus on performance. But hearing about it is one thing. Imagine watching Beau Burchell himself put it all together.

With Nail The Mix, you can. You get the full multitracks for “The Silver String” and can watch Beau’s entire 8-hour mixing session, where he explains every plugin, every fader move, and every decision he makes. You’ll not only see how to apply these concepts but understand the “why” behind them, which is the key to truly unlocking your sound.