Yo, what's up? I'm Aaron, a songwriter and producer with about 17 years in the metal scene. I recently ran into something a lot of you have probably dealt with: how do you take raw, outdated, or straight-up mediocre files and turn them into something that actually sounds modern?

I decided to revisit "A Display of Power," a song I wrote for my first band, Sever The King, back when I was 18. Thirteen years later, opening that session was rough. Missing lead presets, noisy bass tracks, drums that sounded like a machine gun going off. A lot of "what was I thinking" moments.

Here's how I fixed the biggest problems in this remix, and how you can fix the same ones in your own tracks.

Problem 1: Aimless knob tweaking

Honestly, the biggest mistake I see (and one I used to make constantly) is opening a session and just moving faders around until something sounds "better." Nine times out of ten that just gets you a muddy, uninspired mess. You end up going in circles.

Before I touch a single plugin now, I decide what I actually want the track to feel like. For this one it was simple: aggressive, massive, punchy, glued together. Once I have that in my head, every decision gets easier. I'm not guessing anymore, I'm checking things against a target. And honestly, technical perfection matters less than you'd think. If a move makes the song hit harder, it's the right move, even if it's not "correct" on paper.

Problem 2: Drums that sound fake and weak

In the original session from 13 years ago, I'd baked my kick and snare samples into their own tracks with zero bleed showing up in the overheads. That's basically a guaranteed way to get a thin, fake-sounding kit. On top of that, the kick had that dreaded machine-gun effect — every hit landing identical and kind of lifeless.

The fix is a two-pronged approach: compression for weight, and a transient designer to bring back some crack and aggression on the hits. But the bigger fix was rethinking how I treat programmed drums in general. I now make sure the overhead and room tracks are actually capturing the kick and snare, the same way they would on a real kit. It sounds like a small thing, but it's what compacts everything together and gives you that real drum-room feel instead of the sterile, sample-triggered sound.

Problem 3: One setting for the whole song doesn't work

This one trips people up constantly. You find a snare or kick setting that sounds huge in one section, and you just leave it running for the whole track. Problem is, "A Display of Power" moves from a slow, heavy intro into lightning-fast blast beats, and a setting that sounds massive in a slow breakdown will sound completely wrong once the tempo doubles.

So you have to tweak per section. I usually do this one of two ways: automate the plugin chain so settings shift as the tempo changes, or just duplicate the track entirely so I can process the fast sections totally differently than the slow ones. Either works — it just depends on how drastic the difference needs to be.

There's a lot more to this mix

These three fixes cover the foundational stuff, but they're really just the start. I haven't even gotten into the noisy hardware bass, rebuilding the missing guitar leads from scratch, or how I processed the raw vocals. I put together a full 2+ hour walkthrough covering every plugin move and decision in the entire mix and master, if you want to see the whole thing start to finish.