Modern Mixing

With great power comes great responsibilty.  Mixing in the box is threatened by the abuse of plugins.  Just because you can call you a plugin endlessly don't mean you have to stuff three EQ and three compressors on each insert, lol

At aes today. Dude is playing with an ssl. Eq's in every channel,  buss compressor slammed.  It sounded awful. So I sit down to mess with it after he does and he watches me. I turned off the buss comp and every eq. Then I added a touch of eq on somevthings. A little on the bass,  lead vocal and kick. Nothing else. Got a balance where the meters and buss is not slammed  and he is like dude that sounds amazing, how did you do that.... 

analag said:

With great power comes great responsibilty.  Mixing in the box is threatened by the abuse of plugins.  Just because you can call you a plugin endlessly don't mean you have to stuff three EQ and three compressors on each insert, lol

Click to expand...

For once I whole heartedly agree with you. What ever happened to talent, melody, arrangement and the vibe of playing together?

Cheers

Ian

ruffrecords said:

For once I whole heatedly agree with you. What ever happened to talent, melody, arrangement and the vibe of playing together?

Cheers

Ian

Click to expand...

Unfortunately the above requisites mentioned above by Ian, seem to be disappering at an alarming rate.
I seems like plugins can cure all audio ills and desires with our younger generation,
I also think that they belive the "Musical Performance Millenial Talent" 
("MPTP") plugin  becomes evident after the final mastering  !
Which of course puts talent at the wrong end of the chain !
Why play a musical instrument when the PC can do it for you.
Sad times for good music nowadays.

When I was still working ITB I always felt I had to work against something. You need 3-5 plugin on a track just to make something sound passable. But you never get where you want to be. I never perceived this as "great power" but as a great frustration.  Quality OTB is very much the opposite. A few touches here and there and it sounds great. Sadly a lot of the music released today wasn't made that way.

yeah..... 

Before inserting half a dozen plugin in the DAW, most modern "artist" take hours to edit and mount lot of bad instant performance, while the same amount of time used to rehearsal the performance usually end in a low recorded takes count...with the vibe...

Best
Zam

I feel much the same about multi-mic-ing.

Its good to just set up a stereo pair in front of a few musicians as they wood play to an audience, move them around to get a good balance, set levels with a screw driver, and go to a good 1/4 inch tape machine.    For presence and togetherness, you cannot beat it. - Oh and after they have done the 5th or 6th take, the sense of achievement that they get is well worth the effort.

Cheers

Mike

I think s2tudio kinda hinted to another issue is that there are no "instruments" to mic or record to get that good take in many productions. A lot of stuff is coming from VST instruments and, it's really a different process/sound??.  Of course the same mind set could be applied in  getting it to sound right from the gui before committing it to the track .... ?? Still a form of processing though I guess.....
I've watched some EDM artists that have a decent grasp on music theory and come up with some nice ideas but they can't play an instrument. But then again, there are no instruments that sound like some of the stuff in EDM.... 

pucho812 said:

At aes today. Dude is playing with an ssl. Eq's in every channel,  buss compressor slammed.  It sounded awful. So I sit down to mess with it after he does and he watches me. I turned off the buss comp and every eq. Then I added a touch of eq on somevthings. A little on the bass,  lead vocal and kick. Nothing else. Got a balance where the meters and buss is not slammed  and he is like dude that sounds amazing, how did you do that....

Click to expand...

KISS

The last time I did a mix at a trade show was in Frankfurt, where I had a split from a live band performing inside a sound room in our booth, feeding my console. Not only did I get constant complaints from the sound police about my mix being too loud.  : The kibbutzers criticized my mix for being too bass heavy. Both due to sound leaking from the "sound proof"  booth.

I would mute the entire mix to demonstrate to the sound police that I wasn't causing the noise problem, and for the mix critics I'd show them that the bass faders were all the way down already... 

Not the best demo for sound quality unless I used cans, and even then the sound room was not a proper recording space. That's life in the business lane.  As I recall AES  NYC was a big show for showing and selling big dog consoles. Lots of major studio deliveries would spend time detoured onto that show floor before getting installed nearby after the show. Tire kickers were always looking for deals, and often disappointed that demo consoles were already spoken for.  I expect the big desk business is not as strong as it was last century.

JR

PS: Only now are consumers increasingly paying for the music they listen to, so that should help, but it is a different world.

scott2000 said:

I think s2tudio kinda hinted to another issue is that there are no "instruments" to mic or record to get that good take in many productions. A lot of stuff is coming from VST instruments and, it's really a different process/sound??.  Of course the same mind set could be applied in  getting it to sound right from the gui before committing it to the track .... ?? Still a form of processing though I guess.....
I've watched some EDM artists that have a decent grasp on music theory and come up with some nice ideas but they can't play an instrument. But then again, there are no instruments that sound like some of the stuff in EDM....

Click to expand...

Before electronic music was called  "EDM" it was made with hardware synths and samplers, each of which had a unique and exciting sound. Electronic music can be every bit as alive and organic as acoustic music, but kids using templates and  imitating tutorials on their computers usually leads to the opposite...

My teenage son started watching tutorials online when he was about 10. He wanted to learn to play the piano.... he'd practice on one of those little casio toy keyboards that light up......

Now with his  midi controller, a scarlett and a keyscapes instrument he bought himself last year, you'd be hard pressed to not look around for  Joe Hisaishi or Chopin while you're eating dinner....

But, I can hear those reverb tails cut off too soon sometimes in the pauses...lol

It's not all bad...