Key Of Grey

Photo courtesy of fr1zz

February 17th, 2009 -

I’ve talked before about getting the best possible signal into your digital space, including nice analog pre-amps and good analog to digital converters, but what happens next? Even though music technology has been revolutionized by DAW’s, we still crave the warmness of analog. You might not know know why you like a professional mix,  but it’s likely that you can tell between something that is recorded in a full studio, or something that is recorded, mixed, and mastered all inside a Protools Mbox or something similar.

The difference, besides the obvious skill with which the professional engineer mixes, is that they are mixing through a lot of nice gear. As I’ve said before, it’s not about how much gear you have, it’s about the quality. But the simple fact of the matter is, professional studios have nice gear, but have the money to buy lots of it.

These days, music technology is becoming better and more affordable. The gap between professional-grade gear and semi-pro, is getting much smaller.The nice analog gear which provides the warmth that professional mixes have, is available to consumers at prices they can afford. By now, you know that you want the best possible sound going into your DAW. The next part of the chain to concentrate on, is the mix-down.

The mix-down is where your multitudes of tracks get combined to form one stereo track. This is the file that you’ll burn on a CD, or compress to an mp3. In your music software, it’s most likely called “bouncing”. The term bouncing came from an early technique to attain more available tracks. If an engineer ran out of tracks, he would combine what he had onto one track, thereby freeing up all the rest; essentially ping ponging the tracks back and forth. The problem with this, of course, is that what was bounced, could not be un-bounced. This was certainly something an engineer had to weigh carefully.

In our modern age, where the number of tracks is only limited by our hard-drive space, and perhaps the processing power of our computers, we don’t have to make such difficult bounce decisions. However, once we are happy with our mix, we will bounce everything down to one stereo track so that others can listen to it. This is also called summing, for obvious reasons, and it’s this step that most people neglect.

For people that mix inside the box, most will be happy with the bounce option in their DAW. Professionals, however, will always run their mix through an analog mixer, even if they don’t use the console itself to mix. While this might seem like an unnecessary step, the analog consoles impart a signature on sounds they touch. The analog sound wave has a smooth signature (in stark contrast to the ones and zeroes of digital), and has pleasant distortion that many find desirable. Using an analog mixer allows a DAW user to have that analog sound imparted on their music on the way out.

The mixer does the summing, instead of your DAW. You’ll need a device connected to the output of the analog mixer which can be anything from a CD recorder, to re-routing back into your DAW. The point is that the mix-down is achieved by the analog mixer, instead of your DAW. Using this technique makes a huge difference in the sound quality. Trust me, you’ll hear it.

If you can afford to pay for a couple hours of studio time, you can run as many songs as possible through their console. Just play them while recording the summed stereo output from the analog mixer. You don’t need to mix them since you’ve already done that job, you just want the analog console to warm up your sound. Happy summing!