Mixing out of the Box

With a new headphones matrix set up in the studio, we can now have individual mixes for the recording artists. We can customize these mixes for each player as they track. This is very beneficial to the recording process, and creates a comfortable aural enviroment. Mixing out of the box is a really awesome concept and I am finally glad to say that I am gaining an understanding of signal flow in complex ways that I didn’t know before. Instead of using the mouse to move faders and dial in digital effects, we are using our hands on the faders and physically turning knobs for sound quality purposes, mixing out of the box. Mixing “in the box” with all digital effects and mouse clicking really takes away from the aural experience. There is much visual stimulation happening, and can alter the way a person decides where to begin with a mix. Down to the meat… Go into your protools session and assign specific channel outputs. Using the patch bay, go out of PT into line 1 inputs on the channels closest to you on the board (34, 35, 36). Make sure you are on the mix bus on the channels strip now, and off the aux master mix bus. Line 1 inputs on the channel strip activated, and fader at unity gain. To send an outboard reverb to a channel, patch out auxsends into the effects processor, and out the effect into echo returns. Echo faders 1 2 at unity gain, panned hard left and right. Push in the prefader button in the aux section of the board. Be sure that you’ve turned up the aux1 knob on the instrument channel strip. The channel being mixed on is set to prefader and unity gain. In labs this week we recorded the French horn and both trumpet parts. The recording went smoothly but the player forgot the music so I had to sit there with him and teach it to him using the piano. It took up some time but luckily the takes went well. We used a royer 121 in room 185 in the vocal booth, to get a dry sound. This has synthesizers in it, so I wanted to have some really cool effects on dry tracks. On Thursday we got recordings of the guitar layers done for the first section of the songs. We used the 121 once again since we like it so much. Practicing during the week really helped the recording go a lot smoother. Charting out the song is always a good idea and has only benefited the groups tracking sessions. I am pleased with the way things are going in the group.