Thursday 22nd of March saw the latest in Jigsaw24's very successful Mix With The Pros events held at their London base in Soho Square. This time the event was very music and music creation focused with presentations from many top industry brands including Avid, Focusrite and iZotope as well as a feature presentation and Q&A with producer, engineer and mixer Steve Lipson.

The evening was introduced by Jigsaw24's Head of Pro Audio Business Development Joffrey Ghiringhelli who took the assembled through the plan for the event. Simon Sherbourne of Avid took the stage first taking us through some of the new music and MIDI features in Pro Tools 2018.3.  Using both Pro Tools and Native Instruments Maschine Simon demonstrated the new loop recording enhancements with some audio loops from Maschine plug-in.

Next up was Paul Mortimer of Emerging who are the UK distributor for Trinnov Audio systems.  For those of the audience who did not know what a Trinnov does, Paul took us through some use cases, showed the basics of how a system is positioned in your system and how it is calibrated to make your speakers and listening environment sound as good as they can.

The demonstration sound system for the event was a pair of Focal Trio 6 BE active speakers. Paul showed how the Trinnov system was working with the Focals and demonstrated by by-passing the processing, just how the room was affecting the sound from the speakers.  Using the Trinnov software GUI Paul was able to show what processing the Trinnov was doing with regard to EQ, Delay and Phase.

Simon Short of Focusrite Pro was next to show off a system comprising a Focusrite Red 8Pre and a RedNet AM2 Dante headphone amp.  Simon showed how easy it is to configure a headphone mix using your DAW, the Dante control software and the Focusrite Control App for Mac OS.  Simon was also on hand after the presentations in the break-out session to answer any more detailed and involved questions on all things Focusrite Pro, RedNet and Dante. 

Juergen Wirtz of iZotope was next up to wow the crowd with a presentation of some of the new features of both Izotope Ozone 8 and Neutron 2. 
Juergen started with a basic pop/rock mix and showed how using Neutron 2 and some of its Machine Learning enabled features, he was able to craft a drums track, giving the elements of the kit punch and life using the Track Assistant. He showed how to use the Masking Meter to stop an electric guitar track getting in the way of a vocal. Finally, he used the Tonal Balance Control to take the EQ curve and shape of a chosen track and mac this EQ onto his new mix.  The joke of the day was, now we can all sound like Ed Sheeran. 

The final spot of the evening was handed over to Pro Tools Expert, for Technical Editor James Ivey to introduce Producer, Engineer and Mixing legend Steve Lipson.  James and Steve started by talking about forging your own path, being original and some of Steve's idea on how to get the "sound" you really want in a track. It turns out he has some fairly unconventional methods and processes for doing this including choosing a guitar for a track because of it's colour and how that colour makes you feel, not because it is a Les Paul or a Fender Strat, or because it has a particular type of pick-up.

Steve then moved on to play part of a film cue from a Ron Howard film called Inferno. The cue in question was the collaboration between Steve and the films composer with regard to the emotion and the conception of the music. It was not about the plug-ins used or the gear or tech that went into creating the music. it was all about emotion, the music and the arrangement.

Steve went on to answer questions from the audience with regard to specific hardware and software that he uses and why he ideally wants to use only AAX DSP plug-ins with his mobile laptop based HDX3 systems.

Steve's experiences with Hans Zimmer, working with Jeff Beck, and mixing with Alan Meyerson were all stories that Steve recounted to the great joy and delight of the assembled mix of music and high tech audio professionals. 

We were fortunate enough to be able to record the conversation between James and Steve and will be putting this out as a Podcast Extra Interview very soon. 

As ever thanks to the team at Jigsaw24 for putting on these events which are not only great for information sharing but also great for networking over a beer or 3.  We look forward to the next event which we will let you know about as soon as the date is announced.