Community member, William Wittman is a Grammy Award-winning independent Producer/Engineer/Musician/Songwriter based in New York who began his career as a musician and moved from there into work as a studio engineer and producer, his credits include the multi-platinum debuts from Cyndi Lauper, Joan Osborne, the Hooters, and The Outfield.
In this article, William is going to explore three techniques you can use to help you create an analogue workflow in a digital production environment.
Setting The Scene
When I was younger I was a serious competitive foil fencer. And there is an axiom in fencing that says: there’s nothing new in fencing, only the old stuff people forgot about.
I might say that we could say the same about audio recording. The work methods change but there are valuable techniques, and mindsets, that we perhaps could employ except that we ‘forgot about them’.
There are many things about working in today’s DAW, digital audio, environment that are clear advantages. We no longer have to worry about finding available tracks or allocating our outboard equipment resources and so on.
But without giving up any of these advantages, there might still be aspects of an ‘analogue workflow’ that could benefit you in your modern digital productions.
Here are a few ‘analogue mindset’ things to try:
Limit Your Choices - Limitations Can Be Good
When we worked in the analogue domain, with 2” tape machines and large mixing desks and racks of outboard gear and so on, we were forced by necessity to make certain choices.
Want to do another pass or a drop in at that guitar solo? Well, then we have to erase the one we have. “Is that worth it? Are you sure?” was a question we were forced to ask ourselves often.
We don’t have to make those hard choices anymore, thanks to a virtually unlimited number of digital ‘tracks’, but are we in some ways better off having to really think about another one rather than just throwing on possibilities endlessly?
It’s one thing to be able to give the singer or the guitar player a chance to ‘beat’ the performance you have recorded or to perhaps explore an alternative idea. That’s a welcome luxury. But it’s entirely another matter to record dozens of vocals, for example, simply because you can. Not only is it unlikely to yield a better performance without a clear goal as to why you’re doing more takes, but it also becomes almost impossible to mentally keep track and sort through a large number of takes later.
In many ways, it’s far better to do the takes you know you need, for a defined reason.
Perhaps a judicious drop-in is a better use of your time and creative energy than another 13 full takes?
We don’t have the limitations imposed by the tape machine anymore, but we still have the same emotional and mental limitations on our ability to process information.
Setting reasonable limits for yourself might very well lead to a more creative result.
Try Setting Up An “Analogue Studio” In Your DAW
Populate every channel with the same EQ and compressor, set up a few select reverb types and maybe a delay on sends and even perhaps add those sends (muted) to every channel, all ready to go, and see if it doesn’t make your every day work more creative by eliminating needless decisions.
Working in analogue, we had a finite number of outboard gear choices.
We had a large console with its equalisers, and whatever outboard gear any given studio had in the rack. Only so many compressors, only so many reverbs, and so on.
This meant that we sometimes would print the reverb plate with the drums so that we could free it up to use on the vocals in the mix, or compress the guitar to tape because we needed that compressor for something else in the mix.
We don’t need to do that now when plug-ins offer an infinite number of instantiations. But having that compression or reverb already committed, or at least chosen, on the spot provides a perspective to build upon.
If I am working in a way that allows it, I record (or "print") any eq and compression going into Pro Tools as I see fit. But if circumstances don’t allow for that reasonably, then I will use the appropriate plug-ins to achieve a similar effect and just have them on there from the beginning as though it was "printed".
Hearing the guitar as close as possible to the way it’s going to be in the final mix makes your next overdub choices easier and clearer and more relevant. The ‘analogue workflow’ way of thinking says: don’t delay those choices; make your choices and base your next decisions on them.
And do you really ‘need’ 6 reverbs in your mix? Or for that matter do you need to agonise over which of your 12 reverb plug-ins to use?
We typically had a few options in a given studio, perhaps one plate and one digital reverb, a chamber if you were really lucky, and that was that. But that also meant we had to really think about creating a sonic space based on the reverbs we had at our disposal.
Use what you have and make it work.
Again, this might not be because you have that actual limitation; you might actually have those 13 reverb plug-ins in your folder and you can instantiate as many of a given one as you like. But rather the mental energy spent on paging through your list of reverbs is likely to be better spent in the creative side of your brain, using just two or three reverbs you set up and decide how to use.
What about even EQ? To me, this is a big one.
Most often we used what the desk had built-in. Perhaps one or two things in a mix might have an additional outboard equaliser patched in, but on the whole, the desk EQ was it.
And I would argue that this gives a certain cohesiveness to a mix that’s actually beneficial over an assortment of EQ choices. “How do I glue my mix together” is one of the most common questions I see on the internets from project studio users. And one sure way to get that ‘glue’ is to use the same type of EQ on everything.
One thing very much worth trying is to create your own DAW “console” by populating your DAW tracks with your favourite channel EQ on every channel. Perhaps even follow that with your favourite compressor on every channel. You can bypass some for sure, (I certainly don’t need a compressor on every track,) but try creating that virtual mixing desk in the box and see if it doesn’t both speed your workflow and make for a more unified sound blend.
Hint: it will, and, once again, it saves all that mental busywork involved in choosing plug-ins.
Go one step further and set up a few select reverb types and maybe a delay on sends, and even perhaps add those sends (muted) to every channel, all ready to go, and see if it doesn’t make your every day work more creative by eliminating needless decisions.
Mixing To Sound ‘Like A Record’ Every Time
Another thing we’re spoiled by these days is rough mixes.
It used to be that every time we put up the multi-track tape to work we’d have to make a working monitor balance from scratch. This meant of course that each time we’d go to work, the balance we were listening to, and overdubbing to, was somewhat different. So these everyday ‘rough mixes’ forced us to learn to get a balance, maybe throw on a simple reverb on a send, and to make things sound right, quickly, every time.
And, more often than you might imagine, these rough mixes actually made it onto the final records and turned out to be ‘unbeatable’ by later mixing attempts.
While it’s no doubt a pleasure to be able to return to where you left your project when you open it up to overdub the next day, it’s way too easy to just let your DAW bring up the mix where you left it without thinking about integrating new parts into a whole that ‘sounds like a record’. The danger here is that it’s also easy to throw on layers that don’t really fit into the sonic picture only to arrive at the serious mixing stage without knowing if you have an actual cake or just a pantry load of separate ingredients.
And of course, by always building upon that recallable framework, you deny yourself the opportunity for a serendipitous brilliant rough mix!
In Conclusion
DAW recording and mixing certainly gives us a world of possibilities but that doesn’t mean every mix or every project needs to use every option. Quite often that’s just a time suck and, more important perhaps, a drain on mental energy that could be spent on actual creative decisions.
Try thinking like an analogue engineer/producer in your virtual analogue studio, and see if it doesn’t help you be more creative in your DAW world.