Brief Summary

A recent client request to complete the mix on the console which had been used for tracking made Steve DeMott realise that while he was giving up many useful things his DAW enabled him to do he found he gained at least as much as much as he lost.

Going Deeper

How much time do you think you spend during a mix just paging through your plugin options trying to find the perfect insert for a given source? Plus, there are probably a few plugins in there that you forgot you had, that you feel you should try out again. I can't be the only one who goes through that. I imagine, like myself, you don’t give it much thought. It’s simply part of the mix process. A necessary step toward sonic bliss. It’s something I probably wouldn’t have ever questioned had a project not taken an unexpected twist.

Last November/December I did an EP project for an artist I’ve known for over a decade. After finishing all the recording, we were sitting in the control room and I quickly dialed in a rough mix on the console for the artist to take a listen to, when the unthinkable happened. The artist noted “This is sounding great. Why can't we just finish dialing it in on the board?”

No Recall - No Problem?

“I’ll tell you why,” I though to myself, “this is the 21st century”. We have far more power inside Pro Tools than with a 40 year old console. What about recalls, what about versioning? What happens when we want to change one thing in the mix in 2 weeks and it “sounds different,” because analogue gear does that. It sounds different having been on for an hour versus having been on for 9 hours. So, after taking a deep breath, I walked them through the potential pitfalls, thinking “oh yeah, they’ll want to ditch this idea”. Instead the artist simply said, “Nah…this sounds awesome. I’d like to keep going & finish this. I love what we have.” So there we were, getting ready to mix an EP, in its entirety, fully analogue on an SSL SL4000E. Pro Tools acting like a tape deck & everything else (save a bit of clip gain) would be done in the analogue domain.

Over the years I had assumed that I had really streamlined my ITB mix process. Using control surfaces and plugin controllers to keep my hands off of keyboards and mice, and create an almost analogue flow, but here we were going old school and I was surprised at how much faster these mixes came together. Have I been working harder than I needed to all this time? Since I wasn't surfing plugin lists to find just the right EQ or compressor, I didn’t have to think about what was available or not. Aside from a couple of outboard compressors and a Pultec on the 2-bus, everything was done on the SSL. We used the SSL channel EQs and compressors without even worrying that we might be missing out.

Fast Mixes

The whole process made me hyper conscious of the huge time sink potential we are up against when mixing ITB, with thousands of choices at our fingertips, and how freeing it was to have limited choices. All my focus was on the mix, not on the process of choosing. I never had to bring my brain out of “the zone” to remember a name of a plugin or to try to find it in my expansive list of plugins. It was also a reminder of how incredibly glued a mix gets when it runs through the same equipment.

Coming off of that experience I went and created a new mix template for myself that was just a channel strip on every channel, and have since kept that mentality of “console mixing” ITB. My mixes have come together faster, and I even think they’re better because of the cohesiveness of running everything through the same channel strip.

And, to further test this, I have been asking my mix consulting clients to try replacing their processing with a console/channel strip plugin and see what happens to their mixes.  The results are, not surprisingly, that in every case it has been an instant improvement. 

The takeaway for me is that we’ve been trained to overthink our mixes and have fallen prey to marketing that tries to convince us that we need more, and to do more. More EQ options. More compressor options. More of everything. The reality is that by simplifying the process we are staying connected to the music, the art, and creating a cohesiveness and glue that only comes from running everything through the same “parts”.

What do you think? Could use replace your template with a console strip/channel strip plugin using just a couple speciality plugins where needed? Would you benefit from not having to choose plugins and think about options, leaving your brain in the “mix zone” and not the “analytics zone”?