Why go FULLY itb, rather than hybrid?

Like a moth to a flame with this thread..

Anyway, there's a fair bit of difference between taking in variables / understanding both sides of a coin and what I actually do. A lot of successful ITB tracks have been made by very well known engineers but it doesn't matter because simply put I can't do what they do. My workflow over the years has actually heavily regressed back to classic technique, simply because I find it simple and efficient.

I print tracks, not as in from a DAW to outboard I mean I record with HW EQ / Compression / Limiting / saturation / effects, I split the vocal mono / effects tracks so I can blend them on a buss but. Yeah once recorded it's already 95% there, I leave a bit of wiggle room for a few plugs but they hardly do anything.. I'm sure it seems a bit crazy to approach it this way in 2021 but as a home recorder it's just a matter of finding the sweet spot on your HW then set / forget. Because I can only track one thing at a time it doesn't require tons of outboard either..

Meh, works for me ..

P.S Dr. Bill hope you feel better soon..

I'm beginning to think Dan likes Tokyo Dawn plugins.. Could be wrong though.

Curve Bender is one of the great ITB EQ's.  I'm sure the hardware is staggering, but the software is great!  I saw Joe Chicarelli (why do I have to name drop, I don't know) using this one with Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor as his 1-2 mixbus chain, I thought that was smart.  I already liked the Shadow Hills plugins (I have both versions.)

Not every song needs a mix bus compressor, I don't think.  But it's good to know what the good plugins are.  They are not created equally.

That thing people get from relaxing into a vibe, I am convinced it can happen with rack gear, or plugins, equally.  When you sort of exhale, relax your shoulders, everything is just grooving and hitting hard.  I get that from my ITB mixes all the time.  Just like I did with my hybrid rigs.  A great mix, is a great mix.

I wasnt around for the original thread, but I've been making records for ~20 years and have bounced back and forth between console mixes, ITB, hybrid etc. I still use hardware a lot - especially while tracking - and on occasion still mix on my console. on mix I will have a mix bus comp+EQ at the very minimum. I hate mixing with a mouse and choosing my tools from a menu. hardware gets me better results in less time and i have more fun doing it. and if i'm having fun then i'm automatically doing a better job.

a typical mix for me might look like:

Kick - dbx 160sl or 162sl, 550a or b
snare - inovonics 201 or daking fet2, 550a or b
drum bus dbx 160/162sl or api 2500, iron age v2
drum parallel - almost always alesis microlimiter (sometimes drum+parallel get summed on the console and EQ'd together)
bass - chandler ltd2 or daking fet 2 - 550a or b
el guitars - sometimes fatso or other comp, daking EQ
mix bus - fcs p3ex or api 2500, sometimes dbx 160sl, 5500eq

my vocals are usually pretty well handled in tracking and i often only go OTB if i didn't track them, but sometimes i'll hit JLM la500+fet2 or 160sl

on the mastering side, if i'm asked to do a test master i will do it full ITB. when it comes time to do the actual work i will rename the test master as file "A" and do a new version with hardware involved and label it "B" and ask the band if they have a preference. every time they've chosen the analog/hybrid master over the tester that landed me the job. So while working ITB is good enough to get me the work, my clients blindly pick the hybrid masters every time.

i like it here so much that i'm very seriously considering the wes audio ngleveler to give myself 16 channels of auto/recall to make console mixes more practical.

jmoose is right. It’s recall, the modern pro gear market giving up worshipping the 60s to early 80s and not having pro support, and gear repair being inexistent for many pieces. The consoles never adopted modern low-power cleaner circuitry like the interfaces have. Instead they got cheaper out further or became repair nightmares now with a lot of the speciality chips being discontinued including basic ones like dbx / that blackmer rms detector ics. ssl used ssm parts used in the prophet synths eventually and the only drop in replacements are cool audio ie behringer garbage, crazy expensive AD stuff, cleaned up more durable ssi chips and that analog engines now if they want to redesign it but they don’t because they went bankrupt and sold out. Well what got fried by heat got replaced by digital.

Honestly most of this stuff is unnecessary. I’m back to using Sonnox Oxford, Tokyo Dawn, and Sound Radix for most heavy lifting along with what comes in the saw after experiencing Plugin Alliance bugs, Softube bugs, graphics issues and behavior changes (great amp sims and distortions though), MDW bugs and lack of automation ability, and mcdsp graphics bugs. The new Goodhertz and Liquid Sonics fx are killer though.

Tonally, you can build chains of plugins to do what you want. It’s no worse than some overheating pushed mixer. Maybe preferable when you consider that the stack up of a lot of this stuff is where it starts sounding microwaved or like you ran everything through gritty synth parts. You cannot get it exactly the same but you can get it in the ballpark. But the same is true with hardware. There are a lot of timbres that cannot be had anymore from discontinued parts and ics but the same is true with everything. Sure you can put underspecced tantalum caps and vintage transformers in a 70s piece, hifi guys do crap like this all the time, but for everything it makes cool, it will get in the way.

Now most analog hardware seems to get in the way. Like the only thing I like more on vocals than Oxford Dynamics is the Aphex 661 and those are all time bombs because the Aphex ics are all gone for similar stuff from that era, the that rms chips are gone. Many of the cooler analog pieces are just to fuck up samples and drum machines and the ones that can radically change the sound of real drums aren’t praised anymore or have incredibly stupid marketing or whose manufacturers seem unaware of how to tell their customers how to cleanly use the design they copied from the 50s-80s…

The manuals for most modern hardware and software are garbage.

In the 2000s hardware came out just meant hide garbage Chinese and Australian mics, garbage prosumer circuits, garbage aliased processors, and clipping and sadly it’s still useful but now we have software that can do more or less the same things just now we have forums of people defending the garbage whose music is awful and where posters defend awfully PRODUCED pop music with horrible tuning artifacts where nothing about the recording is good or even interesting and the limiters being used are not really better than in 2000 are doing incredibly stupid pumping and breathing and distortion exactly like the waves l1 and l2 days but with a different timbre. Of course better limiters exist, some intentionally distorted like Oxford and elevate, some that clean up the volume modulation like elephant, invisible limiter, boost, and limiter 6 but now mutlibanding everything to sound like fm, doing the same garbage as l2 but cleaning up the clipper part of it are incredibly popular still. Maybe I’m bitter but I’m being realistic. You have to dig up the worst stuff from back in the day to even compete with what gets released, praised, and sells now and even then, it’s not as bad because they didn’t intentionally clip or hit lookhead limiters hot that will clip everything. The old productions take limiting better because they still have transients to replace with distortion over brief moments rather than over the whole track. There’s still good stuff out there, it’s just rare. Especially in rap and pop and metal and if it’s well produced or recorded, half of the time it’s some conformist retread.

I've got a Thermionic Phoenix Mastering Plus and Thermionic Swift tube EQ on the stereo bus and they do most of the heavy lifting.

But I've been using them on the drum bus and for EQ on acoustic guitars etc and then rendering that to file to free them up again for the stereo bus.

I have literally no more room (or money!) for anymore hardware so I'm rendering to file so I can use things more than once.

My hybrid mixes blow my ITB mixes away .... no comparison!

Yes, there's more hassle working hybrid, but all artistic creation from songwriting to performing takes effort, energy and time.
I've had 40 years experience at this game - and for me - nothing beats the sonic superiority of great hardware :-)

It's literally music to my ears 

Not sure I've ever get into rendering a buss - too much fuss if I have to change something in there. I can fully recall a mix now in 30 seconds tops. Another pair of EQs or two and I'm looking at a minute. It's almost too easy.
 
I'm thinking of another pair of EQs that I can use in the first pass to sweeten a few tracks, then thrown on the drum bus as the mix gets going. 550s or V2s or Phoenix Gyrators maybe. That or something dedicated to a few key tracks. 

The stereo mix bus hardware I run live an recall if I revisit a song.

But, yes I am rendering to file channel hardware and any drum bus stuff as I then have instant recall without setting the hardware up again.

It's a half way house solution.

Eventually, I might simply keep everything live and just get used to recalling the racks like I used to many years ago when all I had was analog gear.

i'm not producing so much music these days, just my own albums and I've taken on an amazing young singer (truly stunning imho) and I've started writing for her
plus I've started doing some drumming again with a fusion guitarist I've know for many years - I always wanted to be Phil Collins in Brand X

I'm with you. Music which is sparse, organic, and intentionally light on the production choices really showcase what hardware can do. Acoustic folk type stuff is a really good example of that. Metal is kind of at the other end of that spectrum, where you may not notice (or care about/want) the beautiful tone that something like a hardware Varimu imparts on the sound.

I have to admit, if I could only mix ITB I'd be more than fine.
I've had my 2-buss compressor for years but am getting more into hybrid as much because I enjoy it as any other reason.
I grew up with hardware - from cassette 4-tracks to 2" tape/consoles. Like someone said, it's more fun and the work is better when having fun.

In the last year I've mix mellow acoustic music, electronic, metal, pop and rock and it's the same in each case. I do agree that when the music has a lot of space around the parts, great arrangements/ playing/ sounds, you'll have less to do in the mix and some gear can really shine here. Said that, it's pretty sweet when mixing something dense and heavy to really push into some hardware...