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Post by FM77 on May 30, 2024 7:56:44 GMT -6
Convenience should never be the end goal in your life's work, IMO. If your client likes the sound of ITB, that may say more about your available hardware than the client or your ability to use it. Or maybe it say's they prefer ultra clean or hyped modern production, even if they don't know it. Alot of people want to sound like modern radio and might think something is amiss when they don't. Doesn't matter if it is creatively lacking, unique or dynamic. Personally, the little nuances are the only thing that matter to me. Modern well-built hardware (and well-made vintage gear) suit my vision because I produce within a relatively small and specific era of tones, noise floor, resolution limits etc. Those limits feel good to me. I like the limits of hardware or plugins that have a similar feel. I like the limits of hands-on listening. Turning off the screen. Plugin emulation is impressive in many scenarios, but it is difficult to genuinely turn the clock back on production values unless you use the gear of the time. Regardless of forum or marketing hype. (just pop in the albums) And even then, you cannot escape a large degree of modern, hyper clean production mixed in. There is nothing inherently complicated or challenging about hardware recall or gain staging. It's just part of the gig that requires hands on attention and listening. You might need paper and a pen (imagine that) or greater mental recall or longer term relationships with your gear. Knobs get bumped, settings get changed, tubes sound different from session to session. Ghost or gremlins in the machine etc, I have noticed for some, switching from song to song might require the inconvenience of brain-power or time and energy that is difficult to sacrifice for what we consider to be such mundane tasks in 2024. I understand. But the alternative seems like such a slow 2 dimensional death. If you do this to pay the bills convenieance / efficiency is everything! Sorry I understand the artistic mentality, but when rent is due it’s about cranking projects out the door. While the history may now be colored in retrospect the hole reason the SSL 4K was so popular wasn’t its sonics it was an investment in Turning projects. At the end of the day you have to understand this is a business. As someone who lived off that tree for years (and stressed a great deal), we agree on this. ITB can be impressive. It produces modern standards that are completely valid and useful for today's artists. Though cost/time/perspective is relative. Being ITB doesn't bring in more clients. Hybrid setups are different, but it does not slow you down enough to matter. Working cheaply or conveniently doesn't pay enough to pay the bills. I feel like the absence of rewind, FF etc and DAW recall alone makes for all the convenience required for efficient work-flow. And all of it affects your mental health and state of joy. Again, what matters most should never be at the mercy of convenience. If it is, you will burnout somewhere.
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Post by kbsmoove on May 30, 2024 8:36:27 GMT -6
If you do this to pay the bills convenieance / efficiency is everything! Sorry I understand the artistic mentality, but when rent is due it’s about cranking projects out the door. While the history may now be colored in retrospect the hole reason the SSL 4K was so popular wasn’t its sonics it was an investment in Turning projects. At the end of the day you have to understand this is a business. if i had to adopt this mentality to continue making a living making records, i would find a new job. i wish fully ITB worked for me for the speed and convenience reasons everyone cites, but the sonics fall flat for me. and the sonics are my business card and i will choose them every time. |
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Post by gravesnumber9 on May 30, 2024 8:56:56 GMT -6
Byrne's point is that it just kind of is what it is. The format changes to fit the technology. People hear the technology without ever even knowing what the music sounded like before it had to be changed to be recorded. People copy what they heard on records assuming that's what their heroes really played like. Nobody remembers why it was played like that, the music just evolved. One example he gives is the use of rim shots and stick hits and such in very early jazz recordings. They only did that because you couldn't hit a snare full force without drowning out the rest of the band. But then people heard the recordings and assumed their heroes really WANTED to do these rhythms with stick hits and cross sticks and things and they invented new beats having no idea that the guys on the records didn't play like that at all when they were doing their real shows in New Orleans or wherever. So by the time you get to Krupa and Rich, the way drums are played is totally nuanced and interesting and way beyond the beat keeping and groove building that was most of the history of drumming. All because drums were too loud to be recorded in the way they were played. Another example is how people have begun to sing like they were autotuned. Kids grew up listening to that having no idea that nobody actually sings like that. But... now they do! Because they thought they were copying their heroes, but they were just copying technology that was limited and created artifacts. But kids heard how Britney Spears or whoever sang and thought that was a real voice. By the time AutoTune improved and Melodyne came around it didn't matter, people sang differently (in pop especially). So what's my point? On one level it's kind of weird that people want stuff to sound like it was recorded with technology that is actually vastly inferior to tech we have now. Vastly inferior IF the purpose is to create an accurate capture of what the performer really sounds like. But that's the not purpose, the purpose is to capture what people THINK the performer sounds like. One final example that Byrne gives is the way that field recordings were deliberately made to sound old and scratchy so they'd be more "authentic". Even the revered Lomax's (according to Byrne) deliberately tried to make performances and recordings sound lo-fi (for its time) so that it would be believably rural. Nobody wanted to hear Leadbelly playing a brand new guitar with nice strings singing into a beautiful RCA microphone singing standards from the American songbook (which is what he really sang before they found him). Lomax wanted him singing slave songs and work songs on a beat up twelve string wearing overalls. Never mind that by that time Leadbelly had more than enough money for decent guitars and wore suits while performing Tin Pan Alley pop hits. White audiences in NYC would never buy that! So... nothing changes. Yeah but they didn’t insist on using ersatz of 50 year old technology. Leadbelly might have been presented like that But they didn’t use Edison’s wax cylinders. There’s a really good book, segregating sound, about how the blues were as much a force of marketing to create a genre to sell to northerners regardless of race. And then it goes on to white washing of rock n roll, Atlantic records (maybe this was a different book?), muddy waters playing mostly what would be considered pop and country music today but having to be marketed as blues, etc. Fair point. Sounds like another book I'll have to read. |
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Post by Dan on May 30, 2024 9:51:42 GMT -6
Convenience should never be the end goal in your life's work, IMO. If your client likes the sound of ITB, that may say more about your available hardware than the client or your ability to use it. Or maybe it say's they prefer ultra clean or hyped modern production, even if they don't know it. Alot of people want to sound like modern radio and might think something is amiss when they don't. Doesn't matter if it is creatively lacking, unique or dynamic. Personally, the little nuances are the only thing that matter to me. Modern well-built hardware (and well-made vintage gear) suit my vision because I produce within a relatively small and specific era of tones, noise floor, resolution limits etc. Those limits feel good to me. I like the limits of hardware or plugins that have a similar feel. I like the limits of hands-on listening. Turning off the screen. Plugin emulation is impressive in many scenarios, but it is difficult to genuinely turn the clock back on production values unless you use the gear of the time. Regardless of forum or marketing hype. (just pop in the albums) And even then, you cannot escape a large degree of modern, hyper clean production mixed in. There is nothing inherently complicated or challenging about hardware recall or gain staging. It's just part of the gig that requires hands on attention and listening. You might need paper and a pen (imagine that) or greater mental recall or longer term relationships with your gear. Knobs get bumped, settings get changed, tubes sound different from session to session. Ghost or gremlins in the machine etc, I have noticed for some, switching from song to song might require the inconvenience of brain-power or time and energy that is difficult to sacrifice for what we consider to be such mundane tasks in 2024. I understand. But the alternative seems like such a slow 2 dimensional death. If you do this to pay the bills convenieance / efficiency is everything! Sorry I understand the artistic mentality, but when rent is due it’s about cranking projects out the door. While the history may now be colored in retrospect the hole reason the SSL 4K was so popular wasn’t its sonics it was an investment in Turning projects. At the end of the day you have to understand this is a business. The SSL has working automation, gates/expanders, more flexible rms compression than a dbx 160, and parametric eqs on every channel. Routing! Modern boards do not have that and are mostly recording front ends not as flexible as a rack of pres and pro tools hdx or whatever low latency native stuff you’re using. Modern daws mostly have dysfunctional stuff and you have to buy a good eq and compressor and gate to use as inserts. Digital just did all do that more reliably and cleaner. And the good compressors and eqs and gates came quickly when daws came around and yeah it took them a good 10-15 years to get great but whatever. Small pots to get on mixers and channel strips suck. Heat kills electronics. Good parts and ics add up. Noise sucks. The fet switches and routing and vcas all add distortion and can break. Digital does this effortlessly. That you can get this all for 60-200 bucks for reaper, logic, and then Cubase and pro tools are more expensive is crazy. Luna is free! Reaper is just time locked with a count down. Buy a reverb, download a better eq and compressor, and go to town. Digital distortion is getting crazy. Stuff like Kelvin and ApShaper sound good and digital. They’re modeling stuff you cannot buy and if you can, you cannot fix like Fuse/Neold. I love the look Tascam sound on a lot of things but they used pots and cassette mechanisms that aren’t made anymore. There’s also new hardware that doesn’t try to ape the past but people aren’t buying most of it. What they’re buying is cargo cult stuff to copy past success instead of stuff that will really solve their problems (rare) or mess up the sound enough to hide a sample (common) Yeah we can hear a difference between say a real tube pre and just a clean pre with a modern tube plug that doesn’t alias horribly stuck on it but they cannot and it won’t matter when they want some stupid limiter or effect on it. Like yeah your special tube stuff, nevey thing, red dots sound great and warm but it’s not going to matter when some putz producer used Valhalla Vintage Verb as an insert so you cannot filter at 400-500 hz or do a huge mud cut on the effect send. That thing is incredibly dirty in a modern emulsified muddy way and all over current production. So is avid lofi. Limitless and Elevate are popular now still and are multiband madness, pretty much remixing your tracks, messing up the harmonic structure, pumping them around, and then applying either a clipper that’s kinda dark and dull or one that sounds like a guitar pedal to it. Limitless you can set to pretty much do nothing but that won’t max out the tracks. Elevate always makes everything sound like it was run through modern rock / metal guitar equipment. Nothing nice you do beforehand will matter except for maybe cleaning out the guitar fizz and crunch. The main use is to make everything sound like Current shitty commercial metal in one go. Same with the Weiss MM pushed into for slick rap, edm, and pop and many modes of Ozone are filthy. Now we have Jaycen Joshua selling heavily artifacted older versions of ozone and metric halo selling scrappy old tape emulators to the general public and they mostly crap up the sound before a limiter. Nobody needs a wave shaper before a compressor before a high frequency limiter now and they all alias and suck compared to just using doing it yourself or setting something like satin or softube tape to barely change the sound. Even less people need el Juan, the god particle, the gold clip, orange clip or any number or repackaged old trash used to kill the sound of 90s and 2000s records especially when you can still buy l1, inflator, and emulate soft clippers pretty easily with any number of things. The FL developers brutally mocking the Orange clip guy for selling “a deadass normal soft clipper” for 100 was hilarious. |
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Post by drbill on May 30, 2024 10:48:08 GMT -6
At the end of the day you have to understand this is a business. Well...it WAS. The real question is, is it really a "business" anymore? |
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Post by Dan on May 30, 2024 11:07:22 GMT -6
At the end of the day you have to understand this is a business. Well...it WAS. The real question is, is it really a "business" anymore? no not for the people buying this stuff with rock star dreams but not songs, instruments, and the ability to play them. Guys want to be legends and don’t get how good many of these live bands were or how many of these singers were that good, night after night. Even people on cult records who never made a living off of music and worked side gigs were often incredible players. |
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Post by chessparov on May 30, 2024 12:09:05 GMT -6
Now Tom Jones? He was an incredible Player!  Those wild 60's/70's parties were... Not unusual.  Chris P.S. I thought The Cult did pretty well with their record$. |
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Post by chessparov on May 30, 2024 12:10:26 GMT -6
At the end of the day you have to understand this is a business. Well...it WAS. The real question is, is it really a "business" anymore? If it's Taylor made? Yes. |
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Post by drbill on May 30, 2024 13:34:49 GMT -6
Now Tom Jones? He was an incredible Player! Those wild 60's/70's parties were... Not unusual. Chris P.S. I thought The Cult did pretty well with their record$. As clever as your comment is, these were decades (50 years?) ago. The "business" has been on a AAA downhill ski run since then. Nearing the bottom of the run where the rest of us who were able to hold on hit the bottom. Rude awakening..... |
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ericn
Temp
Balance Engineer
Posts: 16,086 
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Post by ericn on May 30, 2024 21:12:35 GMT -6
Well...it WAS. The real question is, is it really a "business" anymore? If it's Taylor made? Yes. no but it was Swift😁 |
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Post by rowmat on May 30, 2024 21:26:08 GMT -6
We ran a hybrid setup with a console and outboard but it was a lot of work (especially remixes) and I wouldn’t do it again. The main thing is to use your hardware to get as close as possible to the final sound (tone) you want at the start of the chain, room, mic, preamp, EQ, dynamics etc. before you hit the converters. For me the biggest barrier against going 100% ITB was staring at a fucking computer screen while stuffing about with plugins chasing tone. I’m not a fan of chaining dozens of plugins together trying to find that elusive ‘vintage tone’ as invariably you find yourself disappearing down a rabbit hole and emerging out of your asshole non-the-wiser. Audio requires ears not eyes, well it mostly use to. The one (non ITB) hardware concession I would still consider is a good stereo buss compressor and a pair of Pultecs on the mix buss. Oh and if I still had the EMT140 I would consider printing it to some individual tracks so it could be automated ITB during mixdown. And of course you could have multiple instances of it with different reverb times. I’m still partial to some analog iron and tubes in the signal path of at least just the mix buss and IMO that is a reasonable compromise in terms of tone versus absolute recall. And I should add we also tracked almost everything we mixed. I think there was only one album and maybe a couple of other tracks we just mixed.  |
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Post by OtisGreying on May 31, 2024 4:52:28 GMT -6
I’ve only increased my hardware, quite a bit, though I’ve sold a couple pieces that didn’t earn their stay.
I find analog to just be all around more stimulating creatively, easier to use, makes workflow faster cause of less options, less wondering if it’s helping or hurting the signal. Getting better as a recording engineer has contributed to my workflow gains just as much though
I also write, record and produce all my work though so for me the extra sonic % points make me feel very happy. If I were a mixer for hire though I don’t know if I’d want to be running a bunch of hardware for recall if the clients I got didn’t appreciate (& pay for) the extra effort
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