Console Sound: Tracking & Mixing

Word play on his radar love comment, with the added Midas golden touch like melted butter for his popcorn!

Bob Mackie designs dresses

Greg Mackie designs Mixers.

Had a gen 1 SB and sold it. Let's not get carried away. It's a great box, but it's not a console.

We are trying to console you with this thread!

(best Don Adams/Agent 86 voice/Get Smart-I add this for the youngins'!)...

"Well would you believe Shabby Road?"
I keed, I keed you Dr. Bill!
Chris

I gotta agree with Blackdawg on this one: No.

There are some saturation plugins that can be really useful, and it's more possible to get an "analog" sounding mix (whatever that is) than it used to be, but "pluginland" is still not really "there" when it comes to simulating the sound of a console, at least IMO.

That doesn't mean you can't get awesome sounding stuff ITB, of course.

The biggest benefit to using a channelstrip style plugin on every channel (the SAME channelstrip style plugin) IMO is speed. That's the biggest thing I miss from console days: the speed at which a mix came together.

electricity doesn't sound different, but components do. Each time it goes through an op amp, transformer, ect it changes a bit. And console had a LOT of those. And due to component tolerances each channel is a bit different. All add up to some cool vibe. Or at least unique. Sometimes not cool haha

Plugins attempt to replicate that and yes its a saturation thing, distortion, and some non linearities. 

yeah agreed there. 

Indeed gwlee7, and that is part of what prompted this thread ;-}

I'm missing 2 things, that are probably important for that experiment:
- large track count (I don't usually track drums, just acoustic instruments)
- channel EQ. I think this is likely a big part of the console sound. They plan to release a flick EQ in the near future, so maybe there is hope there.

Seems there's a lot of thoughts in this thread, so I'll add mine.

I was quite eager to use mixers early on, even resorting to using some of the cheapest Mackies back in the day.  I was also lucky enough to be in a studio with a band and got to mess around with a 9K and a 4K a couple times.  

I then bought my own medium format console, an Alesis X2.  Not very complicated overall but it offered what I needed in terms of I/O, EQ, sends/returns, bussing, etc.  I did a lot of modding, then unmodding and whatever in search of tones and features over the years.  I even started to adapt SSL 4K circuits to the mixer but abandoned it after it became too time consuming and costly.

I learned a number of things here.

The "console tone" from something like the 4K is just distortion from driving the circuits a little hard.  You have to KNOW how to do it correctly or you get too much distortion or none at all.  The 9K was designed to alleviate distortion in the audio path, so anyone telling you that they get "console sound" from a 9K is mostly BSing.  In a console like this, there's HUNDREDS of opamps in series with your audio signal.  Somehow the audio sounds pretty much the same through all of that except in some cases where certain sections on the 4K were known to cause higher distortion, such as the bus compressor and channel VCAs.

Consoles from API have some inherent THD in each section that adds up.  That and the opamps they use have a fairly slow slew rate which gives the sound a warmer character.  (People who muse about needing super fast opamps for audio don't seem to understand that the API discrete opamp is slower than even the ne5532 chip that everyone loves to hate for being "slow").  Push the circuits harder and you get more THD.

(Vintage) Neve is mostly from the Class A THD and transformer distortions.  Push it harder and you get more THD.

These things are measurable and model-able and probably the biggest takeaway is that the "sound" of a mixer is the sum of the whole.  A single preamp might get you some of the tone, but it's much more likely that the whole channel and routing are contributing as well.    When you talk about something like a Neve or an API, they typically reused the same amplifier circuits in each section, which would add the same harmonic content multiple times so I would think that "running the audio through the same preamp/line amp multiple times" would indeed mimic the tone of a certain console they're used in.  

True.  Always doing maintenance.  When I turned off the mixer and most of the outboard gear, the room stays about 15 degrees cooler too.