Who finds the concept of everything in the box depressing ?

I find an all ITB style depressing for sure. Very partial to electric on this end. The workflow of the DAW age is undisputedly better than working with tape for obvious reasons but I think music production as a whole suffers sometimes because everything is just too damn easy using all digital. It's quick. Very little actual "work" is involved in music production ITB. Gone are the days of having to get up and actually patch this or that in to make a signal path. We get lazy sometimes and choose the easy way. Does our music suffer for it? Probably. It took over a year to record and produce the Hysteria album and it shows. It's timeless and plays as good to day as when I bought it on cassette 24 years ago. Conversely, a lot of popular music today takes less than a week to produce the record, and THAT shows. I think music has lost some of it's soul with the digital age. These are my views but I'm certainly not dogmatic about it. I don't look down on anyone for choosing to mix ITB, It's just that I prefer to mix with analog as well.

This is what is what I do jc, fill up the gap with plugs. And some of em are awfully damn good these days.

Very true, Tony...
Interesting point, Cowboy, about how long it takes these days...The industry just doesn't have the money to throw a cool million at recording a band and give them half a year to sit and create in the studio - I wish they did. I'm about to go in and produce an EP on a great new artist and we are taking two days to track - Four 3-hour sessions. We're doing 6 songs, so - 2 hours a song. We will have our shit together, and I'm doing a lot of pre-production, so we know the direction we're going...AND honestly, after the constant bootcamp of getting 5 songs in 3 hours for songwriting demos, 2 hours seems like an eternity. The sucky thing about it though, is we can't experiment with drum sounds, pres, mics...guitar tones, etc. Saying all that, though - the session guys in Nashville are just freaks. The engineers and studios are beyond experienced and they KNOW what to do. We will walk in, everything is set up, ready to go, already mic'd...the engineer knows the room in and out, and the players literally can do anything you want. After producing several things and "producing" hundreds of demos, my approach is much like my approach to this board: "Less is more"...These musicians are the stars - I'm just there to push the direction and say yes and no. Maybe sing a few parts.

As far as ITB/OTB - I'm using a hybrid these days too. I'll compress with outboard occasionally and I run the mix through Jeff's 528's...but I also use lots of plugs, VCC and FG-x, etc. Best of both worlds. I feel the biggest difference these days between home and studio are the rooms, by far...and of course, the selection you have at your disposal at a major studio. This is probably a terrible analogy, but I would venture to say a modern car is a lot better machine than a vintage one...but they're just SO cool...

One good thing about home recording is that there is that there is "creativity in limitation." Meaning that I play a guitar part the way I do because that's the only way I know how to do it...Neil Young's singing comes to mind...I think I've heard BB King express the same kind of thing.


But unfortunately, you gotta slog through a shit load of awful people out there to get to "cool limitation."

I cannot say that I get depressed when I mix ITB. Thinking about what bothers me about it comes down to there is no traditional signal path when working inside a computer.
Plug-ins have no signal path. We don't get to manipulate our gear like in a traditional way.

Most of the time I mix out of the computer through an analog console and run this signal through my stacks of transformer / tube / high quality analog gear.
I really like the result of my methods.

George Massenburg brought up a really good point recently at an EARS meeting in Chicago. He pointed out that one is summing the sound of all the d/a converters when you bring a digital signal in to your analog set up. He said that he did not like that sound, no matter the quality of the high end converters involved.

I thought that he made a very good point with this comment.

Note to self..........never piss off Jim Williams and give him a headache..........

I get sick of sitting at a PC instead of using real gear. My only choices for hardware though is a Korg D3200, Akai Dr4d and a Tascam DA88.

in some circles that's a healthy fetish...

I agree, the workflow s the biggest problem for me when working with the computer, not necessarily just itb, although that would be the most extreme case. The biggest pitfall seems to be the postponement of decisions. This might reduce anxiety, but it makes the process a lot slower. I don't find working itb depressing as much as frustrating. Although I have to say I haven't worked itb for over a decade. I tried for years to be analog only but I never could get rid of the damn computer. Right now, the band decides how they want to work. I'll always offer my advice if I feel the group is choosing a working method that takes longer without any advantage for the record.