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Post by jazznoise on May 23, 2017 17:15:23 GMT -6
I'm very surprised about how many "young engineers" (I'm in my late 30's so I'm still young, am i?) feel lazy about fader riding because 1, 2 or 3dB doesn't really make a difference. I'll add to the post about fader riding: I always ride the fader down. I rarely ride the fader up if I want an instrument to be pushed It's insanity. By the end of mixdown I'm still making 0.1 dB adjustments at times. But I guess a lot of modern music mixing comes from judicious use of the 'mute' button. Elements don't combine as much as they're swapped out and solo'd variously in modern electronic music styles. Which is fine - cool, even. It's just that you can't take that approach to everything.
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Post by aamicrophones on May 23, 2017 17:43:34 GMT -6
Hi John, I agree but I am ultra old school. How, we use to mix before automation and way before digital manipulation was to mix with the Faders. I also started recording with rotary pots but the first professional mix I did was in 1971 and we mixed on a small Neve.
It was incredibly impressive to mix with the P&G faders and the 1073 EQ and of course a EMT plate reverb.
The live recording mixer I built has rotary pots only.
When I mixed Jupiter 8 in 1981 for Paul Horn & Ralph Dyck on a 24 track there was Laurie Wallace, Ralph Dyck and myself on the faders. Paul would call out cues like pan the string from left to right over the next 4 bars.
Paul would read the score with our mixing notes and pass the moves along to us verbally cuing us a couple of bars before the fader moves.
We would print the mix to 2-track and then if we messed up part way through, we would just back up the multi-track a few bars before we messed up, start the 2-track and then later I would splice the mixed parts together.
There is something organic about pushing up analogue faders in the mix and it was at this point as an engineer that I felt like I was part of the band and on equal par with these extremely talented musicians. You actually had to learn the mix moves like musical parts.
Engineers today have it too easy. They have an infinite amount of tracks and they have an UNDO KEY. As, the legendary Tom Dowd said, you have 10-fingers and two hands so you can manipulate more than one fader at a time.
You can only move one thing at a time with a mouse or track-ball. There has been lots of time where I am pulling one fader up as I am bringing another down.
Or I want to bring the plate reverb up on the end of a vocal line at the same time as I am pulling the dry track back.
As, and engineer in the days of tape you had to punch in accurately. If you punched in early you erased the existing track and if you punched in late you clipped the new part. If you erases the existing track you couldn't get it back.
With my RADAR/STUDIO I mix the same way. I print the mix to tracks 23 & 24 or if for some reason I have 24 tracks of audio then I will mix to two my 2nd RADAR. The Radar punches in flawless and there is absolutely no latency.
The bonus of the Radar Studio is that it will also run Plug-ins via Pro-Tools, Nuendo or any othe DAW that can run from a PC. But i am still mixing through analogue faders.
Sometimes, I might record 12 tracks of drums and percussion but I will hit copy project and then pre-mix the drums and percussion to 2 tracks. I can always go back to the original project tracks if I find I screwed up the drum/perc mix.
I do the same with vocal parts. There is only one song I have recorded in the last year that has more than 22 tracks. LESS IS ALWAY MORE in my experience.
In the late 60's I mixed Sly and the Family Stone, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Taj Mahal, Chicago, The Flying Burrito Bros, The Fleetwood Mac Blues Band (with Peter Green), the Jefferson Airplane and others all with rotary pots on the Altec tube mixers.
Cheers, Dave
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Post by c0rtland on May 23, 2017 18:27:21 GMT -6
LESS IS ALWAY MORE in my experience. In the late 60's I mixed Sly and the Family Stone, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Taj Mahal, Chicago, The Flying Burrito Bros, The Fleetwood Mac Blues Band (with Peter Green), the Jefferson Airplane and others all with rotary pots on the Altec tube mixers. Cheers, Dave Daaaaaammmnnn
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Post by ChaseUTB on May 23, 2017 19:08:01 GMT -6
johneppsteinHello, You can record the fader riding live onto the print track just like a console mix. Ex: drum sub group... say I want to fade out/ mute / automate the drum group for a certain amount of bars. While printing the live mix I can pull the volume fader down or mute and vice versa when ready to bring them back in.. Whichever Volume I prefer to automate, I can adjust this while the print track is recording. That is the old school way. Automation lanes are there IMO to aid workflow so you don't have to print numerous " live fader mixes "... You can do this with mutes and pans as well as sends volumes, mutes, and pans! I hope this makes sense if not Incan try to explain it better. Have a good one 🤠
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Post by johneppstein on May 23, 2017 23:06:55 GMT -6
Great insights, everyone. Is anyone here using HUI control surfaces? Anyone fader ride a mix during mastering? I used Waverider on a mix I paid for that couldn't possibly have had much done in the way of fader rides due to the fact that I don't recall the guy doing much after the record button stopped. So far, I think it made it better. It must take a real talent to ride these things real-time. Yeah, i use a HUI, not Mackie's original but the HUI protocol on an Audient DLC. The importance of using the HUI is not for writing automation per se, it's for riding the fader while listening to see if you can make something happen in the mix. Without looking for a problem, without thinking about it, but just listening and experimenting. By the time I get to writing it, I could probably just draw it in as I've heard what I want already. You can draw in drum parts too, so go ahead and tell me there's no advantage to playing them live while listening... In my opinion using one of those controllers that gives you a single fader is actually pretty useless - you miss nearly all the functionality of mixing on faders. It's like the difference beween using a modern multitasking computer and an Apple ][. Or trying to type wearing mittens. Or playing a Bach fugue on the organ with one finger. Even one of those controllers that gives you a bank of a few faders that you address in pages is incredibly limiting. The whole point of mixing on faders is that you have access to the levels of all channels simultaneously, with very fine control over each. Parallel workflow versus serial.
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Post by javamad on May 24, 2017 6:54:06 GMT -6
In my opinion using one of those controllers that gives you a single fader is actually pretty useless - you miss nearly all the functionality of mixing on faders. It's like the difference beween using a modern multitasking computer and an Apple ][. Or trying to type wearing mittens. Or playing a Bach fugue on the organ with one finger. Even one of those controllers that gives you a bank of a few faders that you address in pages is incredibly limiting. The whole point of mixing on faders is that you have access to the levels of all channels simultaneously, with very fine control over each. Parallel workflow versus serial. I have thought this for a while. I think there would be a market for a 16/24 channel flying-faders-only unit that would be about 3 feet across or so that it is basically just motorized faders and motorized pan knobs that hooks into the DAW automation. For those that don't like the large number of points on automation, it should be an issue if you don't have to look at them :-) Anybody want to work with me on the development of the Super Fader Rider TM ?
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Post by swurveman on May 24, 2017 7:01:53 GMT -6
I always volume automate with my mouse. Writing mouse automation isn't as responsive to the music as fader riding on real faders on a real console. With real faders you cdan do a lot of incremental stuff in direct response to what the music is doing. With a mouse you're not working in real time so you don't have that immediacy. For me this is particularly important in mixing things like reverb tails. I think a lot of people seem to be becoming divorced (or at least separated) from that real time element by the difficulty of doing real fader rides with a mouse. You can also ride several faders at once while listening to what you're doing, which you can't really do writing moves with a mouse. And writing automation with a mouse requires you to look at what you're doing instead of just listening and reacting. I agree with all this, but I don't own a console and find DAW fader accessories clumsy and expensive. My money (for now) is better spent elsewhere.
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Post by jcoutu1 on May 24, 2017 7:09:32 GMT -6
In my opinion using one of those controllers that gives you a single fader is actually pretty useless - you miss nearly all the functionality of mixing on faders. It's like the difference beween using a modern multitasking computer and an Apple ][. Or trying to type wearing mittens. Or playing a Bach fugue on the organ with one finger. Even one of those controllers that gives you a bank of a few faders that you address in pages is incredibly limiting. The whole point of mixing on faders is that you have access to the levels of all channels simultaneously, with very fine control over each. Parallel workflow versus serial. I have thought this for a while. I think there would be a market for a 16/24 channel flying-faders-only unit that would be about 3 feet across or so that it is basically just motorized faders and motorized pan knobs that hooks into the DAW automation. For those that don't like the large number of points on automation, it should be an issue if you don't have to look at them :-) Anybody want to work with me on the development of the Super Fader Rider TM ?
3X Avid Artist Mix?
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Post by john on May 24, 2017 12:45:57 GMT -6
mixing through my desk riding the faders while recording the final 2track from the output. raw. love it.
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Post by johneppstein on May 24, 2017 13:34:26 GMT -6
Writing mouse automation isn't as responsive to the music as fader riding on real faders on a real console. With real faders you cdan do a lot of incremental stuff in direct response to what the music is doing. With a mouse you're not working in real time so you don't have that immediacy. For me this is particularly important in mixing things like reverb tails. I think a lot of people seem to be becoming divorced (or at least separated) from that real time element by the difficulty of doing real fader rides with a mouse. You can also ride several faders at once while listening to what you're doing, which you can't really do writing moves with a mouse. And writing automation with a mouse requires you to look at what you're doing instead of just listening and reacting. I agree with all this, but I don't own a console and find DAW fader accessories clumsy and expensive. My money (for now) is better spent elsewhere. I tend to agree on the "DAW fader accessories." And not everyone can make room for an aircraft carrier in the control room. I think "fader riding" means a substantively different thing to us old guys - and that a lot of younger guys really don't understand it. I remember the first time I saw an all ITB Protools rig, at a little side room at Hyde Street about the size of a large janitor's closet. I couldn't understand where the rest of the studio was or how anybody could actually mix on something like that. Still don't, really (well, I do intellectually of course, but) - it looks so - tedious.
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ericn
Temp
Balance Engineer
Posts: 15,011
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Post by ericn on May 24, 2017 14:35:22 GMT -6
The thing with fader rides in the box vs on console is resolution, If we look at HUI/ Logic Control as the default standard 12 bit resolution, 12 bit resolution was one of the big reasons People ran away from the first generation of VCA automation. steps were just to big, and could be heard as being steps. A real fader gives resolutions not found in DAWs one of the first big disappointments of The PT world!
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Post by rocinante on May 25, 2017 12:23:12 GMT -6
Luckily in this day and age it's okay to have both automation, and doing it old school. Automation is amazing and honestly ive done tracks that would have required 2-3 people (and back in the day it did) but these days i just assign what i needed those people for and obviously it has made everything a lot faster. I remember we used to have to wait and explain the song and everything we needed done which could take forever. Recall is a story in itself. Laying on top of the console moving the faders, in a completely absorbed, physically involved, very Zen moment is the butter to my bread. Nothing else is like it and after I'm done and listening to the mix, i cant help but think to myself: 'man i love this shit' I do have to mention that when im neck deep in work that I'd been putting off for as long as i could, and the deadline was yesterday working on something else while the pc does everything ive programmed it to isnt just helpful, its necessary for me to stay alive. Because i am moving I've lately seriously considered just getting a summing mixer (actually finish the one I'm building ugg) and doing it all through that and maybe one day I will, but more than likely I'd do both for at least a little while. I'm afraid of mixing console withdrawl. And this is from a guy who has a friggin modded Ghost. It aint no Neve.
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