Motus Mentis

Recording technology has undergone a fundamental change over the past couple of decades, and what has changed the most, and has caused the most controversy, is the move to “mixing in the box”.

I’ll give some background for those of you who aren’t familiar with what this means:

In multi-track recording, individual instruments and vocals are recorded on their own isolated tracks. This means that a key part of record-making is blending those individual tracks into the final product: a composite sound-field, usually in stereo, in which the instruments and voices are carefully balanced and positioned.

There are a practically infinite number of options and choices for the engineer to make when mixing. For each instrument or vocal, at minimum there are choices to make about dynamics (how loud or soft to make the instrument in different parts of the song), tone (adjusting the “brightness” or “warmth” of the sound), panning (where the instrument should be positioned along the left-right axis), and depth (how “present” the voice or instrument should be, which roughly corresponds to position along the subjectively perceived near-far axis).

For tone, we use “equalizers” (a.k.a. “EQ”) and “filters” — devices that boost or cut specific ranges of audio frequencies. All modern recording consoles have one of these built in to every channel, and every brand and model has its own distinctive qualities. There are also scores, if not hundreds, of free-standing (or “outboard”) EQs to choose from; typically a well-equipped studio would have several of these available that an engineer could patch in if the console’s inboard EQ wasn’t quite giving him what he wanted for a particular track. Many of the more popular console manufacturers, such as Neve, API, and Solid State Logic, also made their inboard EQs available for sale as outboard units.

For dynamics, there is, first and foremost, a fader — a sliding, linear volume controller. But there are also useful electronic processors that control volume automatically in various ways. A “compressor”, for example, is a line amplifier with an adjustable threshold; if the input level exceeds the threshold, the gain of the amplifier is automatically reduced. This is handy in general for controlling a track that has occasional loudness peaks that would be difficult to smooth out by hand, but it can also squeeze and fatten a sound in pleasing ways. As with equalizers, there are many, many types of compressors, and any good studio of my era would have a lot of them lying around.

For depth, which as more subtle and subjective quality, we use reverberation, which simulates the diffused and extended sounds of large acoustic spaces — chambers, concert halls, churches, etc. — and echoes, which are delayed and transformed repeats of the input sound, bouncing in from various directions. For all of these, there are once again a great variety of devices, ranging from actual “live” chambers (only high-end studios, generally, could offer those), to suspended metal plates, to, starting in the late 70s and getting better ever since, electronic processors capable of simulating various acoustic spaces.

These are only a few of the tools in the mixer’s kit — there are lots of other tricks and gadgets to produce more exotic effects as well, such as phasing, flanging, pitch-shifting, harmonic distortion, and so on. The good studios were well-stocked with these things.

As you can imagine, the cost of all this equipment quickly added up, and the studios passed the expense along to their clients, usually by the hour. (An hour of studio time at Power Station in 1980 or so cost $250; adjusted for inflation, in 2018 dollars, that would be over $750.) A high-end console alone could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and when you throw in all of those outboard processors and tape machines, putting together a state-of-the art mixing room could easily run into seven figures. But it was rooms like these where all the hit records of the past were mixed. For the engineer, the studio, and particularly the console, was the instrument: we played it all with our hands. What’s more, those big, hot analog consoles and outboard gear had not just physical, but sonic warmth; there was something about blending all that sound through all those channels and busses and tubes and amplifiers that the early digital gear simply couldn’t duplicate.

So: along comes Pro Tools — a digital platform that comprises a virtual console, signal processors, and multi-track recorder all in one. I remember when we saw its first incarnation at Power Station back in the early 80s; back then it was called Sound Tools, and it was nothing more than a two-track digital recorder and editor. But it has come a very long way since then, and it is now a complete recording and mixing system “in a box”. Instead of spending upwards of a million dollars, it’s possible to put together a top-of-the-line Pro Tools mixing system, including good monitor speakers, for under $15,000.

This has led to a debate among professional engineers: it’s obvious what’s cheaper, but what’s better? If money isn’t an object, how would you rather mix a record: in a high-end studio with a big, warm, analog console, a physical fader for every track, racks filled with “vintage” outboard gear, and a rich, tactile experience — or sitting in front of a computer screen, manipulating everything with a keyboard, a mouse, and perhaps a small control-surface?

Most engineers starting out today have never even had the chance to experience mixing on a big physical console, and a lot of them wish they could. To be able to have the whole mix literally at your fingertips, to spread your hands across the faders and to have every parameter of every channel under direct, intuitive control, to feel the warmth and weight of the console in the sound itself, is for engineers of my generation what mixing was. It’s a hard thing to say goodbye to.

But I’ll probably never do it again. Here’s why:

First: sound quality is no longer an issue. All that analog harmonic “warmth” has been meticulously analyzed and digitally modeled. Whatever all those Neve and SSL channels were adding to the sound is now available to the engineer in Pro Tools as well. The “coldness” of digital audio was a legitimate concern in the early days. Now it simply isn’t (and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise).

Second: in a physical studio, even the best ones, you might have available only a few of each type of outboard processor. If, for example, you love the smooth effect of vintage Pultec equalizers, and the room you were mixing in had three of them available, that meant that if you used one on the acoustic guitar and two on the drum overheads, you didn’t have another left over later on to put on the lead vocal. But — lo and behold — several different companies have made precise digital models of these old EQs, and once you buy the software “plugin”, you can use separate instances of it on as many tracks as you like. So instead of owning three physical Pultecs for $3500 each, you can have as many as you want for next to nothing. (As I write this, that plugin is on sale for $29.) I often use a dozen or more in a mix. They sound — trust me — just like the real thing. Pretty much every piece of gear you might have found in a top-notch studio of my era — compressors, limiters, and every other kind of signal processor, and even the tape machines themselves — has been carefully modeled as a digital plugin. What’s more, some of the best studios of the old days — Abbey Road in particular — have modeled their custom-made consoles, reverb units, live chambers, tape effects, etc. as digital plugins.

Third: in the physical studio, once a mix has been printed to tape, the console, along with the rest of the control-room, is reset to normal for the next piece of work. If, after listening to a mix for a few days, the producer decides to change a few things, the engineer must spend a long time — typically an hour or two — getting the console, and all the outboard gear, set up just the way it had been (this also means that somebody, usually an underpaid assistant, had to write down all the settings of all that old rack-mounted gear, and document all the patch-bay connections, before putting everything away). In Pro Tools, though, everything is just saved to a session file; reloading a mix just as it was left off typically takes less than a minute.

Fourth: on the old mixing consoles, you could automate fader levels and channel mutes, but not a lot more. If you wanted to make changes to other things in different parts of the mix — panning, effects sends, EQ settings, etc. — you had to do it by hand, “on the fly”, or use duplicate channels, with different settings, to automate them. In Pro Tools every parameter of everything in the mix is fully programmable, including all of those third-party-plugins.

Fifth: even the biggest consoles had their limits. I can’t recall what the biggest one I ever worked on was, but I think it was a 96-channel SSL someplace. That’s a lot of real estate; the thing was probably about fifteen or twenty feet long. Pro Tools just adds channels as you need them; if your project requires it, you can have hundreds — and rather than scooting back and forth from one end of the console to another (which means that you spend a lot of time outside the focal point of your monitor speakers), you can stay in one place and scroll the console.

Sixth: for the creative musician, there is also an astonishing variety of virtual instruments available: synthesizers of every kind, as well as painstakingly modeled and sampled drum-kits, pianos, organs, orchestral ensembles, and ethnic instruments from around the world. There are virtual versions of old favorites, too: I have, for example, a Mellotron, a Fender Rhodes, a Hammond B-3 (with Leslie cabinet), and — one of my favorites — a virtual drum-kit recorded, at my old alma mater Power Station, by my friend Neil Dorfsman. It’s as if I never left. For the guitarist or bassist, there are also beautifully constructed models of favorite amps. I couldn’t afford to buy a Marshall stack, a Mesa Boogie, a Fender Twin, an Ampeg B-15, and a Vox AC-30 — but now I have them all, and a whole lot more. All I have to do is plug in.

Finally: the money is an object. In my basement I have a state-of-the-art Pro Tools system, with scores of plugins and virtual instruments, in a smallish room that I built for the purpose. As a man of modest means, I could never have afforded to build such a thing around an analog console. I can mix for my clients in there without sacrificing anything at all in terms of quality, and indeed I can do things on this system that would not have been possible even in the most lavishly appointed analog rooms in the world. (I know, because I’ve worked in them.)

Do I miss the old consoles, and the palatial, well-staffed studios that housed them? Yes, I most certainly do; I was lucky enough to experience the “old way” at its very best, way back when it was the only way. Now, instead, I mix by myself, staring at a screen in a small room in my basement. Gone is the social aspect of those bygone days, too; my clients now are usually far away, and we send files back and forth over the Internet. I especially miss the physicality of the old way: it has taken me years to give up the feel of the old familiar instrument, and to get used to the all-virtual experience.

But there’s no going back. Now that I am fully acclimated to the new way I can say without reservation that it’s not only cheaper, and more flexible: it’s better.

So: mixing “in the box”? I’m in.