Analogue Mixing In The Box - Pt2 - Mixing

Tidying Up Loose Ends

 In part one we discussed how tracking (recording) was done in the analogue age and how to emulate that in our DAW. Now that we have captured all those audio performances and tried as best to aim for the sound we wanted and committed to it, as was the norm back in the day, it's time to overlook our work and tidy up loose ends. That's right, it's time to mix.

Now this brings me to an extremely important point, much overlooked by the home recordist. That point is this. All that audio that was treated to pre-amps, transformers, valves, eq, compression, console electronics and finally tape, during the tracking stage, now gets treated to a second layer of processing. Now for most people recording at home they usually track and mix all in one go i.e. the recorded audio gets recorded and then treated with eq and compression etc, once. But in the Professional world tracking is, still to this day, stemmed out in many cases, taken back to another studio, brought up on another console and whilst fixing things that weren't just right, the stems are treated to a second layer of processing. That is a workflow rarely used by anyone recording at home.

Second layer of processing

So in keeping with the old school analogue routines, still employed in many cases today in the digital realm, I'm going to take the tracked audio, export it all as stems, and bring it back into the DAW, mimic a different console, SSL, and start mixing and fixing anything that just isn't working.

Also important to note is that you should have spent so much of your time getting the recording just right that when it comes to mixing the song it should, for all practical purposes, mix itself. For a lot of engineers the tracking stage meant the song was 80% done. So you can imagine when you pulled it back up on the console from the 2" multitrack tape machine it should already sound fantastic. If we spent the same amount of time and dedication to detail, when recording specifically at home, then mixing would become a breeze. We would also need to employ less plugins, spend less ours doing dramatic eq cuts & boosts and overall save many hours labouring over trying to fix it in the mix methodology.

In the video below watch how I pull up the stems, already treated with our virtual preamp, eq, comp, console and 2" tape, whilst tracked, with plugins, our first coat of processing. Now it gets pulled up on a virtual SSL console as we mimic the next stage, analogue mixing, and give it all a second coat.