11-08-2015, 08:58 AM
(This post was last modified: 11-08-2015, 09:07 AM by AndyGallas.)
(10-08-2015, 11:57 PM)Bold Beagle Wrote: Just some quick tips on plugin summing. I like to sum with plugins also, so maybe my methods might work for you on future mixes.
Sometimes console emulators are a little too heavy handed with the distortion for the purpose of summing, depending on the source material and how it was tracked. It's a matter of preference and workflow, but I don't really like most of them personally. If your goal with summing is coherence/glue, something you might try is a somewhat simpler distortion model, like a tape simulator or a transistor simulator. Generally you get a little more control over how much color you're adding. Personally I like FerricTDS for this. It's free and sounds great.
I don't know what your workflow is like, but with ITB summing it seems to work best for me if I'm mixing into buses with the plugins active on light settings. Any plugin useful for this generally adds loudness and affects the frequency response, so adding the summing treatments after the fact can mess up mix balances, kinda like adding a master bus compressor too late in the mixing process. So it's best to mix with the summing active and you'll know what it's doing to your audio as you work. That's my big issue with outboard summing, really.. it always seems to screw up my work unless I'm mixing into it. And a summing box runs more than I make in a month, so it's ITB for me!
Hope that helps,
BB
Thanks a lot for all your thoughts, very nice from you!
I also mixed into the summing plugins from the beginning. I guess I just did drive them way to hot and screwed thing up. The EMI stuff is by far the most colored console emu I've tried. On the mixbus of my last mix I did use distortion too. Slate VCC SSL 4K and a bit of the Sonnox Limiters enhance distortion.