Jules King: Never Stop AndyGallasMix

[AndyGallas]

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.

[AndyGallas]

I's just converter clipping on the mixbus and perhaps one dB of GR from a Sonnox limiter. The subby thing comes from the drivne TG emu. It's actually a kind of lowmid distortion.

Clipping your is a pretty ballsy move. What converter are you using?

I use an older RME ADI-8 Pro converter on the mixbus to insert a SSL style compressor and an EQ. I find converter clipping a very clean way to get things louder.

[AndyGallas]

Here's a really crude diagram I whipped up to clarify how you might use my strategy. Note that on the master out I'm not including any additional distortion, which isn't how most people work with console emus. I'm also sending the FX straight to the master outside the summing busses, since summing the FX sends always seems to muddy up the low midrange.

Hey thanks for sharing, interesting!

In my mix I used only the mixbus.

Cheers,
Andy

[jrk]

old review from SOS mentioning "low-end boost it applies to everything" (specifically "Mike" model). Something to listen out for, I guess.
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/nov12/ar...es-nls.htm

[AndyGallas]

old review from SOS mentioning "low-end boost it applies to everything" (specifically "Mike" model). Something to listen out for, I guess.
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/nov12/ar...es-nls.htm

Thanks for the article! That confirms my findings.

[Bold Beagle]

In my mix I used only the mixbus.

That could be why you had trouble with driving everything too hot as well. If you're using something that somewhat realistically models the behavior of outboard gear (Not sure about your console emu), you have to keep in mind that analog equipment starts clipping around 18 dB beneath digital unity.

So if you're going to use something like that on the mixbus, you'd have to take that into consideration and mix everything really low. With the summing buses approach you have the freedom to group together tracks that serve the same purpose and drive those into the sweet spot individually before you mix them back together. It works for me, but it's only one of probably a million ways.

I guess it all depends on the end-all goal for the summing, though. Lots of guys these days seem to be trying to get a realistically analog sound, which is cool if that's your taste. In my case I don't really care about recapturing old sounds unless that's what the client wants... I mostly do what I do because it naturally glues everything a bit from the very beginning of the mix. So I wind up relying less on reverb and mixbus compression to get everything sounding coherent.

Seems to enhance the loudness a bit from the beginning of the mix as well, so it's a lot easier to imagine how dynamics processing at mastering will affect the punch.

Thanks for good conversation,
BB

[AndyGallas]

Regarding summing plugins, well I don't care what it tries to emulate. I was just curious what color these plugins can bring to the table. I take great care of gain staging but there is that sexy drive knob on each module I probably overdid. Usually I don't use such plugins. Once in a while perhaps a Slate VCC on a bus. I was a bit irritated that I did realize the downsides that late. There was just to much "wow" at a first glance

Just to be clear, there is no problem with the plugin or this working method. That problem was just, uhmm... me.

Cheers,
Andy

[manuke]

Hey Andy, only listened to the last one, think the whole thing sounds great. If I had to nit pick, bump up the gtr solo but apart from that......nice one.

[AndyGallas]

Thank you very much! I agree, the solo guitars could be a tad up.