Dilemma - Mixing In The Box part 2

The solution to yesterday's dilemma came forth during dinner at AES in San Francisco with a renowned LA studio owner/engineer (whom I shall refer to as AS). We were discussing Pro Tools and the various controllers available for same, which evolved into the subject of mixing in the box. AS related that he had not had great luck doing it, and that he split out all his tracks into a vintage Neve console for mixing. Makes sense - I know a lot of folks who break out their mixes, but, sonically speaking, is there really a difference? He claimed that even if you route all your tracks out of an 8 channel Pro Tools I/O and run it into a little Mackie mixer it will sound better. Unbelievable! But he insisted it was true, and challenged me to try it next time I had a "problem" mix. This was the ideal opportunity to test his theory.

OK, I got rid of all the Pro Tools auxes, submasters, and the master bus, and routed all of my tracks to the 8 outs of a single HD192 so that I had stereo drums, stereo GTRs, stereo keys, mono bass, mono Vox, and ran them into a Tascam M3700 analog console. Voila! Lo and behold, the drums suddenly came alive; the vocals were clear and had dynamics, even the murky bass track had definition.

What was the deal? Why did the relatively pedestrian Tascam console yield a better sounding mix than the fully blown Pro Tools rig with all of the expensive plug-ins? Give up? Check back tomorrow and I'll relate the rest of the story. It's scary! And it'll scare all the Nuendo, Logic, DP, etc. users, too.

Happy Halloween!

MBM

Dilemma - Mixing In The Box

So, I'm in the middle of mixing an album for a AAA artist, and we're stuck on one song in particular. It's a full-band Rock track, and we're combining two different takes (done at different times with different players) together to make a "best of" take that really rocks. We have two sets of everything, including drums (20 tracks of drums!). Though we're not using everything all the time, there are sections that cut back and forth between the different drum takes. Individually, the drums sound pretty rockin', but when you start to add everything together the definition gets more and more hazy with each additional track, and pretty soon it sounds like I'm mixing on an old cassette 4 track. Worse, actually!

How do I get out of this one?

Here's a bit of back story - the tracks were all recorded professionally by professional engineers in reputable studios with quality gear. The players are all pro's and the songwriting is quite good. No excuses, right? Let's go a step further: this entire project was done in Pro Tools (24 bit, 48kHz WAV) and we're mixing on an HD3 rig (G5 dual 2 gig with 4 gigs of RAM) and not really pushing the limit of the DSP. This song is being mixed "in the box" (without any outboard mixer or processing) with a track count of 64, many of which are stereo tracks.

Here are the big questions:
1) Why does the mix sound like dookie when the individual (and even small group) tracks sound great?
2) Why does it get worse when I submix the drums or the vocals?
3) How do I fix the problem before the artist wigs out? Or before I yank my hair out?

And, oh by the way, the artist wants this done and mastered by the end of the week.

Clues? Hints? Suggestions? Send 'em on in! But tune in tomorrow and I'll tell you how I fixed the problem and beat the reaper, and how you can, too!

Au demain,

MBM