The Magic Box Part II

So you’ve heard what I like on the front, so let me tell you what I lay on the back of my mixes to really make them sparkle.

I’m sure that you’ve seen pictures of ‘big’ recording studios with giant recording consoles and tons of knobs. They look VERY impressive and people pay a pretty penny to have their music mixed on them.

Why?

Can’t we just do all that in the computer now? I mean come on, we have almost unlimited possibilities in the computer with plugins modeled after the finest equipment known to musicman kind.

True, it’s amazing stuff.

However, John Mayer just recorded his latest record on a giant console that looks like it was manufactured for the Death Star destroyer in Star Wars. What makes these things so great?

A lot of things do, but there is one thing in particular, and that is the way they MIX. I’m not talking about EQ, or compression or anything like that. I’m talking about how they mix many channels down to just two.

Think about it, you’ve got your vocals, backup vocals, guitars, bass, keys, and so on- these all get added together in the ‘mix bus’ and come out as a two channel stereo pair. How do they get combined?

To make it overly simple: In an analog mixer you basically have the output of each channel wired in to the stereo bus. (A bus is just the name we give in mixing to sounds that we combine together and handle as their own special channel. Larger mixers have more buses like the famous old ‘Mackie 8-Bus’. That meant that in addition to your stereo mix bus you had 8 additional buses that you could do things like take all your drums and mix them together on buses 1-2. That way when you’ve got all your drums mixed well together and you’re mixing down the whole song and you notice that the drums need to come up in the mix, you could just raise the level of Bus 1-2 without having to raise all the individual drum channels together)

Big fancy mixing desks like the SSL or Neve consoles have a lot of attention paid to how electrically sounds get combined together on the bus. They do special things so that when sounds are panned at different places from left to right they maintain their exact relative loudness in the mix and so forth.

Computers are very very exact. They are very good at math, and what you’re doing basically when you’re adding sounds together is a lot of math. One sound plus another sound is precisely the sum of those two sounds in a computer.

In an analog mixing console, it’s not so exact. To tell you the truth, the big analog consoles in their non-exactness of adding sounds together sound much more natural and spacious. Sounds that are meant to be mono are DEAD center. In mixing this is exactly what you want, and for some reason, computers stink at it.

So this brings me to my back end ‘magic box’. What I use is the Dangerous 2-Bus LT. The way it works is this:

You minimally need to have eight outputs on your interface, and I prefer of course a high end D/A converter like an Apogee. (The Dangerous 2-Bus has 16 total inputs) What you do on the software side is this: you set the output of each channel to be different. Rather than each channel running out the main left and right outputs, you send some channls out 3-4, 5-6, 7-8, and so on. I like to leave one pair for mono, that way my vocal and kick drum can be right dead center where I want them using the mono mode on the 2-Bus.

What is the result?

For me it was like the sound went from just coming out of the two speakers directly to coming out from beyond the speakers. It literally made my old mixes sound like they were done entirely in mono. Wow, tremendously huge difference!

The technical name for what the Dangerous 2 Bus is is called an ‘Analog Summing Device’. It is summing (adding) each channel of your mix together in the analog domain down to 2 buses (left and right). Just like when I first began using the Apogee on the front end, when I started using the 2 Bus on the back end, there was no turning back. The difference was dramatically more natural and spacious.

These two ‘magic boxes’ I’ve described here in these last blog posts are not like your average magic box such as the BBE Sonic Maximizer or the TC Finalizer. Those devices change your sound to something different than what it originally was. What the Apogee A/D converter & the Dangerous 2-Bus do is duplicate and reproduce what your sound was originally: pure and beautiful.

I think that your music from your instruments sound amazing, and I think they should sound that good once they’re recorded and played back for somebody else. Don’t you?