Welcome back to my bloggy ramblings. I'm sure you're wondering what you're doing here again, I can assure you I am as confused as you. I have spent the last 4 weeks banging my head against various assortments of audio gear. Eventually I have found that if you bang long and hard enough the gear starts making nice sounds (or maybe thats from the concussion, who knows?).
My goal for this song was always to bounce it down into separate elements, import it into Pro Tools, bring it into the analog world on the audient desk and then mix it down there. With this goal in mind I was always conscious of not getting too finicky with eq's compressions and reverbs, if I used one of these things it was crucial to the sound of that element. This gave me a surprising amount of creative freedom as I wasn't constantly going from writing to mixing and back. In this way I could really focus on one thing at a time and not have to switch around headspaces too much.
Mixing on the Audient was a great experience, having to run around from one side of the room to the next to change a level was a healthy change from my usual spot propped on my chair moving nothing but my hands. Having hands on control of pans, levels and eq's was really cool too. And having access to reverbs that don't sound like a digital mess... Golden.
Overall however I believe the cons outweighed the pros. The biggest one was simply not being able to utilise hindsight. Once you leave the studio you can kiss any changes to the mix goodbye. This was a massive bummer to me, the first thing I did in the morning was to listen to the mix again. Of course there were issues. In simple things like levels too. But due to the nature of the beast I can't change any of that. Furthermore due to the track constraints of the avid interface I had to bus a few nice sounding stereo effects into mono. This affected the stereo balance of my mix a bit but not so much that it was disastrous.
Overall I think that it's a good idea having two different workstations - one to mix and one to write - but I think that the final product would benefit far more by keeping it all in the box, perhaps writing in Ableton and then bouncing into Logic and mixing there (I love logic's reverbs btw). Anyway check out the tune below if you're interested. I'm pretty happy with how it came out in the end.
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