Here’s a new tune from Griffin Anthony that was mixed by Charles Dye. It’s called, “Above All” from the album “Crazy Ways.”
Using a screen reader? Click here for the video.
A New Charles Dye Mix For Artist Griffin Anthony
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010Using a screen reader? Click here for the video.
A New Player In DAW Saturation Plugins – Slate Digital
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010I’ve been a believer in adding saturation in the DAW via special plugins ever since becoming acquainted with the idea via Charles Dye’s Mix It Like A Record interactive video mixing course.
As I learned there, I’ve been using McDSP’s Analog Channel, several of the DUY plugins (including DaD Valve, DaD Tape, etc.), Steven Massey’s TapeHead plugin and the Waves SSL bundle to achieve this.
Now there’s a new player in this interesting niche, Slate Digital. (You might be familiar with Steven Slate from his famous drum sample collections and drum replacement products.)
Here’s the official lowdown from the company, and in the latter half, Steven Slate himself:
The Slate Digital “Virtual Console Collection” brings the sound of six of the most legendary mixing consoles in to your digital audio workstation.
“When you mix through an analog desk you get this life and body to the sound that just doesn’t happen when you mix inside the workstation. The separation and imaging from the analog summing is very apparent, especially when your track count gets high” remarks mixer Jay Baumgardner (Papa Roach, Evanescence).
Steven Slate made his mark on analog summing by conceiving the concept of the Folcrom passive summing, which was expertly designed and manufactured by Roll Music in 2001. Now he brings analog summing to the digital world.
“Slate Digital CTO Fabrice Gabriel and I studied these consoles inside and out. We meticulously modeled the entire circuit path so that we could recreate every subtle nuance that makes these consoles the legends that they are”.
The VIRTUAL CONSOLE COLLECTION consists of two plugins, Virtual Channel and Virtual Mixbuss. Each plugin allows the user to choose from one of six modeled consoles. Virtual Channel is applied on individual mixing channels. Virtual Mixbuss goes on the first insert of the master fader.
When using the Virtual Console Collection, your DAW instantly takes on the personality of a real analog mixing desk. The imaging and depth improves, instruments sit better in the frequency spectrum, and mixing becomes easier and more musical. You can even push the DAW faders up to find each mixer’s ’sweet spot’. This is due to the algorithms being dynamic, just like a real console.
From Slate Digital Co-founder Steven Slate:
The Virtual Console Collection has been a dream of mine for years. I’ve always mixed on analog consoles because I love the color and sound that they provide, and I missed it while trying to mix “in the box”.
The Folcrom allowed me to get the best of both worlds, and I’ve used it on hundreds of mixes and productions with great results. However, after creating Slate Digital with Fabrice Gabriel almost two years ago, one of the first things we looked into was recreating the sound of analog mixing, but with digital.
This first lead us to the question: What is wrong with digital summing?
To answer this question, we first built our own digital summing buss. In fact we built three of them. Our conclusion?
NOTHING. Nothing at all is “wrong” about digital summing, whether it be fixed integer or floating point, dithered or undithered. None of these things had an audible effect that any human could pick out in a blind A/B test.
No, actually the problem is with analog summing. With an analog console, the audio path contains a lot of circuitry. By the time a mix is summed in an analog console and gets passed to the outputs, it contains varied degrees of harmonic distortion, phase distortion, and noise. However, it is these nonlinearities that sound “musical” to the human ear.
Fabrice Gabriel is not only a genius at audio DSP, but he has a degree in electrical engineering. He was able to carefully analyze the schematics of all the great mixing consoles and produce individual DSP modules that reproduce various parts of the circuit path, from line input amplifiers to fader buffers to summing amps. Over the past year, we then tweaked the modules by EAR in a mastering room to precisely match the hundreds of test files that were processed with each console.
Keep in mind, that an analog console is a dynamic instrument. As you begin to push the faders into the mix buss, the amplifiers start to reach their threshold and various changes occur in the harmonics and overall sound. This is all recreated in this plugin suite.
In conclusion, I’m so proud of this plugin, and I think it will change the way many people think of “mixing in the box”. As we’ve been developing the Virtual Console Collection, we’ve been pleased to see other digital models of analog mixing pop up (such as the Harrison Mixbuss), showing us that this was an important issue for the audio industry, and we’re glad to add to it.
The Virtual Console Collection is RTAS, VST, AU on both Mac and PC, and along with the whole Slate Digital line, will now be available very soon with a 14 day demo. I’m eager for you all to try them.
Ask Big Al: Using Analog Mixers For “Color”
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009This represents a new feature here on the blog, “Ask Big Al“. I get a lot of questions from a lot of sources, but recently a lot from my Twitter followers. Some answers are short and easy, and some aren’t. So, I decided to offer to answer the more complex questions via posts here on my blog. Here we go . . .
@LoPro311 asks:
“Was wondering if you knew what type of mixer would work well with the M-Audio ProFire 2626? Trying to get that analog feel.”
This is a very common question these days as ITB (”in the box”) trackers and mixers chase a little analog magic. Charles Dye has identified this “magic” as saturation and uses specialty plugins to add it back into his mixes without going out of the box at all. But, some still prefer the hardware. This can be in either the form of an analog mixer of some kind, or something known as a “summing box.”
None of what I’m about to cover depends on what interface you’re using. Some will have more or less flexibility in their input and output options making it easier or more difficult to achieve the end goal. Either way, all the same principles apply in most situations.
Option #1 – Mixers
The advantage of choosing a mixer is that it’s a multitasker. You can use it for its analog goodness while you’re tracking and you can sum through it during mixdown.
The downside is the price, at least if you want some decent analog sound. Most anything new in the under $5,000.00 range is mostly transparent (or low consumer grade). That’s not going to give you any of that analog color you’re looking for. However, between $5,000.00 and $10,000.00 there are quite a few really nice options.
My friend Bryan Stevens, from the Music Pro Show podcast and Bonzo Tunes studio in Atalanta, Georgia USA also craved some analog action. He recently removed his 32-channel Mackie console (a popular, but mostly transparent choice) to replace it with a Toft ATB24. It’s a 24-channel board and with the optional meter bridge has a street price of just under $7,000.00. Not only is it well made, it sounds great too. Bryan is definitely getting what he was looking for. Just ask him. 
The Toft ATB Mixing Console
Along the way, he also considered console offerings from Allen and Heath.
Purchasing a used board (like a Soundcraft for example) can certainly get you more board for your money, but it can also deliver more pain per dollar when it comes to maintenance and repair. Buy carefully and plan on some ongoing expenses.
Option #2 – Analog Summing Boxes / Mixers
While this generally doesn’t offer you options while tracking, it does offer the analog color you’re looking for at a much lower price point than a full console. Some of your options here are:
- SM Pro Audio PM8 8-Channel Passive Summing Mixer (entry level)
- Solid State Logic (SSL) X-Desk 16-Channel Summing Mixer
- Dangerous 2 Bus
Solid State Logic X-Desk 16-Channel Summing Mixer
To pass your signal through analog hardware while tracking you might consider adding a couple of nice analog mic pres to your summing box; like the Universal Audio Solo 610, Universal Audio LA-610 or the dbx 386. If you don’t need oodles of simultaeneous inputs, this could fit your budget very nicely.
Universal Audio LA610 Mic Pre
Bonus Option #3 – Carefully Selected Plugins
Yep, I’m gonna do it. I’m also going to recommend you try getting that same sound completely in the box. The best person to demonstrate this is the one that opened my eyes, multi-Grammy winning engineer Charles Dye. His approach changed my mixing life forever.
If you haven’t yet gotten your copy of his Mix It Like A Record DVD mixing course, it’s one of the single best things you can do for yourself. Check out more info on it by clicking here (you won’t be taken away from this site by clicking the link). Even if you still decide to go out of the box to access analog hardware, you won’t be disappointed by what you’ll learn from this multi-disc set.
Do you have a question you’d like me to answer? Drop me a line!
This Day In Charles Dye History
Friday, July 10th, 2009
Charles Dye
Why?
Because my man Charles Dye is “off to the NEWS!”
1999, Ricky Martin started a three week run at No.1 on the UK singles chart with ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’. A US No.1 for 5 weeks. The song was the first No.1 song to be recorded, edited, and mixed totally on a DAW (digital audio workstation).
Yep, the Dye-Man was the first to achieve this historic milestone. Congratulations!
And, two other tidbits from music history, on this very day…
1992, a range of eight ‘ties’, designed by Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead went on sale in the US. President Bill Clinton bought a set. The collection grossed million in the US by the end of the year.
1971, The Bruce Springsteen Band opened for Humble Pie at the Sunshine In, Asbury Park in New Jersey. After the show an impressed Peter Frampton from Humble Pie, tells Springsteen and the band he’d like to have them open for them on a national basis. Frampton also said he would be happy to get the band an audition with his record label, A & M Records. For no logical reason Springsteen’s manager Tinker West declined both offers on the spot.
While you’re at it, if you haven’t checked out Charles Dye’s most excellent DVD mixing course Mix It Like A Record, why haven’t you? Your ears and your mixes will thank you!
“Begun, The Loudness War Has.”
Monday, June 29th, 2009Okay, so technically the Loudness War began a looooong time ago.
I was recently interviewed for a featured article on this because of my connection with TurnMeUp.org. More on that in a moment.
If this whole “Loudness War” thing is unfamiliar to you, here’s the quick and dirty from Wikipedia:
The trend of increasing loudness as shown by waveform images of Something by The Beatles mastered on CD four times since 1983.
“This phenomenon can be observed in many areas of the music industry, particularly broadcasting and albums released on CD and DVD. In the case of CDs, the war stems from artists’ and producers’ desires to create CDs that sound as loud as possible, or louder than CDs from competing artists or recording labels.
“However, as the maximum amplitude of a CD is at a fixed level, once that level has been reached, the overall loudness can only be increased by a combination of dynamic range compression and make-up gain. This is done by applying an increasingly high ratio of compression to the dynamic range of the recording and then increasing the gain of the recording until the peaks have reached maximum. Certain extreme uses of dynamic range compression can introduce distortion or clipping to the waveform of the recording.”
Here’s a video that also explains the Loudness War in a very quick and easy manner:
Now we come to the self-serving part of this post.
A while back, Charles Dye, John Ralston and I founded http://TurnMeUp.org as way for an artist to fight back against the loudness trend and release a dynamic record if they so choose.
I was recently interviewed on the subject by David Sason of Bohemian.com and the it’s now out. Here’s the beginning of the interview with a link to the rest of it. Thanks for the great story David!
It’s called “soundcheck” on the iPod. On some television sets, its name is “steady sound.” Today, virtually every electronic entertainment device has some sort of built-in volume control, seeking to level the increasingly jarring fluctuation in the loudness of audio or video content in the 21st century. “What’s probably most noticeable to people is how loud a commercial is on television when it comes on,” says Allen “Big Al” Wagner, recording industry veteran and proprietor of Big Toe Studio in Vancouver, Wash. “That’s the same technology being used to make music louder.”
As the cofounder of Turn Me Up!, Wagner, along with engineer-producer Charles Dye and rock musician John Ralston, is trying to counter a trend that’s quickly entering the cultural lexicon via a dramatic term: the “loudness wars,” a moniker that aptly describes the aggressiveness with which the loudness race has progressed and the destructive effect it’s had on the audio arts. Whether rock, hip-hop or jazz, music is roaring like never before. Turn Me Up!–the name tells listeners what to do with quieter, more dynamic albums–aims to hush the blast.
“It’s the equivalent of someone screaming everything they say,” says Wagner. “Imagine taking a painting and saying, ‘It’s not bright enough, so let’s take the Mona Lisa and go over it with all day-glo colors so that all the colors scream, all the time.”
