I remember the days..

[Kasey]

oh my bad! I misunderstood.. man i need to stop skimming posts and responding to totally different things. sorry!

[allbaldo]

I wish someone would make a stupidly simple control surface with just banks of faders and transport controls. Nothing else. I do not mind using the mouse for everything else.

I just want 24 motorized faders and a master stereo fader, pan, Transport, and maybe solo and mutes. NO screens, banks, or anything else.

It would look like this:

: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : ......
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||

It would be about the size of a medium sized midi controller and cost very little. Very Simple.

A man can dream can't he?

Damn right! I'd love one of these too.

[JohnDavisNYC]

Joel makes a great point... about automation being around as long as any of us have been recording.... I guess that for me, since the options when I started recording were pretty limited, I didn't get to use a console with automation for a long time...

for me, I guess it depends on the music.... like Joel said about mixing the Dub Trio record, it is really great in certain styles of music to have a live organic feel to the mix, that is different everytime (slightly). but then again, it is nice sometimes to be able to just draw in that breakpoint automation for that one note that is kinda played too hard, without having to remember a 3db move on the 4th chorus when the drums stop and the L rhythm guitar hits the down beat a little too hard....

Joel's post made me think and remember that it is easy to be too nostalgic about limitations. I will always mix on an analog console, as long as I am recording and mixing music, BUT, I will also probably always automate within Logic if I am dealing with music that requires that level of micro-managment...

I will say, however, that some of my favourite mixes that I have done have been manual, mixing off 2".

bla.

john

[joel hamilton]

John, I hear you on the ease of automating with a computer based system. I love it. That is why I mix on a console, and just use PTHD as a really smart tape machine.
I think when this question comes around, it is easy to forget that using ITB automation to send out a hardware output to a tape echo is totally, completely awesome. Or automating spring verbs to really get things "glowing" during the chorus, but with a killer repeatability that leaves my hands free for other, more expressive rides (if need be). Micromanaging every parameter of every second of every plugin is not mixing to me... but having the ability to do so certainly does not get in the way of making good choices and using my ears!

The combination of uptown moving fader/mute automation and protools is pretty insane amounts of power... and if I use that "power" to just remember moves I would have made with my hand anyway, I dont have to stress during the print to the 2trk, ya know? same move, or decision to move, by me, just being executed by a machine.

Make the robots do your bidding, ladies and gentlemen, and the robots will sound just like YOU!

[Andy Peters]

I wish someone would make a stupidly simple control surface with just banks of faders and transport controls. Nothing else. I do not mind using the mouse for everything else.

I just want 24 motorized faders and a master stereo fader, pan, Transport, and maybe solo and mutes. NO screens, banks, or anything else.

It would look like this:

: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : ......
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||

It would be about the size of a medium sized midi controller and cost very little. Very Simple.

Aye, there's the rub.

-a

[KFledman]

ok, maybe not a great story because i can't remember all the details, but I was assistant engineer on two John Cale albums mixed by Martin Brass in the mid-90s on a classic Neve console at a place called Big House in NYC. We eventually got automation for the board, but didn't have it at this point.....anyway, each piece turned out to be something like 45 to 60 minutes each and for some reason [perhaps because we didn't have any protools set up and were mixing to DAT] we were doing the mixes in one take....so, there we were, the three of us, hunched over the console and trying to make all our moves when they needed to be done.....eventually, somehow we made it through the whole piece for each album and the things got released. I didn't get a credit, but I do think I got a backache....

[drumsound]

Another thing that's nice about automation is if you mix to analog tape you can listen to repro head and see if you need to make adjustments based on what the tape is adding or subtracting from the sound.

[JASIII]

A while back I bought a Tascam 2400 control surface (now discontinued) which is almost just 24 faders and transport controls. It works pretty nicely.

Once I'm fully wired, I will be mixing using my console...I can't wait. A Group Mix Story-Hmmm, I've done very minor group mixing and while it's fun nothing really sticks out to me as that interesting. However, several times we all went out for a group of mix drinks afterward.

Tom

I have that same control surface (Tascam US2400) and I think it is the closest thing to the much sought after device people are wishing for in this thread. My only complaint with it is that I don't think I can assign unused faders to control my bus faders in Sonar (maybe it's possible and I just don't know how).

[trodden]

its shoulder to shoulder on the soundtracs at my place... funny thing on the last project, my girl got really great with being my automation helper for a few songs, and when doing a remix, i had the band around and instructed them what to turn, when to do it, post it notes with times written down, masking tape over the aux's NOT to turn, etc... and they just couldn't focus enough... hahah, told them to go get lunch and we'll take another stab... hollar at my lady to come down, we get the mix first time through...

it is fun when you get everyone in the room active on the mix. I'd rather have that than everyone just shuffling through magazines, staring at the back of my head and being complete BORED out of their minds.

[Slider]

I also remember the shitty monitor mixes, recalls!!!, channels dying and being removed in the middle of working, insane messes of patch cables...
But hey, they were good days none the less.

[DGoody]

I'm with Joel...... I still mix on a desk, and will till the day I go deaf. PT is a very smart tape machine, and quite honestly, is far superior (regarding automation) than any old VCA automation like Uptown, etc..... In fact, it probably kills all OTB console automation.....

There is though, nothing like sticking my finger on a fader and riding it differently for each version of a mix, or clamping my hand on the feedback knob of a Klempt Echolette, blah blah blah.....

I do fondly remember doing a mix with a band called Nova Social, in '98 or so..... we had the console totally full, and machines locked. No automation....... four of us had hands in different places of the control room doing various things as we printed. It was fun..... laborous, but fun. When we fucked up, we laughed, then did it again. Now, if I fuck up, I laugh with my good buddy Pro Tools, and we move on.

Ah, the glory days.....

[roscoenyc]

this is sorta related.....
back in the '90's when there were a lot of "Jr A&R Men" meddling in records...most likely had been to some kind of Jr College Music Business class or something.... They were asking for all these mixes...Vocal Up 1, Vocal up 2, Vocal Down, Solo Up....bla bla bla... really the kind of stuff that a competent Mastering Engineer could finesse from a good mix...

Any damn way, Time just doesn't allow you to do all of that stuff especially on a $20K record. Especially w no automation. I started just writing all of that stuff on the mix tape boxes
Final
Vocal Up 1
Vocal Up 2
Vocal Down
Solo Up

Jr A & R Man never noticed there was only one mix...cause he saw it all written in RED SHarpie!

"Which one did you use?"

"Vocal Up 1"

"Great"