Recording - August 2016 - 52

By Paul J. Stamler

Part 20: Mixing
For the last several months we've been talking about the mechanics of digital recording, DAWs, etc. This month I'm going to get a little more abstract,
because I want to say some things about mixing, and that's a pretty abstract
and subjective topic. Not completely abstract; I'll start by talking about the
tools used for mixing-the mechanical devices that we use to achieve a mix,
and their software equivalents.
In a way, mixing is a microcosm of everything we do when we're recording audio. Every time we make a recording, or mess with it in a DAW or on
a hardware console, we have aesthetic goals in mind; we want the listener to
experience it in a certain way. Almost inevitably, we use technical means to
achieve those aesthetic ends, and it could be argued that this has been the
central modus operandi of audio engineers, ever since they first positioned

has recorded, just like it follows lines drawn
using the mouse (see the DAWs II article, June
2016). What's great about this is that you can
go back and edit the first draft of your mix; if,
for example, you want to bring up the voice a
little more in the second verse, you can go into
the DAW and tweak the lines with your mouse.
Or you can do the updated moves on the control surface.
A fader can also control the level of more
than one channel. We'll talk about that in a
moment when we talk about Groups. But first...

musicians around a metal horn that drove a disc or cylinder cutter. It's the
nature of the sound-recording beast, just as it is for the photographer, the
instrument maker, or for that matter the performing musician-technical means
to achieve aesthetic ends.
Back to the subject: what are the mechanical or virtual devices that we use
to make a mix?
Tools of the trade
First and foremost are the faders on the console (or virtual console) that we
adjust to bring elements up or down-more bass, less banjo, or more cowbell. That seems pretty obvious, but even here there are subtleties.
In the first place, will we push the faders up and down to ride the levels of
particular tracks? In the DAW articles I talked about mechanizing this
process by drawing lines on the display that move the faders up and down.
Often, if you're mixing inside the DAW, this is easier to do than grabbing
each fader with your mouse and moving it as the song progresses. But
there's another possible tack.
In the last several years manufacturers have introduced a variety of control
surfaces. These are hardware devices which look an awful lot like mixing
consoles, but no actual audio goes through them. Instead, Fader 1 on the
control surface moves Fader 1 in the DAW, Fader 2 moves Fader 2, et
cetera. As a side note: the fancy hardware mixing board in our university's
Studio A can function as a hardware console-which is how I used it for the
Ottoman Underground session-or as a control surface for the virtual console in Pro Tools. When it was being installed and the company technician
was demonstrating this feature, I remember remarking that the console, in
this mode, was emulating a DAW, which in turn was emulating a console.
He had the grace to laugh.
A control surface can be used to do the DAW mix in real time. Or you
can program the DAW to record the fader moves that the surface is generating; when you go back to do the actual mix, the DAW follows the lines it
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RECORDING AUGUST 2016

Pipes of Pan
You all know about panpots. A panpot steers
the output of a single track to someplace in the
stereo image-it might be hard left, centered,
hard right, or anyplace in between. It does this
by varying the amount of signal from that track
that's fed to the two stereo output channels, and
we call the result panpot stereo or intensity
stereo. This qualifies for the comment, "Well,
duh!", and you may now say that to yourself.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - August 2016