Mixing

I was sitting at the mixing board today, going over some of the tunes we've been working on. Right now I'm using a Tascam 2488 24-track (that's the 24 in 2488, I guess) hard-disc recorder (uh, what's the 88 about?). So, you make a sound (drums, voice, whatever), and then a microphone picks it up, converts it into electrical energy, that moves down the wire into the mic pre-amp on the back of the 2488, where it's amplified, and the amplified signal is converted to digital information by an analog/digital converter. Blah, blah, blah.

But what I want to talk about is mixing. Because the more I record, the less I want to dick around with frequencies and levels. I used to crave perfect control, 4 band parametric eq's, the ability to pinpoint each sounds essentialities and cut down on the noise. And with digital, you can really do whatever you want. Once the information is digital, there isn't the problem of having the greatest mixing board, because eq becomes a simple math problem, and the 2488 is pretty much a math machine. And I've used the eq to fit 10 guitars into stereo sound, to squeeze a voice between them, but I'm just not fantastically interested in doing that this time around. I'm getting the feeling that an honest record should have so little eq, that the arrangement of instruments should have no extra noise to filter out, that it should just sound like it would if you were in the room when we recorded it. It's not like in person someone would say, "you know, the high end snare sound is really getting in the way of the vocals".

I started making multi-track recordings on a karaoke machine -- it had a double cassette deck, so you could record yourself singing over your karaoke tapes, I guess. But, I could record a guitar track, and then switch the tapes and record a voice over that, and then switch the tapes again and add drums. Voila! Multi-track recording. But I couldn't mix, of course, I couldn't eq or adjust levels. That's actually how John Lennon recorded Revolution 9, one of the most hated songs in popular music history -- using simple tape over-dubs.

What the hell is this post about?

I don't know.

It's late.

I'm trying to keep up writing.

I'm using a minimalist mixing approach.

Would that my blogging be the same.

Anyway, I'm not begrudging my newly found ability to manipulate and mesh sounds -- the 2488 has really helped me out. I'm just finding that with this record, I'd almost rather record on a karaoke machine -- remove the temptation.

Jay.

P.S. The above 2488 was yet another final piece in the studio puzzle.