At a meal with the Expert’s team last week we all commented on the menu. It was presented on an iPad, which should have been a sign because the issue was that it was too long. This is a red flag for a few of us. It’s often said that there’s a correlation between the brevity of the menu and the quality of the restaurant. The thing about endless choices is that sometimes those choices are helpful. But only sometimes. Sometimes too much choice is counterproductive.
In the analogue days, these choices were limited by the practicalities of hardware design and more significantly the best gear stays in our available list of options because it worked. Lots of old gear has disappeared because it wasn’t as good as the stuff which did stay around. Much like old music, bad stuff gets forgotten.
So the premise here is being presented with a few good choices can be more conducive to good work than having thousands of choices. With that in mind, here are some examples…
Vintage EQs
The Pultec EQP1A is a great place to start because it presents so few choices. What it’s presenting to most of us most of the time is a choice between making the top end sound awesome, the bottom end sound awesome, or both?
Just mixing with Pultec plugins is something that might be fun to try but it would be an extreme position to take (and historically at odds with how real Pultecs were used, if that matters). The same can’t be said of Neve channel EQs and their fixed frequency choices. This is a reflection of the design of the EQ circuit, they are this way because it was the most practical way to do it at the time. However, these frequencies were chosen carefully, in consultation with studio engineers and because of that, this limited set of choices are a limited set of good choices. It’s not a coincidence that the six fixed midrange frequencies remain effectively unchanged from the 1073 all the way through to the 33102.
Presenting a limited set of choices doesn’t have to be limiting though. If we’re interested in removing clutter (and the implied suggestion that you should be using all those features) for an excellent example of almost limitless facilities and a very stripped down interface look no further than FabFilter’s wonderful Pro-Q3. A plugin that conceals its depth behind one of the best-designed user interfaces out there.
LA2A
When it comes to compression there is a temptation to dive deep. While compression can have a profound effect on source material, there are still a great many sounds which just need a bit of firming up. Some compressors invite experimentation. I can’t leave an 1176 alone, those “what if I just…” moments happen a lot and I’m worse with a Distressor. With something like a DBX160 however, I tend to find the lack of choices help get the job done and I can be onto the next thing without that nagging curiosity about whether I’ve missed something.
The ultimate expression of this has to be the LA2A. The choice available is effectively “how much compression?”. That’s it. One knob compressors have existed for a long time but there’s something reassuring about using a plugin version of such a studio stalwart. “If it was good enough for X then it’s good enough for me” is an excellent answer to mix prevarication. It’s not suitable for everything, but it works on more things than it doesn’t.
LCR Panning
It was in conversation with William Wittman that I finally gave in and tried LCR panning. The story behind it is interesting because stereo recording was invented before the pan pot was, and as a result, many early recording consoles had switches that allowed routing to the left, the right or both at the same time.
This stark choice sounds more restrictive than it is in practice. Revisiting a mix after my conversation with William I saw his point. Big, obvious stereo placement really works. I’m conflicted overextending this approach to drums as while I approve of mono drums in theory, in practice I’m not convinced, but super-wide drums feel a step too far for me, and what would you do about the toms? However, when dealing with guitars, keys, vocals, bass, BVs, percussion, in fact, everything apart from drums, I’m becoming a convert.
For stereo mixing, keeping panning choices blatant is a valid choice, and if you have one of three positions it certainly speeds things up.
Console Shapers
I find the idea of tape emulation plugins and using the same channel strip plugins across a whole mix appealing but in truth, I’m too much of a tinkerer to stay with the concept. While breaking a self-imposed rule, and one which is rather arbitrary, isn’t the end of the world, it only gets abandoned because the means to do it are right there. This is why I like software emulations that exist as part of the mixer in the DAW. HEAT in Pro Tools, Console Shaper in Studio One and the Neve and API summing built into LUNA are all examples of this deeper integration and while the results are impressive, the best thing about them from my perspective is that they are consistent and they are global. Global Drive and Color and you’re done. You can bypass HEAT on individual channels but that’s about it. Less choice, faster mix.
Bouncing?
With my references to vintage hardware it might look like I’m suggesting that old equals good. That’s not my intention but if it were it wouldn’t be off topic to suggest that committing decisions to ‘tape’ is desirable.
While it might work for some, I’ve never been convinced by this. For those old enough to have experienced it when it was a necessity, bouncing tracks internally in a tape machine to free up tracks is the ultimate in committing ideas. I remember profound frustration at decisions made in haste when freeing up tracks for overdubs. I’d never want to go back there again!
However, the options gained from having a reduced number of tracks to balance when mixing presented by bounced tracks did focus the attention on the big picture because it was the only picture available. Reducing the number of tracks you have to deal with at mixdown through the use of VCAs is such common practice that it’s hardly suggesting something new to highlight their use. But I do think it’s worth suggesting taking their use further than many do in an effort to focus on a mix at the very top level.
When mixing, I often reduce my choices to 3 or 4 faders. Vocals, track and effects can be useful. With VCAs, it is easy to spill out the contents but being able to quickly get back to the ‘top-level’ and concentrate on what’s really important can help mixes avoid endless tweaking.
If the best mixes are done quickly, and in my experience they often are, limiting your choices is a way to focus on what’s important rather than being distracted by what’s available without reference to whether it’s actually important.
An interesting illustration of the point being made here is iZotope’s Ozone. This is an unashamedly modern piece of software. The processes on offer are at the bleeding edge of what’s possible but a few years ago they introduced a Vintage EQ to complement the ultra-flexible Equalizer module. The Vintage EQ module features fixed frequencies.
Are all the choices offered in your tools helpful?