[geezer]

....Yeah, back in the days when I had my truck up and running with the 600B, 2 inch and Dolby SR (early 90s), my famous younger brother (Paul R. Smith) had been invited by a major studio musician to record his band at a newly renovated studio on music row in Nashville......He brought the tapes up to the truck for a listen and quick mix kind of thing......Classic Neve console, well constructed rooms in the current design mode, etc.

I have to say that the tracks, although they had a certain kind of big time flavor, were not particularly good sounding to my ears at the time, and several had some pretty good hum on them. What was that all about? I think it was probably: a)maintenance issues on the big board b)doing things the "way they were done" instead of the way they sounded best c)low attention paid to essentially a non-paying client inside of that very busy atmosphere d)recording with a very particular set of effects and eqs planned for use later at mix time.

When I built my truck, I made it multitrack only as an afterthought. I had come up in the live sound and NPR school of mixing to 2 track, and all of the truck was designed that way.....Perhaps it was a little arrogant and foolhardy, but the idea was to get it right the first time. I printed any eq and compression (didn't use much then) I used live right to the multitrack, and I did not have a way to mix back from the tape live. The original notion was that the tracks were only going to be usable if I could get a decent live mix.......The multitrack tape was so expensive at that point that most of my public radio client base couldn't have afforded to pay for it anyway.

Even though this put me in the pretty precarious position of not really knowing how my tracks sounded until after the fact, I tended to get praise for the sound of the tracks when they went out to other studios, even though recorded through a mid-level Soundcraft......I think my sort of classical use of eq made up for the less dynamic and bandwidth capabilities of the Soundcraft compared to the Neves, etc......Plus, I had spent some money and time having one of the old school NPR design engineers build me a balanced, carefully level matched set of direct out amps for the board.

I had not really done any serious multitrack work when I started that series of Blues Alley albums (other than 8 track work at a couple of friends studios). It was a pretty big shocker when I tried to get the mix of the first set of tapes to sound as good as my live mix....with the obvious goal of sounding better in the end, of course. It was not only an issue of hearing the alterred sound off of tape, but also me being removed from the live situation....A real eye opener. It probably took me a week to get to that point with the first tune on the first of those 5 or 6 albums.. ...Over time, I have always added the things I learned in the multitrack mixing back into the live mix, however, so some of it was certainly just gaining new skills on my part.

The other thing going on here, though, is probably the slightly mid-level state of the Soundcraft as a summing mixer.....In other words, the direct out amps I had built were really tweaked, and all happened before anything entered the stereo buss....so when the tracks hit the tape, they were pretty darn optimized sonically....when they came back though all the gain stages and the stereo buss, they were probably slightly degraded compared to the world of API and Neve.....who knows, but it was all a major learning experience for me.

Even in that relatively simple set-up with that relatively simple console, I did have maintenance issues with the 600B which nearly put me out of business a couple of times, and definitely degraded one of the albums in that Blues Alley series. My operation did not have a lot of financial headroom, so this was a very big deal indeed.......My general impression has been that the maintenance issues tend to become more frequent and more expensive as the complexity and retail price of the console goes up. The brand new 8000GB SSL we had at BET (a broadcast version of the 4000) had constant little issues, and SSL wanted $12,000 a year to maintain it. I always though that was a good deal for BET, but they did not go for it, and paid the price in console down time.....When I have gone into lower budget studios that have picked up vintage consoles inexpensively, there is almost always a relatively serious maintenance issue that crops up.

I have since gone to monitoring and mixing off tape, etc., for all the obvious reasons.....This really did not work so well with the 02R, but the 02R was fabulous for mixing the tracks I recorded (digitally, starting with DA88s) on the Soundcraft. The first day I had the 02R, my multitrack mixes suddenly sounded bigger and more pro.....I am sure most of this was 1)The fabulous automation, and 2)suddenly having 50 compressors available......

The DM2000 works really well in "big time" mode for mixing off tape, and has a lot of the same kind of analogue depth as the big time analogue consoles, so I guess, after swallowing the credit card debt, I'm in a pretty good place now. It is certainly a more powerful console in most ways than the big, bad analogue boys, and requires virtually no maintenance. With all that power comes some complexity that doesn't always make things easier, though, and I guess that is what started me down this whole path of thought.....

I'm not really nostalgic for the analogue days, just trying to figure out logically if I have lost anything since then, and if so, how I can get it back without losing the new stuff I have......I'm an old man, and I get a little confused about this stuff from time to time......Just mining memories to see if I can clear my head a bit.