#196 - 24th October 2024 - StudioSzene Day 3

This day was about analog snobbery.

As part of the „insights“ ticket for StudioSzene, we were able to join Moritz Enders who walked a small group of people through his mixing process „of the old days“ on a SSL4000 E series console.

In Hamburg‘s „Home Studio“, Moritz showcased The Intersphere - Wanderer:

Takeaways?

• Great musicians make for great recordings 🙄 but seriously, the playing is a absolutely top notch, especially the drumming, and…
• …great recordings are easier to mix 🙄
• Having a console, and particularly the recall workflow figured out, can be a super fast, efficient and fun way to make mixing decisions. Moritz says he does ~250 mixes p.a. That‘s immense. Without looking at a screen all day!
• The workflow works great when the overall production process is a bit old school with clearer borders between writing, arranging, recording, producing, mixing and mastering. Also according to Moritz, modern pop productions are blurry between those lines. And if the production cannot easily be bounced in a few dozen tracks because of complex routings, going OTB to the console can be quite cumbersome and therefore perhaps not worth it? Also because a modern producer does a lot of mixing and FX already anyway. Similarly, Moritz masters as part of his mixing as it seems obvious to apply stereo processing if - like him - one is already OTB and owns the hardware units anyway.
• Does it sound better? I don‘t know. Better than what? It sounds great and feels right for him. What else is there to know?

And then I got to “mix“ with one of the brand new Harrison consoles. Whatever that means. I moved some faders, played with the EQ, drove the input w/o much effect compared to my BigSix. But it felt great and is damn pretty. I would have needed more channels though. And that console is already 50k EUR. yussuf christ!

When I was back at the convention center, I listened to a quick demo of SPL equipment that could not hit my taste. But that was a matter of setup. How the machines brought dimension to a relatively flat mix on a terrible set of headphones was quite impressive.

Lastly, a guy who mixes radio rock and emo schlager pop rock showed some of his tricks to make stiff ITB sounds more interesting, mainly through layering. Tips were good, music was…aweful I‘m afraid.

I missed one master class while I was at Home Studio: Julia Borelli on mixing Richie Hawtin. Folks who were there liked it a lot but also added she was mainly applying the Jaycen Joshua mix template which made me google again, stumble across god‘s particle vst and eager to do some demo‘ing now. Damn.