I'm using too much crap

[Paulo]

[stoman]

Depends ...

The Steinberg on-board plugins are good enough for beginners, but they cannot compete with any quality plugin.

I would never be able to do with Steinberg plugins what I can do with Softube FET, Flux Alchemist, elysia alpha, Lexicon PCM Bundle, MeldaProduction AutoDynamicEQ, Voxengo Elephant, SPL Transient Designer, etc.

Regards,
  Steffen

[Paulo]

That's what I want to see 

[CosmicDolphin]

The Steinberg on-board plugins are good enough for beginners, but they cannot compete with any quality plugin.

I would never be able to do with Steinberg plugins what I can do with Softube FET, Flux Alchemist, elysia alpha, Lexicon PCM Bundle, MeldaProduction AutoDynamicEQ, Voxengo Elephant, SPL Transient Designer, etc.

Ahh but do the expensive plugins make you a better mixer ?

[stoman]

Ahh but do the expensive plugins make you a better mixer ?

Certainly not. But with them I can - no doubt - do better what I can do.

You should know that yourself, Mark - the more we know the more tools we want to have to apply our knowledge.

I've heard mixes by pros using onboard gear. Well - they were good, solid mixes, but not great. Listen to some of the mixes by Mike Senior, and you'll see what I mean. You can quite clearly hear the difference even with deaf ears like mine.

Regards,
  Steffen

 

[CosmicDolphin]

Ahh but do the expensive plugins make you a better mixer ?

Certainly not. But with them I can - no doubt - do better what I can do.

You should know that yourself, Mark - the more we know the more tools we want to have to apply our knowledge.

I've heard mixes by pros using onboard gear. Well - they were good, solid mixes, but not great. Listen to some of the mixes by Mike Senior, and you'll see what I mean. You can quite clearly hear the difference even with deaf ears like mine.

Regards,
  Steffen

 

Mike often goes for the bundled or free plugins...not always...but his mixes always sound excellent.

CD

[stoman]

Sorry, that I have to disagree, Mark. Yes, he often does a great job, and he certainly knows what he does - but I have heard many mixes by him where I thought the original mix was a lot better.

The promotion video on Amazon, e.g. - have you listened to the before-after comparisons there? They ALL sound like crap to me. Completely broken, whereas most of the original mixes where pretty nice.

Matter of taste, I guess. But the Amazon video is also of a bad sound quality in general, so his over-processing is brought out very clearly there.

Regards,
  Steffen

[CosmicDolphin]

I can't even see a promotional video on Amazon ??

Though I quite often download the files from the SOS website that go with the article.

He's a real helpful guy too , I keep asking him questions and he always emails back    Even sent me his address so I could send him a CD.

[Paulo]

I'm no mixer  but I agree with Mark... No matter what I use it always sounds like crap so I prefer to have a fast system to do my crap, lol...

The onboard reverbs, delays and modulation efects, are enough for me... The compressors and eq's I use the one from liquid mix... Even if I had top notch equipment, I don't think I'd be using it better than with what I've got.

[CosmicDolphin]

The promotion video on Amazon, e.g. - have you listened to the before-after comparisons there? They ALL sound like crap to me. Completely broken, whereas most of the original mixes where pretty nice.

I found it - It's on German Amazon not the British one.

The sound is bloody awful on that video , I've got the originals of some of those and when you hear them properly there's a massive improvement, and they also expose the poor quality of the originals.

I've not heard one where I preferred the original. But I agree the video makes some of them sound worse.

CD

[stoman]

Apparently the video is only on the German Amazon site:
http://www.amazon.de/gp/mpd/permalink/m1QM740VGKXEMW/ref=flash_player_2_preplay

Yes, I'm sure Mike Senior is a nice guy. That's not the question.

BTW, I have his book - seriously, he does no magic at all. Everything he describes in his book is standard knowledge. I do exactly the same. What really matters IMO is the room acoustics (which in my case is still far from optimal) and the tools you have at hand once you know how to use them.

And, of course, the goal you have for a mix. I hate modern mixing styles, as you both know - and that's why I usually don't like Mike Senior's mixes. They are loud, overprocessed and simply not pleasant for my old ears. But I know young listeners want to hear it like that, so he does it for a reason, and that's ok. It's just not my style.

For delays and lots of other modulation effects you don't need anything but onboard gear (or even freeware). For reverbs you don't get far with the bundled DAW plugins though. And compressors - no way! I have yet to hear a good DAW compressor. You can sometimes use them for technical reasons, but not for sound design.

And for mastering I would be completely lost without Flux Alchemist. I don't use it on every master, of course, but sometimes you have to accomplish tasks that can't be accomplished without dedicated tools.

But that said, I do agree that many of our everyday tasks can be done with onboard gear. Just not all of them, and not as good.

Regards,
  Steffen

[CosmicDolphin]

BTW, I have his book - seriously, he does no magic at all. Everything he describes in his book is standard knowledge.

Yeah I got the Kindle version when it came out,  read it twice and gone back to various chapters when I've needed to remind myself during a mix. Not magic for sure, but very practical. I think if it were standard knowledge we wouldn't get some of the awful mixes produced in home studios.   Other mixing books I've read have been a bit too 'emotional' for want of a better word.  But I think the stuff in the book holds for whatever style of mixing you prefer, it's not specific to modern sounding mixes.

Like you say, you can read every book under the Sun and it won't make much difference if you're mixing against the room, I don't get why folks spend so much on plugins and monitors when they can't objectively evaluate what they're doing.

I'd say there's enough good Vst freebies out there that no-one could blame the tools for a bad mix.  SIR is an excellent reverb , Sonars lexicon Pantheon is good for certain things, some of the Bootsy free eq + compressors are great too. Better than my old hardware Phonic compressor for sure or the eq on my Allen & Heath Desk.  People I know with Logic all say the bundled plugs are often all they need.

I'd say most people would be better treating their acoustics and sticking with free plugins than buying expensive plugs and mixing in an enviroment that isn't letting them hear what's going on.

CD

[stoman]

I totally agree that the room should come first (along with good monitors). Then the knowledge must slowly be built up - using what the DAW has to offer. That is enough for the first three years. But once you know all your tools and how they work you discover their limits. Or you just realize that different tools of the same category work best for different situations - which is especially true for compressors.

What I do not understand though is why people throw their money at Waves. Most of their plugins are pure nonsense IMO, just made to make more money, not because anybody needs them. With few exceptions (C6 is ok, ...)

As for Mike Senior's book: I do think it is a decent book. I did not learn much from it, but I would have if I had bought it two years earlier. But like all books I've read it does not really cover any topic in depth. That's what I mean by standard knowledge. Everybody knows what delays and reverbs are for (well, at least everbody who has a couple of years of mixing practice), those are no "mixing tricks". From the book title I would have expected special treatments for special situations, i.e. something that is not just everyday work.

Of course the content of the book is not aimed at modern production techniques, that's true. I was not referring to the book but to the mixes I have heard at "mix rescue". For my taste they were all far over the top. But still his explanations of what he did and why he did it are very interesting and helpful. It's not about the quantity but about the technique itself, and everybody with some experience should be able to pick from it what he can use. 

Still, the mixes done with onboard gear sound less polished and less stable than the ones done with good equipment.

Regards,
  Steffen

[CosmicDolphin]

Still, the mixes done with onboard gear sound less polished and less stable than the ones done with good equipment.

Sounds like a challenge ! 

Here's the idea, you choose the song..we will both mix it....I  will mix it with only free or bundled plugins...you mix it with anything you choose..then we post them maybe on mixoff.org and ask for people to say which mix they like more.  We don't tell them until the end that one is using only free plugins or who mixed which one.

It would be an interesting experiment 

CD

[stoman]

I'm talking about Mike Senior's mikes, Mark!

Regards,
  Steffen