Dub Mixing

[didi]

First of all this is production not Dj mixing.

I'm really getting into live dub mixing. It allows you to be seriously creative, and views on playing the mixer like an instrument are revolutionary.

Its a lot of fun writing a 16 bar reggae loop switching on a recorder, and then, through muting different channels to create intros, breakdowns, putting snares through sends with delays reverbs etc., you can watch a five minute, interesting, diverse dub track being born.

Post tips, stories, etc. here.


P.s. Really quite interesting link below
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul07/a ... mixing.htm

[Hircine]

First of all this is production not Dj mixing.

I'm really getting into live dub mixing. It allows you to be seriously creative, and views on playing the mixer like an instrument are revolutionary.

Its a lot of fun writing a 16 bar reggae loop switching on a recorder, and then, through muting different channels to create intros, breakdowns, putting snares through sends with delays reverbs etc., you can watch a five minute, interesting, diverse dub track being born.

Post tips, stories, etc. here.


P.s. Really quite interesting link below
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul07/a ... mixing.htm

I produce dub, mostly. The way i do it is get the chorus / main part ready and subtract from that. It's usually a 8 bar trumpet melody, 4 bar drum pattern, 2 guitar chords, 8 bar bassline and the bubble organ / chopping guitar. Just layer all that. From there, just subtract things in a way that the track builds up for the central loop. Echo verbs / delays on the snare, maybe guitar rig with some delay / flanger / phaser for the guitar, bit of delay on the organ to get the shuffle bubble thing going, maybe chop the bass pattern and take bits out of it. The hardest part is putting 8 ~ 16 loop together and mix it down. The rest is pure automation / fx business. If you got a mixer with enough channels, it would work great, if not, just get ableton + launchpad or a maschine setup and loop the bars. And I also fire some Mini 700 analog fx samples in the breakdowns and transitions.

[didi]

Relevant video of Scientist, a King Tubby apprentice, playing the mixer at the Red Bull studios.

[wormcode]

This is the way I've always worked too, in all genres.
I really miss having access to full mixing consoles, but moving around a lot does not permit such huge expensive things.

The Akai MPD32 is what I use mostly now along with a BCF2000 which is the best "MIDI mixer" in the price range that also supports total recall with motorized faders and support for Mackie Control.

The Fadermasters are also very very good alternatives to consoles and also motorized, but get pricey too: http://www.jlcooper.com/_php/product.php?prod=fmp

[Hircine]

I never understood that pulldown fader freeze fx thing, how does it work? Or is it just the tail of the sound?

[didi]

@wormcode that's wicked mate, I have occassional access (once a week for about an hour) to a studio that has a mixing desk in the same league as the RBMA one, but the audio engineer gets quite anal about use (as I'd probably be about such an amazing piece of kit).

@hircine I don't know, maybe you can assign send levels to various faders, as well as channel volumes.

[wormcode]

@wormcode that's wicked mate, I have occassional access (once a week for about an hour) to a studio that has a mixing desk in the same league as the RBMA one, but the audio engineer gets quite anal about use (as I'd probably be about such an amazing piece of kit).

@hircine I don't know, maybe you can assign send levels to various faders, as well as channel volumes.

Used to use a Ghost, and older Mackie. The famous dnb consoles used by quite a few old school guys. I liked the British-style Soundcraft, nice bang for the buck. They were about 7k at the time, can probably pick one up for half these days. The preamps and all that were good, but not in the same league as the high end 30k desks of course. Still, for most uses it was great. The cheaper Spirit desks were also decent, lots of dnb guys used those as well, pretty solid mixers. I see those for well under 1k.



They are just too big though, and once I lost my actual studio space those went too. I would love to get a smaller one, but I was already finding myself mixing more and more ITB and only using the consoles to clip stuff, and as an effect really so I'm not sure if I would even use it now. Maybe invest in analogue filter and valve saturation instead, and continue to use MIDI controllers as mixers. I have moved more toward tape saturation these days though.

The Fadermasters and BCF2000s can also be linked up. As cheap as it is, the BCF is probably Behringer's best piece of kit they've made. Here's 3 linked. He is killing the motors, but for the price so what lol.



I have tried the Novation Zero, but honestly did not like it. It has some cool features, and I did like the knobs and LCD readouts. It works instantly with all NI plugins, and many others. It just felt and looked toyish though and the lack of motors/total recall and higher price didn't seem worth it. Plus it looks really tacky imo.




The M-Audio ProjectMix I/O is somewhere between them all. It's motorized, but pricier at over 1k, but mostly because it is also an audio interface. I would be interested if they released one without the audio interface for half the price.

[Depone]

one of the most standardised control surface and the most popular is the Mackie Control. Its what most of these units were influenced by. The behringer even has to work in mackie emulation mode.

Its got a button for pretty much everything, opening plugins, zooming, scrubbing and of course those knobs at the top are context sensitive, so when you boot your logic eq, the knobs change to frequency/gain etc...

[wormcode]

Yeah the Control is good. I was waiting for the Universal Control Pro to come out, and got a BCF in the meantime and just never ended up upgrading to the Mackie. I hear great things about it though. The older Mackie Controls dropped in price since the Universal came out a while back, been looking on Ebay every now and then for them.
The older ones have some fader issues that were fixed recently.

They came out with some nice upgrades too http://www.mackie.com/products/mcupro/splash.html