by Roger Nichols
There is no reason to continue living. I saw the enemy and it is me. I can never go back to mixing on an analog console ever again. Last month I mixed an entire album on the AMS/Neve Capricorn digital console at Chung King Studios in New York. This month I got to mix an entire album on the Sony Oxford digital console. I already tossed my analog console over the cliff by my house. If it wasn't for my Yamaha 02R and 03D, I would have forgotten to let go and gone over with it. Working with digital consoles is like flying IFR. Once you get over the initial learning curve and check ride, life is so much better.
Wherefore Art Thy Oxford?
The Sony Oxford console I used is located at the new Ocean Way Nashville studios. Alan Sides decided to attack the studio scene in Nashville in a big way. The site was an old church that has been a Nashville landmark for many years, first as a Presbyterian church, then as Tony Alamo's Nashville headquarters.
The studio complex consists of three rooms. Studio A sports the largest discrete Neve console in the world in a 25'x32' control room. It is basically two Neve 8078 consoles glued together to get 80 inputs.. The studio supplies the client with walkie-talkies and binoculars so you can communicate with the producer at the other end of the console. The recording room is 50'x75'x30'h with four 15'x18'x20'h iso booths.
Studio B is the Oxford room. A 30'x34' control room with a 30'x40' recording room. The Oxford as fitted at Ocean Way is 120 inputs.
The Sony Oxford console consists of two identical control surfaces with a center master control section sandwiched between them. On the left and right console sections, you can call up any group of 24 channels to view and modify. There can be up to ten groups totaling 240 inputs. You can display 1-24 on the left side and 25-48 on the right side, or the same group of channels can be displayed on both sides at the same time. Two producers can actually ride the same vocal at the same time. One guy can be boosting the level while the other guy is lowering the level. The automation mathematically adds the two moves together and the results get stored as the resultant move. You may laugh, but I could have used that feature many times in the past 30 years.
There are seven color LCD display screens for menus, waveform displays and parameter selection. It works like a Mac with multiple monitors. Just scroll the mouse pointer to the one you want and click. Any monitor can display any parameter screen so you can have all of them looking at the same EQ curve.
Most of the knobs and switches on the console had LED displays next to them for software configuration. Each knobs function depends on the mode you are in. The knobs provided 1000 steps per revolution with the LED pointer in the moving part of the knob. It looked and felt like you were actually doing something when you just barely turned the knob. With the LED indication in the surrounding panel, nothing happens until the move is sufficient for the display to jump to the next segment.
The linear faders are not the P&G faders that everyone has come to expect with moving faders. These are custom made for the Oxford console and utilize a direct coupled linear motor instead of a rotary motor and string to position the fader. They are fast and accurate without overshoot. You can be 20dB below the unity gain point and still make moves of a tenth of a dB if you want to.
Of course, you could connect digital outboard gear directly. I used the Lexicon 480 provided by the studio, but I also brought along a Lexicon MPX-1, a Roland 880 reverb, a TC electronics M-5000 with two engines, a TC electronics Finalizer, and a Valley Audio Dynamap 730 digital limiter. It was easier than plugging in analog gear, because there was no balanced audio or ground loop hums to deal with, and I knew that the outboard gear I brought would be the same level and sound exactly the same as they did when plugged into any digital console.
Digital vs. Analog, still
I LOVE digital. I like the way digital recordings sound. I like the way digital consoles do nothing of their own to the sound; only what I want them to do. The instruments sound so open and nice that it is almost beyond belief. The attacks of a piano, the mouth watering highs of a shaker or tambourine, the sweet overtones of an acoustic guitar, and the vocal that sounds like it is right there in the room with you. That is what I like about digital recording and mixing.
If you want an instrument to sound smooth and warm, then it is easy to do. If you want it to sound raw and edgy, then that is just as easy. If you like using analog outboard gear, then you can do that too. There are plenty of high quality converters to get the analog audio in and out.
I realized from the Capricorn sessions that digital mixes shine when pumping 48 tracks of rocking bass, stabbing horns and mellow 40 piece string sections through all of the bit crunching, but what about minimal acoustic tracks? The Oxford mixes were recorded on the Sony 3348 48 track digital machine, but sometimes I used only two tracks for acoustic guitar and vocal. I never used more than 18 tracks. The results of even the guitar/vocal mixes were head and shoulders above the analog console mixes I did before we got to Nashville.
Next Month
So now I have mixed albums on the AT&T Disq digital console, the
AMS/Neve Capricorn, and the Sony Oxford. For next month I am mixing an entire
album on the Yamaha 02R fed by ADATs and Pro Tools. Stay tuned.