Re: Mixing Rule from Bobby Owsinksi's Book

Sean McCoy <osr-8M4tguVJAtjmgLyNmNZT/[email protected]> wrote:
>Did a session with a client today who brought his 
>portable Logic rig in for me to give him some 
>mixing pointers so he could do more work at his 
>own studio. He showed me a page in Bobby 
>Owsinksi's book, "The Mixing Engineer's 
>Handbook," that stated "Rule Number One" in 
>mixing in Logic is that all channel faders must 
>be lower than the master fader. Huh? Logic isn't 
>my principal mixing DAW, but I've used it enough 
>and am familiar enough with its architecture to 
>have serious reservations about this statement. I 
>can't for the life of me imagine how that could 
>be stated as a rule, and told my client 
>unequivocally that this wasn't true. Am I missing 
>something? Could it be this practice might have 
>made sense in an earlier version of Logic? The 
>book was published in 2006, so we are talking several releases back.

The Zeroth rule is:
If it sounds good, it is good.

With any 32bit floating point DAW (this would NOT be
using DAE/TDM, which is 48bit fixed point), it is possible
to have all the faders up high enough to distort the output
fader, but then the act of simply lowering only the output 
fader could eliminate the overload distortion. That's the nature
of "floating point" math.

However, this would not apply if some process (say, a plugin)
in the mix was not using floating point math for example and 
the distortion was happening before the summing algorithm 
(the output fader).

So Bobby's not technically correct, but it's certainly a good
rule to say that you shouldn't HAVE to lower the output fader
to avoid distortion - why not avoid it in the conventional way
(eliminate it at the source of causation).  I start all my mixes
with all faders at -10dB [except the output fader].  I just turn up the
volume to the speakers.   I find that many people attempt to get
more "ooomph" in their mixes by using fader-creep. That's when
you get to the "volume ceiling" and can't go any higher.  A simple trick
to convince yourself that the problem is NOT that everything isn't
loud enough is to increase the volume to your speakers.



f-erenc szabo,  smarty pants
                        Z+E+R+O+B+E+A+T
"NOW POWERED BY THE MIRACLE OF THE TRANSISTOR!"
        <http://home.goodmedia.com/~zerobeat>




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