Fueled by suitable amounts of plonk, I had one of those "current state of recording" conversations last night. Our group consisted of a couple of old farts like me, and some young guns carving out their position in the business.
The conversations turned to choices and decisions. Choices of what techniques, equipment, plug-ins, outboard gear used in recording and mixing in 2009, and when decisions are made in the recording process.
Choices
In the age of 4 to 24 track rock recording, typically the choices were limited. For compression and limiting, there were 1176, LA-2, LA-3, maybe a Fairchild and some A&D's. There weren't that many of them either, so the tendency was to get it more or less right when the tracks were recorded, and to apply mix processing more sparingly because (a) it wasn't necessary on every track and (b) the number and type of units in the racks was limited. Of course, the channel strips often had dynamics and EQ, but even so the choices were not extensive.
Reverb options were even more scarce. A natural echo chamber. Maybe a couple of EMT plates, an AKG box, and perhaps a 250, (in the fancier rooms) and some actual tape delay with a 7" spool hung off the side of a 1/4" machine with vari-speed. Lexicon came along a bit later. We'd often pump something out into monitors in the live room or hallways and route it back to add room ambiance. So when using reverb, there may be a bit of chamber, some plate and maybe something else for a spot effect, and some delay. That's it. One of my young gun friends talked about a recent mix where he used (he tried to list them all) 22 (!) different types of reverb/delays. When asked why, he spoke of creating different spaces for different elements, but he also admitted that these subtleties often disappeared in the mix and and he found himself turning returns down at the final stages of the mix.
For rock recording, at least, maybe there is some value in cutting down on the amount and types of processing used, and instead considering using fewer electronically created spaces to achieve a more cohesive staging.
Decisions
Recording with a limited number of tracks made us make decisions early in the process. If you didn't have some plan in the recording session, you could run out of tracks. So you had to know what you were doing, what was left to record and allocate, and bounce down tracks accordingly. And you couldn't change your mind. If you didn't plan, you created a mess which made mixing more complex, and remember that through much of this early period, there was little or no automation and, until SSL came along, no on-the-fly processing changes.
So shakers appeared on guitar solo tracks, pianos popped in and out on vocal tracks and the inevitable extra bits of fairy dust were dropped in on whichever tracks had space. So often we had to mix in sections, and cut up the tape. Looking back at this time, it had its advantages and drawbacks. The music was king, and the options were fewer.
We were stuck with these decisions, which could make the whole process more spontaneous somehow. On the other hand, it was a pain in the ass and many of these decisions made at the time may have been wrong. But did they result in an inferior end result? Technically, maybe. Musically, maybe not.
Even now, with a high-end DAW, I find that old habits stick. I tidy stuff up. I create sub mixes of each essential group of tracks, so once the mix is ready to print, I'm often only dealing with a limited number of sub mixes which I can route out to an analog board and mix 'live,' or automate within the DAW. And I'll still bounce down sections to disk, with processing, and hide the original tracks.
