Hey everyone! So many of you’ve been buying the music I’ve released this year (Thank you ALL for that!) and yes, I’ve made a few bucks through the process. Before I got to work on relaunching trance[]control I decided that all revenue from my music would go back into the project instead of spending it on coffee and pizza. So I’m now close to the point of where I feel comfortable to plan my next investment.

One of the major drawbacks of using digital only stuff inside the computer is that you’re restricted to laws of math and I find it quite tricky to get a huge 40+ track mix to not sound smudged. And the other problem is that when the mix doesn’t sound Smudged, it sounds lifeless and sort of flat (A wierd and tricky balance according to me). I suppose in a way a digital mixing is like a huge puzzle that combines to a canvas, every piece have to be in the exact right place to make the canvas look right, where as an analogue mix is just a canvas and you’re no longer dealing with the small pieces, you simply paint what you want and worry about details later, if at all.

There are a number of plugins out there to dissect and correct a mix but I’d rather just produce music and make it sound good from scratch instead of fiddling with hundreds of plugins just to play dr sound engineer.

I’ve long been wanting to get back into analogue gear and mixing, and I think my next step would be to place my money on a potent multichannel sound card with a good AD/DA converter. I can then run a multitude of channels out to an quality analogue mixer and simply record the stereo mix coming from the mixer and regain that analogue warmth, coloration and saturation in a jiffy. With a risk of being a bit of a tech freak, this is called analogue summing. I’ve been reading extensively on this subject and essentially it’s a way to use the best of both worlds in a streamlined way.

I’ll also need to keep my rig open for expansion so that I later on can start getting some neat synths and outboards without having to change my setup. And preferably I’d like to do the mixing inside of my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and let the external mixer take the punches while being able to recall all my settings when I open a project at a later point.

The only problem I find is that ALL hardware manufacturers seem to have figured this problem out in their own way, essentially producing a dense jungle of gear to choose from. And the more I read about this the more puzzled I get but I do know it’s key with a good signal converter (AD/DA) and I can’t go for a budget mixer. After filtering the information as best I can I’m left with two solutions.

1. Get an all-in-one device such as the Allen & Heath ZED R16, or Mackie Onyx 1640i. Both are FireWire soundcards and full blown analogue mixers combined, but they take up space and not very expansion friendly.

2. Get a 28-30 channel soundcard such as RME Fireface, or MOTU 828, add an AD/DA ADAT converter such as RME ADI 8 to get the extra analogue in-/output channels needed and then get a good grade older analogue 16+ ch rack mountable mixer. Not very cost friendly but easy to expand and in total it’s only three little boxes in a rack that do require a freak-load of cables.

Both solutions solve the problem, but the first solution is easily half the price. So, to all you guys who produce music out there – what would be Your solution?

//Alex