[Ardour-Users] Using a 'clean' bus to compare

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 14 Nov 2015 07:22:58 -0500, jonetsu at teksavvy.com wrote:
>If you know, and if anyone knows about a good concise book on the basis
>of mixing I'm interested.  I do not want the tales of that mixing guy
>legend or that other guy.  Only concise mixing basis using tools that
>are common in all basic setups, hardware or digital.  A web site or two
>would also be OK.

I started learning in the 80s, when I was around 16 or 17 years old,
with home studio gear and by an one-year-long practicum in a
professional audio and video studio of an university. To learn the
basics I just read one or the other chapter of user manuals and before
I already read one or the other chapter of books how to build circuits
and had electronic lessons in middle school. I learned by doing and by
hints from others.

Perhaps you should read the Ardour manual and imagine that decades ago,
when most important gear of audio studios was analog, excepted of a few
effects, there even were limits for professional studios.

Today everybody can add hundreds of effects to a single audio track,
this was impossible in the past.

When do you feel better? After drinking no or a little bit alcohol or
after drinking hundred of bottles of alcohol?

It's the same for mixing, less is more.

Today you can configure the design of your virtual mixer, in the past
even mixers based on modules always shared more or less the same design.

Why did they share quasi one and the same design? There are simply just
a few sane work-flows, lot of flexibility often isn't really
flexibility, it just means that no finished mixer is provided and you
need to build one yourself.

If I were you, I would start with adding Fon's parametric EQ to each
audio track and 1 post-fader aux send to share one reverb for
all tracks by default. Try not to use any other effect, for most things
people nowadays use a compressor, no compressor is needed, it could
be handled by using a single instance of an EQ, such as Fon's
parametric EQ.

If an instrument needs a flanger or chorus or similar add this effect,
but don't add many effects and consider to mix without effects.

Ensure that stereo mixes sound ok in mono too, canceling out
frequencies, doubling speed of ping pong delays etc. could happen if
stereo becomes mono.

Regards,
Ralf