Are mixers really relevent to recording/beatmaking?

I seen on youtube that the alchemist has a mixer or something he saves his beats into... and yeah just wanna record raw and good shit yo

i dunno what mixer records audio but mixers can be helpful for mixing and mastering audio

using an external mixer allows you to further process the sounds, provided you have individual outs to route sound to dedicated channels on the mixing board.

having 2 drum machines and an mpc2000xl with individual outs along with some synths and effect racks I quickly run out of channels on my 32 channel desk.
When I do hardware only jams or tracks I'll route everything to the mixer, expecially when I do dubby stuff, so the mixer becomes an instrument by itself.
If I need to do accurate arrangement or mixdown with automations, I'll multitrack everything in the computer (happy to have 16 inputs) and then I'll route 20 channels on the board for some "OTB" mixing.

I personally like having a large board, so I can go crazy with effects and EQ on almost every sound I want -but some people prefer to do everything in the box, be it a computer or an mpc. I felt limited with the mpc1000 having only 4 outs, but that's just me.

Hugely relevant if bought for the right reasons. The best investment I've made in the past couple of years is my Mackie 1402 VLZ-Pro. Second hand it was about £70.

Very useable EQ, creative routing options, something tangible to mess with, push the gain for some weighty distortion etc...

Alchemist might have been recording through his mixing desk into an external recorder. At a push you might have seen something like a Portastudio, or another external recording device that has a smaller mixer built into it.

The raw and good sh*t yo sound comes from the source of your sounds first and foremost. Look there before you start spending.

There is indeed a few hardware mixer/hard drive recorders out there. D1200 by korg is what i have but there are a few brands like tascam that do the same. Some bigger ones record multiple tracks at once. Then you can retrack, over dub, and mix down to stereo.

TreCipher617 wrote:i dunno what mixer records audio but mixers can be helpful for mixing and mastering audio

Multitrackers a.k.a hardware DAWs is basically a mixer with recording capabilities. Some are tape mechanisms, others are digital.

Definitely check out Tascam, nice and easy to use products, they pretty much operate the same. I always hear about the difficulty level with Boss and Roland multitrakers and its true, well for me too.

I EQ everything through an external board. FX and Feedback loops can sometimes make unexpected, original sounds.