Battle between Software and hardware

i have to say i agree with ROX.

major artists use those expensive pieces of gear cuz they are on that level. if i had budgets like them i would be rockin my shht thru the neves and ssls.

fact is hip hop doesnt need tha ssls and neves. if you were talkin about a celine dion or shania twain record than yes.

you think these major label, are going to risk wasting their promotion budget on a record thats mixed on a berhringer? no way! but thats the level their on. for them its about money!

but for the average cat on the street, its about music. and they can care less what you record on. before cds came out everybody was rockin the cassette tapes. which had the worst sound ever. same as vinyl.

there are lots of cats that are on the same level as i am. trying to be creative with what they have. i understand a mackie cant be compared to an ssl, but who the fkk cares? if your music is garbage that ssl aint gonna make it any hotter.

dre has the dough to rock the ssl. so does 50 and jayz. these cats are ceo's of major record labels. but us average cats dont have budgets like that.

you dont need all that expensive shht to acheive a satisfactory sound. we know an ssl or whatever would make it sound better. but we only need it to sound good enough to listen to.

i feel rox on this one!


+1 Rox

all y'all r really talking about different things. i am talking about taking a good song and having it mixed at a good studio if it is going to be released, not if u r just making it for your friends. rox u missed my point again i am talking about if i take a bill withers record and sample it i now have taken the work of others and i can't say that the track that i make was only made using a mpc and a turntable. it was made with everybody credited on the bill withers record and a mpc and turntable. u understand what i am saying.

u all r stating the obvious all of us need to learn our gear and learn how to make good songs, a mixer isn't going to help that. my point is that all y'all should have some goals. my goal when i was coming up was to be able to mix on a ssl and i have achieved just that. does a ssl turn a sh!tty song into a great song? no but it will make that sh!tty song sound sonically better, and it will make a good sounding song sound great at the hands of a talented engineer. there r many terrible songs where the sond quality is amazing. a great performance with lesser sound quality will alway beat out great sonics and a bad performance, and again that is just stating the obvious. i have mixed releases on a mackie 8 bus, a yamaha 01v, in the box, ssl 9000j and on a neve vrp72. i can mix on anything, but if u give me the choice i am taking the 9000j, and until u have used one for an extended period of time please refrain from comparing it to budget gear. if it was the same then the price would be the same.

i never said everyone go take the beats u make for your friends to a studio and run them through a ssl. for all of y'all that think it is very expensive to rent a studio to mix on a ssl or neve, it really isn't at all. i have clients ranging from inidies to majors coming through .

" if i take a bill withers record and sample it i now have taken the work of others and i can't say that the track that i make was only made using a mpc and a turntable."

I'm feelin ya 100%. My whole point from the very beginning was to use what you got and make the best of it. If you have a $2 mic, use it untill you can get something better. If I want a VST synth, I'm going to make the best of it, no matter how much better the original costs. I really don't understand why this post needs to be 6 pages long. A lot of artists have said the same thing in video's. "it's not about the gear." We hear it all the time. I repeat the same thing and suddenly my words have no weight and I don't know what I'm talking about. I guess I have to go platinum to make people listen.
I know SSL's and all that other type of gear is sonically better, there is absolutely no disagreement about that; but many of us can make music that sounds great, and we've all heard music mixed on expensive gear that do nothing for us (Laffy taffy for example). The end result is the music and how people feel it.

I'm out... time for a new topic of discussion!

It's all about concept and imagination...

When you are working with those VST's alot of the time, you have to use your imagination to hear what you WANT it to sound like....or make up the difference between what it sounds like, and what it SHOULD sound like.

Sometimes its nice to have a quality sound pushed in your grill by a nice board, if your concept calls for that.

This is where the PRODUCTION aspect of the art comes in, taking the musical idea, and making it sound as good as possible.

How can the o1v touch the SSL mixing bus, its probably got like a 32 bit architecture? VS analog, please, I wish Yamaha would try to step to SSL with their BEST board in another 5 years, then MAYBE we'll see a lil heat.

BTW>>>>>>My concept of softsynths has somewhat changed in the past week. I changed a 1402 VLZ-Pro mixer and Aardvark PCI sound card (using Hosa cables off the inserts) for a Mackie ONyx Firewire mixer...

My softsynths sound much much much better!! I expected a difference but was surprised! FM7 is a BEAST now, "I'm lovin it".

hey does that onyx mixer mix the signals in analog or digital?

d loc unfortunately there is no money in making large format boards. studios r closing left and right.

the future is to make single channels of a board like the j series ssl, for the project studio. which companies like ssl and ams neve r starting to do. so u get the same signal as an expensive board but only pay like 3-8k for just 1 channel.

wow this thread is still going

Science wrote:wow this thread is still going

yeah this is only the 6th round.

Beat God wrote:d loc unfortunately there is no money in making large format boards. studios r closing left and right.

the future is to make single channels of a board like the j series ssl, for the project studio. which companies like ssl and ams neve r starting to do. so u get the same signal as an expensive board but only pay like 3-8k for just 1 channel.

I didn't understand... How are you gonna mix a 30-track song with only 1 channel?

Nah, the future will be small format boards of high quality, as front ends for DAW. Channelstrips work but something like the toft atb seems more attractive than having 16 rach channelstrips each with it's own power supply and so much redundant wiring. then the channel strips can augment the basic mixer as well.

I don;t buy the summing box channel strip arrangement for very long.

i am not talking about summing boxes or a mixer. i am talkinjg about how ssl and neve r going to survive. they r no longer selling as many boards as they used to. if u have 30 tracks u loop each channel through the single channel strip track by track. yeah it's time consuming but u r getting the same sound as the top of the line board but using only 1 channel. yeah they could make a smaller board but the price would still be out of reach to many. 1 channel solves this problem

What is the point of that? Does the mixer strip give any improvement to the sound? Isn't it just that the sound doesn't lose any quality when you run it through the 30-channel ssl/neve-board?

1 channel??...lol

they should make some affordable boards. thats what they need to do.

EMFinite wrote:1 channel??...lol

they should make some affordable boards. thats what they need to do.

if they make affordable boards then the sound that u r looking for won't be that classic ssl sound. the point is 2 have good a/d d/a conversion and to route the track to and from the channel strip. i rather do this for 30 tracks for 4k than spend 400k on more channels.

Beat God wrote:

EMFinite wrote:1 channel??...lol

they should make some affordable boards. thats what they need to do.

if they make affordable boards then the sound that u r looking for won't be that classic ssl sound. the point is 2 have good a/d d/a conversion and to route the track to and from the channel strip. i rather do this for 30 tracks for 4k than spend 400k on more channels.

Why is that? aren't people mainly using hardware mixers for their summing boxes?