Week 2: Tour of Mixmaster Studio

A liberating experience indeed! My highlight wasn’t even the fact that it was the first time I touched an SSL (…I’ll never forget – or wash that hand again..).
It goes without saying that it was great to get into a pro room and hear from a working producer.
What really blew me away was the lack of pretence. Here was a guy standing in a room full of classic analog outboard gear that said: ‘None of this matters!’ Of particular note was his admission that he has patched in a channel with nothing on it before and thought to himself ‘Yeah, that sounds much better…’
Thank goodness! It’s not just me.

I was very impressed that in a room full of great gear, his focus was on getting the balance of the mix right, rather than telling us how great the gear is. But I suppose that is one of the perils of being an amateur: one spends far too much time around other amateurs!

Next major revelation… how did the control room sound? Frankly: not too different to my office at home. This has been another one of those areas where I have let urban audio myths creep into my psyche. I imagined that when I heard my stuff in a ‘pro room’ I would be hearing something entirely different to what I had hear at home or in my headphones.
To summarise: I think the experience helped me to start to get past some of the self imposed psychological hurdles that stand between me and good mixes. There is a lot of them to get over – but I can see that much of the psychology that is working against me is of my own making, and not reflective of a world stacked against me!