Premier Rock Forum

Kniferide wrote: Mon Oct 20, 2025 12:07 pm

TylerDeadPine wrote: Sun Oct 19, 2025 11:07 pm I feel the same way about really dialed in tricked out home studio rooms - it's either hard to find the music made by them, or you wish you hadn't.

My basement is admittedly over-tricked for what I do down there, but part of that is that I manage and operate big AV tech infrastructure for a living so if I have a small problem, I sometimes throw a big solution at it. I honestly don't think the equipment at had has much to do with how cool your recordings are at all. Someone with a competent skill set can make a 4 track cassette sound great if they have good talented performers, and if you are an idiot, a rack of outboard preamps and expensive motorized faders and German Mics aren't going to save your shitty mix. For me, my recording gear is exactly an old mans model train set. I enjoy putting it all together.

But you use it right? you can sense in someone’s space when they’re spending time using it vs. managing the infrastructure full time

TylerDeadPine wrote: Mon Oct 20, 2025 2:00 pm

Kniferide wrote: Mon Oct 20, 2025 12:07 pm

TylerDeadPine wrote: Sun Oct 19, 2025 11:07 pm I feel the same way about really dialed in tricked out home studio rooms - it's either hard to find the music made by them, or you wish you hadn't.

My basement is admittedly over-tricked for what I do down there, but part of that is that I manage and operate big AV tech infrastructure for a living so if I have a small problem, I sometimes throw a big solution at it. I honestly don't think the equipment at had has much to do with how cool your recordings are at all. Someone with a competent skill set can make a 4 track cassette sound great if they have good talented performers, and if you are an idiot, a rack of outboard preamps and expensive motorized faders and German Mics aren't going to save your shitty mix. For me, my recording gear is exactly an old mans model train set. I enjoy putting it all together.

But you use it right? you can sense in someone’s space when they’re spending time using it vs. managing the infrastructure full time

I do! All the time, but since the pandy, I'll admit that it mostly gets used to make pointless ambient synth "music" but I occasionally get to track some drums and guitars too. Had a Drum session scheduled for Saturday but it cancelled due to Inflatable Frogs rioting in the streets (We've been declared a WARZONE!!!!) or something like that. It's actually pretty simple but it's a small space and I never get rid of gear so it's kinda cramped. During the Pandemic when it was just me and or Heather recording alone down there, I got obsessed with being able to just start Reaper, arm a track and hit record so I got pretty wild with connectivity. On paper it seems really complex, but in practice it is extremely easy to use. I utilize a good amount of AVB and patchbay normalling. I can get into it but it will be long winded.

Kniferide wrote: Mon Oct 20, 2025 2:32 pm I utilize a good amount of AVB

https://youtu.be/9i4lBhJpuOc?si=yihVyeUSzcgQ612b&t=970

jorsh wrote: Tue Oct 21, 2025 9:14 pm

Kniferide wrote: Mon Oct 20, 2025 2:32 pm I utilize a good amount of AVB

https://youtu.be/9i4lBhJpuOc?si=yihVyeUSzcgQ612b&t=970

That's a lot of hot hair-dos

more like hair don'ts.

Frankie99 wrote: Wed Oct 22, 2025 10:49 am more like hair don'ts.

yer never gett'n laid without a wig like these bruh!

I'll take the risk.

I recently put together a plug-in setup to get that "analog sound" for mixing. I use a tape machine for the first insert of each track, setup as 2 inch. After the tape plugin is a Sonimus console. These are designed to have saturation build up. (A free alternative is Airwindows Console). It has tracks, busses, and summing. You can dial in saturation, crosstalk and apply different frequency curves.

The last insert on the mix bus is another tape machine, set up like 1/2 inch.

This gets pleasing glue and warmth and offers a nice baseline to start at.

For the 2 inch tape, I use Satin. It's a very customizable plug-in. (A free alternative is Chow Tape.) With Satin, you can assign groups to machines. This let's you set parameters across several instances simultaneously, which is nice for things like drum sets, multiple guitars, or every track. I saved a calibration that I like to start with. I usually just stick with the setting and not fiddle other than gain.

For the 1/2, I'm using the UAD ATR 102. It's easy to use and sounds amazing.

The console summing is a mixed bag. I tried to use the master group, but it's less cumbersome to just use a normal bus on the master and use track faders as usual.

Sonimus has 4 consoles: A (API), Statson (SSL), N (Neve) and T (Tube). I have Console N, but it would be fun to have different consoles for different base flavors.

I picked up Sonarworks SoundID. A little pricey, but economical in a sense because you can expand your single speakers to different profiles, based on their frequency curves, plus the room correction. It really improved my mediocre speakers, but also my headphones. You don't need hardware for it, but it's an option. I did get an Oria to house profiles, but if I had to do it all over, I'd probably just use the software and do my best to turn it off before rendering.

If you go hog wild and get the virtual studio addon, you could generate a profile of your room and apply it to your headphones. This seems worth it for professionals, maybe not a hobbyist who might not really need this convenience. I believe there's other studio profiles available. For the price, there's cheaper headphone studios available like Lewitt and Realphones.

Landr (cloud-based mastering company) bought Reason (the DAW I've been using for 20yrs). This is maybe good? Maybe bad? It was owned previously by some random VC firm so at least having a parent co involved in the music world is probably heartening to some degree. That said, I'm not excited about having ai bloatware pushed into future releases.

I'm not really a typical Reason user, but I really love the workflow, the interface, the quirkiness, and the fake SSL mixer. I use Reaper and Audition for sort of utilitarian tasks, but the idea of having to move wholly into another DAW if Reason shits the bed is really disheartening.