to fly or not to fly tis' the question

[jhamburg]

Hello all,

Recently I was tracking bgv for a latin-soul/boogaloo album. This album is a sort of come back for a fairly well known artist whose heyday was the early to mid 70's. Everything else was well recorded by another engineer on 1" 16 track. The playing is pretty tight, the sounds are right with lots of nice saturation and the vibe is spot on.


The producer wants to fix a few things with the lead vocals and tighten up the bgvoxs and clean up a few things here and there. With the exception of one tune, there's not much to be done.

Here's the rub, the producer hasn't decided how he wants to mix. The obvious choices to me are to either fly the offending tracks into PT, edit and then fly them back, finally mixing off a console;

or to just fly the whole thing into PT, fix and mix through a console.

Here are the mitigating factors.

1) With the exception of the rhythm tracks, the masters are a bit of a hodegepodge. Mostly due to poor planning and only 16 tracks. So one track may have a guitar intro, an alternate leadvocal line, a bgvocal and a flute solo.

2) There is only ONE free track per song which we kept for SMPTE. Unfortunately, it often abuts the lead vocal track !

I personally think the best plan of attack would be to fly everything into PT and then mix through a console. I know I could probably get away with recording SMPTE at a pretty low level but it makes me nervouse none the less. Also, it would be really nice not to have a gazillion mutes and mults and such.

The next best thing would be to just fix the neccersary parts and try to consolidate things so we have a better track layout.

Finally, we could also fly everything in, clean it up and then fly everything back out to a fresh tape, losing some quality but not mucking about with sync and such.

The console to be mixed on is yet to be decided as well, let's just assume it will be something decent.

Am I totally sacrificing the vibe by going into the Pro Tools ? Or does the flexibilty and ease of editing and resultant tighter finished product overrule this. Some work will definetly need to be done in a DAW.

Finally, if we do go back to tape, what are your feelings as to how hard to it ? I generally try not to kill the tape on the layback but I've known some people who do it.

Okay, I'm sure there are plenty of opinions out there, let me know

cheers,

joel

[deft_bonz]

although i love the sound of analogue gear, there is NOTHING comparable with editing in a daw. you'll be much faster, reliable results and undo's

if the sound and the sync idea does not please you, then you can go back to a new tape.

in the daw you can clean up the hodgepodge, take all the vocals in one or two new tracks on the new tape.

just my 2 cents, kind regards deft:::

[Jules]

How many channels of PT i/o do you have?

HD192
HD96
888/24
888

??

Wordclock?

Console?

[Jay Kahrs]

I'd fly it all into PT and mix out of that though a console. Going back to tape isn't worth it and will just add more noise. If you were talking about flying one or two tracks over and back to tape that's another story, but all tracks on all songs? Not for me.

[Tousana]

Originally posted by Jay Kahrs
I'd fly it all into PT and mix out of that though a console. Going back to tape isn't worth it and will just add more noise. If you were talking about flying one or two tracks over and back to tape that's another story, but all tracks on all songs? Not for me.

Sounds like a job for PT's,If you feel it's all there don't fuk with it. Fly it into the box at the best sample rate you can,do your fixes,get the track thing strightened out,and mix to taste on an analogue desk of course.

[jhamburg]

thanks all for the reply's.

in reference to the current rig. I'm using a DA7 for the front end of a MIX+ with an 24 bit ADAT bridge. Sync is courtesy MTP-AV and AARD. I have up to 24 channels input currently.

Things are in a bit of flux around here, we are expecting a nice console and a serious converter upgrade before we mix it. Most likely we'll be getting the AD16x and then something a little cheaper for DA.

As I said, I'm personally leaning to just pushing everything into PT and mixing via console.

cheers,

joel