Before or after Console. The only place you shouldn't alter volumes is between the ConsoleChannel and ConsoleBuss. The buss undistorts the distortion from the channel, but if you change volume between them it won't be calibrated correctly. You can still mix your track!

If your DAW of choice can place plugins post-fader then you can stick it on and just mix as normal.


The more tracks you put it on the more of an effect it's going to have. If you only have it on groups then all the tracks going to that group will use the DAWs linear summing. Depending on how many groups you have/how many tracks are sent to each group/how much you change volume of your groups etc. will all affect how you end uup using it.

Thanks for your help! Ableton is pre-fader only on inserts, so I am hoping someone with Ableton can chime in. I wound up putting Console at the end of every track and Channel at the start of the master in a 170 track session and I am having trouble hearing the difference A/B in multiple listening situations/devices :/

Maybe my ears just aren't up to spec.

+1 for another Ableton n00b wanting to figure out how to use Utility in conjunction with Console5? Should Utility come before C5 on the insert and used to balance the channel levels as opposed to the channel fader?

Sorry to bump an older thread, but I got hung up on this detail. It would be great if someone could chime in.

Right now I'm sending stereo information to a single console channel. For example, if I were summing four stereo busses, I would use 4 console channels and 1 console buss at the end.

It seems to me that the quotation above is suggesting that I split the L/R of each stereo pair into its own console channel. Going back to my example, I'd now use 8 console channels and 1 console buss to sum four stereo busses.

Does anybody have an opinion as to which approach is more "correct?" Sending stereo information to console channels seems to work, but I'm always looking to optimize my approach.

It ought to just work… pan law is not that great of a departure from unity gain by Console standards. I'm mostly trying to prevent people putting ConsoleChannel and then putting the fader down 40 db and wondering why the quiet thing seems a little too distorted. Does it sound like you're losing too much, exaggerating the pan law? That's what it would do if it's not working optimally, make centered mono stuff (with mono ConsoleChannel) sound like it's slightly too distorted and slightly too quiet. Console5 is a little more forgiving, it might be fine.

Good to know, thank you for the reply. My current method isn't leading to extreme consequences. I'll take a moment and compare the two approaches.

I've used console 4 a few times in Harrison Mixbus in the past and enjoyed it. But, moved to S1 with its lack of post-fader inserts and stopped.

Last night after a few of beers I was contemplating a song with loads going on, where in the rough mix it just becomes a wall of noise at the end - drums, bass, loads of guitars, brass, percussion, backing vocal lines etc - and decided to try console 5, and just bite the bullet and set up a load of hidden summing busses.

This morning I pulled up the session half expecting not to hear the difference. But man, there was a difference. Totally unmixed, it sounded unmixed but damn, I could hear into the noise and make things out, while still feeling like the sounds belonged together. Totally forgot the joy of console in that sense. And the mix didn't seem as hard work.

Also played around with Bus Colors a bit, and I like that too. Mocked up a Focusrite console with "holo" on sub busses and instances of BX_Focusrite on individual channels, then topped it off with Lush on the master.

I actually preferred Bus Colors *before* console5bus, inside the summing system. I don't know if that makes me a bit crazy...

Anyway. The combination of Bus Colours & Console 5 as a summing setup *really* made me feel like the mix belonged in a space, and was working with me as it came together.