So these days we are mixing and mastering entirely in the box using plugins.
The plugins we are using are the SSL, Slate Digital, and Harrison, plugin bundles, with occasionally dipping back into native instruments or Izotope plugins.
The value for money and the technical capabilities, mimicking pro gear that would of otherwise costs many tens of thousands in a purely analogue, real world mixing and mastering technical capabilty.
Something that in the ‘real world’ extremely costly.
SO I guess this is as good as it gets really, the dsp and math algorythms are probably not going to be better by much.
The ‘Being Digital’ era is now maybe 30 years old ? Perhaps? Definitely mainstream. For relatively small effort and costs, and massive conveniences of doing all this ‘in the box’, and the general maximum availability and wide spread through internet cultural bases, such as Ableton or max for live, and the great software industry behind hardware and software products.
The music industry is at a cross roads, after streaming and all of that. Post AI, or at least Co-Existant with the AI thing, there is much difference in opinion into how things should evolve from here.
With the the internet pre-cambrian explosion, and the shear accessibility and market access that all this affords, combined with the earning potential if your product or software subscription reaches critical masses of subscriber numbers.
Culture has reached an accept or reject cultural moment with the coincidence and collision of all these lines of communique and relative and respective lines of development.
So I think that the capitalisation of music tech business and the results of certain busts and booms in terms of corporate groups that hold the intellectual property and global sales markets of the music industry and business, there is also a search for character, personality, originality, perhaps the emergence of a new punk to counteract the same all old corporate cultural tropes in the industry.
Newer products seem to be characterised by old school look and feels harkening back to the pre-digital era.
Too late to say we are post digital / post ai ?
To early to say we abandon the whole digital ai thing?
Do we go back to oil and canvas to make our album art ?
Certainly the very aesthetic of digital futurism, is incredible and perhaps hardly achievable by mere human comic artists,
This is really is a quite a historic moment into the future of culture, was Judge Dredd and 2000AD right all along?
Certainly technical capability along creative studios and the capability of the output, in terms of cultural gigabytes, perhaps, we increasingly ‘see’ inside of our selves, delving further and further into creative imaginery space, pulling out of the deep ever more crazy conceptualisations and modalites, perceiving or creating further along the lines of our imagination, incredibly performant.
Perhaps humankind always saw this, but lacked the cybernetic means to express the thought, or see the sign, and certainly melded with technical capability, which will be the biggest toolkit at our disposal, in terms of technical performant creative complexity within industrial architectural goal oriented deign , discovering new spaces for exploration again in kind returning a new level, a new place to evolve creatively from.
Perhaps old ways of looking at things might not serve us too well in such days ?
To be or not to be?
O before i forget some of these latest plugins have an easy ‘AI’ button that can set all the settings for you which saves time just getting something down ASAP.
I still know you need a mix engineer in the chair, in terms of cybernetics, a full fat analogue mixing desk, or the equivalent control service, works infinitely better faster, with immediacy and simultaneity (as in simultaenously)is still, as of time of writing, faster than computers to do the job.
Granted a ‘field of agents’ or a ‘swarm of agents’ could hit out at every circumstance massively in parallel, and i guess with a few basic rules could do everything quickly but without the human in the loop i don’t think it would get to the master achievement of a complete well done mixing and mastering. You know the human in the loop I think is still more capable, but a ‘field of agents’ could certainly bring everything up to speed as regards the leg work of setting up a recording session on computer or mixing desk and equipment.
Avenues still to be explored – perhaps using playstation VR or the Apple headset and using that to express virtually the architectural space of a mixing and mastering recording studio with a 3d version of the acoustic space.
Certainly 3d and spacial workflows for video games with the appropriate gaming style headphone would mean you could work entirely in VR/XR scenario, so that’s an interesting permutation to counter the complete lack of space, even when working with multiple monitors, and would loads of annoying zooming the keyboard and mouse around to a particular plugin , waiting for the screen to be revealed and then of course tweaking the setting. All of these tens of thousands of micro, sub-routings, or micro interactions, touch points upon the mix, each cost digital computational powers to beam in and beam out of each of the several parts.
Just a technical note, I probably could just get the ssl daw control surface, which all in is around 2 thousand pounds, bet even then would only put us about half way between keyboard and mouse, and the actual real world nuts and bolts mixing console and out of the box equipment, in terms of operator speed, but it would be putting us ten times faster than operating the production service using just a keyboard and mouse.
The final technical alternative would be mixing using apple pods with an apple monitor with Wavelab 13. This would be about 2 thousand pounds including the cost of the Wavelab software, which would be the cheapest possible atmos capability.
Any way that all for now.