Digital mixing desk

I've just received yesterday the christmas gift I made to I-Self, after having bad experience with Behringer I usually don't bought some device from this brand, but this time I needed a really cheap MIDI controller, mainly to have fun more than use for production (cause I use analog hardware for production... software simply can't emulate all that wobble that occur with analog hardware).

Hope this little gift are not going to break the budget I'm actually building for the Murcia versionist gathering ...fuck... I'm just falling like a child in this Christmas commercial time, fortunately it's not the case each year.

Now let see the beast:

A simple 4x8 rotary fader midi interface, exactly what I needed to control my Orion software at home, and my 64Studio workstation at studio.

Don't going to use it to do live dubwise cause love analog hardware, but going to be really useful to do mixing of other project at studio, and of course, having lot of fun doing live electro set at home !

Just experienced mixing some Orion project, and tried some minimal stuff... it's a real pleasure !

Not bad for a Behringer product...

Mastering abuse and the RMS value

I've just spend last weeks to mix a demo for a band sharing studio with I and had learn so much about mastering and general way of working to get a good sounding mix.

After having good discussion on the versionist forum and long exploring of the wikipedia, and now I understand all the debate that running around mastering.

The main problem is that during last decades worldwide producer have done a war to get the maximum loudness possible of their production. Perhaps they had think having a track louder than other studio is a proof of quality, but this war was go to far and until the majority of 'major' production was over-compressed resulting in killing all 'sensibility' of the sound !

A song from 1983

Same song remastered in 2005

So when you have a perfect mix it must not be a problem, but otherwise it's compromise between loudness/sensibility...

This loudness level are call 'root mean square' (or RMS), I'm actually compiling all information about mastering on the ODF knowledge base, so you can get more info here.

Be the master of mastering

Sound mastering is one of the most complicated task for sound engineer, anyone having done music and recorded some tracks have notified the problem of mastering.

If you record a song without using any compression and without doing mastering your going to hear a big volume gap between your production and the one's available on a professional release (CD/LP/WAV).

Since today I was always doing mastering manually using my hardware compressor and different software... Compressor was doing a good job put it wasn't enough to get a real powerful sound, so I tried using some PC plug-in without a real success... The only way I had to get a good mix was to manually remove peak !

All that is finish, for sure I keep all my tube-filter and analog compressor (really useful for live...) but I can now forgot all other sad plug-in used before, JAMin is the only one today !


Just try it out (under Linux with JACK) and you will see his true power... really incredible, nice eq, really good dynamic compressor... and all module can be fine tuned. This software is free and can do better job than some semi-pro expansive software !