Chapter 3: Meeting the Mixing Board
In This Chapter
Understanding the mixer
Deciphering channel strips
Exploring routing and busing
If you’ve ever been to a recording studio and watched a great recording engineer create a mix, you’ve probably been entranced by how he or she interacted with the mixing board: a dance around the mixer, a twist of a knob here, a push of a slider there. All this to the beat of the music. It’s like watching a genius painter paint, or a great orchestra conductor conduct, or a brilliant surgeon surge . . . er, operate. I’ll even bet that one of the reasons you got interested in home recording is so you could have a chance to play with those knobs yourself. Go ahead and admit it — you’ll feel better.
Well, you get your chance in this chapter. Not only do you discover what each of those knobs does, you get a feel for all the functions that the mixer fulfills in the studio. You discover what makes up a channel strip and how it’s used. You get a chance to see how routing works (and even discover what routing is). And you see how digital mixers use fader banks to provide numerous functions while taking up very little space.
Meeting the Many Mixer Types
Pro Tools ...
