But, carry on we did… After a few hours of getting drum sounds and doing all the different snare drum “treatments,” the moment of truth arrives. We turn up the gain, bring up the return, and … WHAT!?!? It sounds so terrible that all my “strutting around” embarrasses me.
“HONK, HONK” – sounded like a goose. The drummer says, “How’s that sound in there?” I swallowed my pride, push the talk back and calmly said, “Yeah man, it’s not quite right”.
Moving right along… we have an old tape delay unit called “multi-echo,” which is very much like a space echo or an echoplex. It’s actually a super cool unit, in that it can step up input and output level to 0 Vu (kinda), making it pretty good for the recording domain.
One particular mix session we were relying on this multi-echo unit pretty heavily, and we found it was taking us long periods of time per song to set up the delay time, and more to get it just right. This was becoming frustrating – there had never been a problem when using it on the record side of things.
Mind you, this is the first time we had used it in a mix session. After three days of fighting this thing I’m about ready to give up and just use a digital box when my colleague figured it out (by accident). We had already printed eight songs, of 18 total.
Every song up to this point had the multi-echo panned up the center, mainly carrying the lead vocal. The multi-echo was only returning delayed signal and nothing dry. On the fourth day Dan panned the lead vocal hard left and the return from the multi-echo hard right. BAM!!!!
The output of the multi-echo was completely out of phase with whatever we patched into it. It never ended up canceling the vocal in the previous mixes because it was not returning any dry signal.
We felt more than slightly stupid for not checking the phase before we started mixing, which is actually something we do all the time. We even have phase clickers for this reason (and yes, we had them at the time of this session).
Needless to say we had to back up and reprint eight “finished” mixes, which of course is not easy when you’re working in a home studio with no automation, let alone recall.
Some say, “The bigger you are the harder you fall.” Baloney – even that vertically challenged fellow on Fantasy Island falls hard, and so do we.
But you never know unless you try, and you’ll never learn if you’re afraid of pushing buttons, turning knobs and putting a mic where it’s maybe never been placed before.
j. hall is a veteran audio professional and the moderator of Indie Rock, In Practice & In Theory on ProSoundWeb’s REP Forums.
