When home recording made the jump from tape recorders to the PC, there were a great many benefits to be had. These include the ability to "see" the audio, so that parts could be easily edited, slid around, tightened up, tuned, etc. The ability to easily paste in pre-recorded loops, and effortlessly treat audio with various plug-ins, rather than rely on hardware-based effects. Computerized mixdown, with all pans and fades pre-programmed in. And on and on.
But for many, there was something lost: specifically, the manual, hands-on control that a tape recorder and (especially) its mixing board provided. That's where Frontier Design's new AlphaTrack control surface for Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) comes into play. But first, some background. (Feel free to skip to the next subhead if this starts to become old hat to you.)
Since around the mid-1950s, in professional studios, songs are mixed down from a multitrack recorder to a two-track master tape (where they would be physically edited together to form an album) via a producer or his engineer riding the faders on a mixing board. Back when recording studios were four or eight tracks (and EMI's prestigious Abbey Road Studios didn't make the jump to eight tracks until around the time of the Beatles' "White Album"), this wasn't much of a problem as it simply meant one finger per fader.
The race from eight to 16 to 24 tracks happened quickly in the early 1970s. During the next few years, many professional recording studios were in a transition phase between the arrival of 24-track recorders, and, eventually computerized mixing boards. During that period, when the number of tracks outgrew the number of fingers the producer had to control them, often the whole band was brought in for mixdowns, typically with a musician given the volume fader to one of the tracks he didn't play on. And the golden rule was never let the drummer ride the faders to his own drum tracks.
As the number of tracks that could fit onto a roll of two-inch magnetic tape grew, computerized mixdowns became the norm, allowing the engineer to pre-program each track's volume level and position in the stereo spread, as well as manipulating when effects are turned on and off, or their intensity adjusted. And today's digital audio recording programs such as Cubase, Nuendo, and Sonar import this concept into the PC, thus giving the home musician surprising technological power.
But as always, there's a tradeoff. As Craig Anderton noted in his exceptional Sonar 3: Mixing & Mastering book a few years back, one of the reasons why mixes recorded 30 years ago often sound more natural than today's computerized affairs was the presence of that producer or engineer physically manning the mixer's faders, and playing them to control their dynamics, much like a skilled musician intuitively manipulates the dynamics of his singing or instrument. For the most part, it's an imperceptible thing, but its presence in the best mixes can often be noticed: the subtle feel of a hands-on mix, versus simply cueing up the tracks and doing little more with them other than fade-ins and fade-outs.
Give Me A Little Of That Human Touch
While those results are still very much possible to achieve on a computer and a mixing board connected to it via a FireWire or USB interface, a full-blown mixing board is often overkill for the musician working alone in a personal studio, when most parts are recorded a track at a time. Particularly since, historically, the biggest multitrack instrument was the drum kit, which in most project studios is supplied via a hardware or software drum machine and/or loops, and there are so many mono or stereo recording interfaces that take up much less physical space.
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