I'm with Bert. TBH I didn't know that "producer" was anything specific in the whole process. I started out doing somewhat separate processes but that was in a different age/different setup so it made sense at the time. I still use a lot of hw but nowadays I do it all, in no particular order. I don't see any point even in recording a bare mix that will be later mastered, though yeah I used to do that. I get a finished mastered end product from the whole arrangement/mixer that is mixed, bussed, processed and mastered all one the 1 screen in the DAW that includes live hw, midi channels hw and VSTi and individual samples/sample channels with God knows how many FX channels and busses. My hw is generally rendered down to audio, so a separate mix gives me no advantages or loss of retraceability etc. I can still recall it all if I ever want to redo it (which I almost never do). And if I want to redo something, I'll probably want to rejig mixing, composition, mastering, pretty well everything anyway, so why split it up into sections.
Yeah, I get the "organisation" aspect. Some people are tidier or more process-driven or logical than others. But there's no right way. You can do 26 different steps from A to Z or I prefer to just have the whole alphabet in one big jigsaw and do it in one process. I always thought "producing" means the whole thing - it's why that name came into being in recent years.
On the other hand, there are people with specific talents out there, and I'm absolutely certain I could get better tracks by having a "mixing engineer" do my mixes for me. Which means doing things a certain way to get your stems or whatever to the engineer. But most of us do it all ourselves, so do it however sits easily with your mindset. I still compose after I've done some mixing and vice versa, and I have an idea of my gainstaging and master levels etc way before I'm mastering. If you're wholly digital, you don't even really need to gainstage except for reasons of neatness/organisation.
Yeah, I get the "organisation" aspect. Some people are tidier or more process-driven or logical than others. But there's no right way. You can do 26 different steps from A to Z or I prefer to just have the whole alphabet in one big jigsaw and do it in one process. I always thought "producing" means the whole thing - it's why that name came into being in recent years.
On the other hand, there are people with specific talents out there, and I'm absolutely certain I could get better tracks by having a "mixing engineer" do my mixes for me. Which means doing things a certain way to get your stems or whatever to the engineer. But most of us do it all ourselves, so do it however sits easily with your mindset. I still compose after I've done some mixing and vice versa, and I have an idea of my gainstaging and master levels etc way before I'm mastering. If you're wholly digital, you don't even really need to gainstage except for reasons of neatness/organisation.
Statistics: Posted by kritikon — Thu Oct 03, 2024 11:52 pm