Alex Fiennes on Scott

Today I thought that I would try something else and mix the piece that was recorded in Logic doing all the summing inside my Metric Halo to see if I felt that this was a nicer, more analogue way of working - I don't really like Logic very much and it often feels a bit uphill to get the parts to gel whereas on an "old fashioned" analogue desk like what I've been using for live work for more years than I care to calculate, things sit beside each other much more "easily".

So I decided that I would take advantage of the rehearsal time when Scott was getting the live microtonal performance to his liking to come up with a patch that would let me hear the difference between Logic summing and Metric Halo summing. I thought that while I was doing this, it would be "sensible" to also provide it with the ability to switch between monitoring the output of either route through either the Metric Halo DACs or the Audient Centro DACs.

So I did this.

And I was just getting to the point when I was ready to make everyone go away (or be really really quiet) so that I could really listen to the best way of doing things when we decided that we would no longer process the live audio on the way into the Metric Halo, but instead process the previously recorded patches and add this electronic track to the previously recorded tracks. This of course meant some rapid expansions to my Metric Halo patch to permit these new alternative routings and it started to resemble some kind of Frankenstein monster. Unfortunately, something somewhere was getting paralleled up between the Metric Halo and Logic and Martin ended up getting some horrible phasing on the recorded string parts that was hard to track down.

It was relatively late already when we got into this situation and it rapidly became clear that tracking down where the problem was happening would be not possible within the time constraints so bye bye big patch and hello newer smaller leaner patch. Which was great for getting the piece recorded, but not very good at getting "proof" as to the best course of action as I was originally hoping to achieve.

However, despite this, I think that the final result reproduces what I think that Scott was after. It is very hard to maintain a sense of perspective, especially when you are trying to make sensible mixing decisions at midnight after listening to the same piece all day - if I was going to do this project again, then I think that I would try and make it so that each day would be split with the first 2 hours of each day would be spent mixing the recordings made the previous day as the distance and perspective that a nights sleep gives would be invaluable. However, I have just sat down and listened to it again with a bit of time perspective and I think that it works quite nicely. I'm pleased that there are points when I'm not sure / can't remember whether I'm listening to "real" instruments or computers and therefore I think that it is probably going in the right direction.

A fiennes.org site

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