I was watching “I’m Still Here” starring Joaquin Phoenix and there is a scene where he is visiting Sean Combs in his recording studio.
Combs is at the mixing board and it is huge. It must have been 20 feet by five feet IIRC.
Why are they so big? I understand a complex song has many tracks, but is there really a need for something so large, with seemingly thousands of knobs and buttons?
Just wondering.
A mixing board is so much more than a signal in signal out system.
It is a route manager, so a sound my be sent out the mixer, then given some EQ and perhaps some limited effects, then sent out again to a specialist effects unit, and then rerouted back in again.
In between this journey effects such as noise gating, echo, digital delay may be added, and there is often a certain amount of adjustment to be made when the signal returns.It is not unusual to have a 128 channel studio these days - lots of this is done using computor contrils rather than the knobs and sliders you have noted, but those knobs and sliders are usually motor driven from outputs generated at the computor.The result of this is that you can set up your studio, and digitally transfer all your settings to another studio so that artists can collaborate across boundaries.
In addition, the mixing desk may well be supplying signals to dozens of other speaker amplifiers, there might also be a system of echo cancellation, or of optimum signal timing so as to counter the acoustics of the environment - some of these speaker monitoring systems are auto monitoring and make the adjustments by comparing the signal recieved from the desired mix, to the one that is heard in the audience.
Ah, on reading I notice that this is about studios rather than live, but much of the previous applies.
One thing to realise when you look at a large seemingly complex mixing desk is that it is an exercise in duplication. As a rough approximation you have a large number of channel strips, side by side across a large fraction of the desk. Each strip runs the full height of the desk, and provides a single channel of control. Desks simply get wider as you add channels. Additional complexity is introduced with routing (as casdave notes above) and there will usually be a slab of channels of output control functions - the nature of which to some extent differentiates a studio desk from a live desk.
But the vast bulk of the desk is just a massive duplication of how a single sound source is managed. So various gain controls, in addition to the main fader the determines that channels level in a mix, various equalisation controls (glorified tone controls, that may include parametric frequency equalisation) buttons to control routing, muting, it quickly adds up to a dozen or so knobs sliders and a slew of buttons.
Now duplicate that for every single audio source you have. That means every microphone you ever used - a dozen or so for a drum kit alone, and for mixing you need to consider any processed sources or additional material that you wish to add in. Modern highly produced music may have an astonishing amount of such stuff. And if you can afford it - you use a channel per source. It wouldn’t be hard to burn dozens of channels.
Then again, as a simple statement, there isn’t much that can beat a 128 channel desk. Even of you only need half of it. It isn’t as if Sean Combs is short of money.
You can do it all with a computer and a mouse, but not much beats the tactile and visual nature of a physical desk. So much so that soft desks, i.e. desks that have no audio processing capability but are nothing more than a control surface for a computer mixing system are built.
Very informative, thanks for the replies.
The very largest boards are in locations that specialize in mixing film soundtracks. Some are more than 30 feet wide and are used by five operators at once.
I Want To Hold Your Hand was recorded on a 4-track recorder. I’m not saying that 128-track digital isn’t better, but still, nothing succeeds like success.
The Beatles used the top technology available at the time. When only stereo was available, they used that. When 4 track was introduced, they moved to that. Same with 8 track and 16. I’m quite confident that if 128 tracks of digital recording had been offered to them, they would have been all over that.
I won’t dispute that, but sometimes in hindsight it is interesting to observe that the introduction of massive technology does not make the music any better.
Of course not, but the mixing board doesn’t make the music. It’s just a step in reproducing the music. So all you can say about a better mixing board is that it can lead to a better reproduction. Not exactly an earth-shattering revelation, that.
They were making crappy music in the 1960s, too.
Once the four track was introduced it became possible to start layering tracks - buy the laborious process of bouncing tracks - recording onto a free track the mix of another track being replayed and a new source. This allowed complex arangements to be created in the studio over time, rather than needing the whole arrangement being played at once. It also opened up a new range of recording techniques - something the Beatles were at the forefront of exploiting. In many ways a huge multi-track recorder and similarly sized mixing desk is nothing more than a way of a technological advance that removes the need to continually bounce tracks - yielding better fidelity and freeing the creative process from the slog work of continual bouncing. Modern digital systems can have essentially infinite tracks - if you are prepared to perform the final mixdown in slower than real time. With reasonably fast hardware you can have a huge number of tracks and process in real time. Pre digital era peaked with 2 inch tape and the largest number of tracks you were prepared to fit across that. But the basic idea was pioneered back with those 4 track machines.