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A lot of folks seem to think Ray Charles hated digital recording, but the engineer who did most of his later work would say no. There were things he didn't like about it, but the link below, with an interview of the engineer is rather enlightening.

 

Bruce

 

http://www.emusician.com/artists/1333/recording-the-genius/36640

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...but the link below, with an interview of the engineer is rather enlightening.

 

That was enlightening.  It also tells me what the DAW software tools are doing (or, rather, not doing) that causes the users to insert "dither" noise into each channel to keep divisions by zero from occurring.  Not cool.

 

Also, using so many channels (more than 32) seems like subdividing the performance into oblivion so that the performers themselves can't balance or react to each other.

 

In any case, I'm not a fan of so many channels even though guys like John Eargle did it a lot.  I understand the consequences of fewer channels, and that is, well, you've got to accept the performance as the musicians played it a great deal more.

 

Other than that, the comments about the studios complaining that their (Ray Charles') mixes were too quiet - well, that's not a revelation, but it does make me shake my head, once again, on the ignorance of the technical decision making within the music labels.  That's why we have "Loudness Wars" instead of hi-fi recordings.

 

Chris

Edited by Chris A
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Get over the CD, HD digital tracks are where its at. 

 

 

"Vinyl's absurd"

 

 

Paraphrasing from Marc Cohn,

 

"Don't you give me no Buick
Girl, you must take my word
If there's a God up in Heaven
He's got a silver Thunderbird
You can keep your El Dorado
Man, the foreign car's absurd
Me, I wanna go down
In a silver Thunderbird"

 

Its all about the music.  Cheers

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Chris,

I thought you might enjoy the article/interview. I've heard some mixes that were done 'in the box', that sounded really good, but they were usually things with very few channels/tracks. More acoustic/jazz oriented.

 

I'm guessing the movie guys mixing a couple hundred tracks for all the Foley work and dialogue aren't mixing in the box but through a console with automation.

 

Bruce

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