I’ve always found printing analog gear, especially compression sounding better but of course you have to be confident it’s exactly what you want. “Less is more” Live recording, well… you are recording live so you obviously want the live sound. When I used to mix for people I found most tracks being ruined by bad reverb choices and too many types of reverbs on a mix. Layered reverbs sound bad to me. Makes tracks sound phased out and thin. Not sure these are the answers you are looking for but it was the first things that come to mind with your post. Some recordings sound better tracked dry and clean. Some not. Depends on the music and room I think.

I’m trying to use eq and compression for correction only…example would be pulling the 2k out of a vocalist or compressing the drummer or bass player who has trouble with dynamics rather than for coloration…as far as reverbs and delays go I’m only using one analog delay and one plate reverb and then routing the instruments sends to those effects (if needed). Does this make sense? Is what I’m doing standard practice?

Your process sounds good to me. I’d say keep doing what you are doing. 👍🏼 How’s bass frequencies behaving in the room you are mixing?

being fairly new to all of this I'm not exactly sure how to observe the behavior of various frequencies in my room with anything other that my ears which to me don't seem to be a problem. I do have a number of 2'x4' ridgid insulation panels on all the walls, corners and ceiling for bass trapping my near field monitors are exactly 2'-6" away from my nose and I mix fairly quietly as to not produce large amounts of bass. id love a few tips on checking the room for problems if your willing o share. thanks

I'm no guru with acoustics but what I do know is if a room is too bassy it may cause us to mix too bright. Just the opposite, an overly treated dead room may cause to mix too bassy. There are tons of topic in the search, this old one with Kurt is a good start. https://recording.o… Your doing a great job but one can never know too much on room acoustics and how to tweak things using traps and absorption. If you have a measurement mic you can run white noise in your room to identify hot spots, dips standing wave etc. This will helps identify freq that effect our mixing. How high is your ceilings? What type of room are you working in?

It’s the worst conditions possible I will admit….13’ x 13’ x 8’ box It’s all I have…I will do whatever I need to do within reason to tune it for decent mixing…I have thought replacing monitors with better ones…I’m interested in the HS7 but I think it would be pointless until the room is either replaced or treated better.. the panels I do have installed I believe are only deadening the room rather than trapping bass…

agree on all points. I've noticed a consistent 2k (ish) mid freq area standing out in your mixes which (in this topic case) likely points to the need of bass traps due to your low ceilings /room dimensions. As mentioned a few post back pointing out that the hats are a bit up front. I'm sure it's not you wanting hats as upfront as I hear them but its you not being able to hear those freq as accurate, which is due to excessive bass in you room fooling you to push the hats louder than you would if your bass trapping was better. Thus, your room makes you think you need louder hi hats and freq in that range. Hope I explained that well. I could be wrong but its a pretty normal problem most of us have in smaller rooms. The fact that your mixes sound this good already speaks on how good your ears are! Kudo's. I bet once you are able to improve the bass trapping your mixes will sound awesome.

The Great Fall wrote: being fairly new to all of this I'm not exactly sure how to observe the behavior of various frequencies in my room with anything other that my ears which to me don't seem to be a problem. I do have a

You can get the free REW software which is a great measurement software. It's important to find the best locations in the room for speakers and the listener. This can make a huge difference. An easy way to do this is with an RTA app on your phone, or the RTA function in REW. You can play some pink noise with a speaker aimed at the corner of a room a few feet away, and walk around looking for where bass is most even. You can mark some speaker and listening spots with tape on the floor. This gives you starting points for the locations and you can optimize from there.

I’m not sure what you’re doing? I think the only time I would ‘print’ anything ( I use Cubase so we don’t use that term) is if it is not stable, or repeatable, or needs some process added that needs an audio file. I never add anything before I record. Everything is done on the recorded track now, with the exception of maybe adding a bit of extra gain. I have one bass that needs a bit of help, and my preamp is worse at adding extra, extra gain than the increase level facilities in the DAW. My favourite and least noisy method is by sticking the Cubase compressor on the input, turning the knob to no compression, but using the make up gain feature. This works better than turning up the preamp gain for me. I might freeze an old MIDI synth to capture the special sound I created because I know that if I save the project the MIDI settings wont be saved properly. Other than that, everything I record is as captured. I change my mind so often, ‘printing’ anything would annoy me, because I can’t go back and remove the compression or other treatment. I just can’t see any benefit and see lots of disadvantages. Have I missed something that you do it for?