After many months of hard work in my small home studio I finally finished my first song, although it is no great masterpiece there was a lot of knowledge gained from my experience. What’s more important are the questions that arose from this practice.

I got it all done burned it to a CD and listened to it on various sources just like everyone says to do. I noticed that that the clarity and depth was not great, also it seemed to lack that analog thickness that I’m looking for and it’s overall volume was much lower than a professional CD. I then took a professional CD with the style of music that I created and compared it to my recording. I could hear a big difference and see a big one on the meters of my Mackie 16x8 board. I thought about where my samples came from and realized that, because of my inexperience I may have recorded them a bit cold going in to the DAW. I tried going back and making some changes to the different tracks ie, compression, eq, things like that. Overall the mix got a lot better when I used a Waves L2 plugin on the final mix.

So I thought about different configurations of preamps compressors and eq’s that could help my signal chain going in to my DAW and for my final mix during mix down.

I was thinking along the lines of an old analog preamp / eq like a Neve 1073, Vintech X81 or some instrument that I can use to give my sampled sounds that fat analog thickness before going into my DAW. I have also heard of guy’s running their final mix thought a pair of these to fatten their sound up.

Here is my set up Mackie 16x8 bus mixer hooked up to a Pro Tools 002 Rack that runs on a laptop. A Desktop that is used for editing and mixing down with a echo MIA soundcard. A tr707, tr727, access virus indigo, 2 technics 1200’s, Electrix filterfactory, moFX, Warpfactory. Once the samples that I’m going to use are in the computer most of my mixing is done in the box. Any suggestions