So You REALLY Want A Console

So You REALLY Want A Console?
22/02/12 09.44
When The Console Falls Over: So You REALLY Want A Console?

Consoles are like marriage. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I want to make it clear that I've written this little article in pieces starting back in October of 2010 when I got the console and continuing on today. I wrote most of this article when I was in the midst of setting up my Toft ATB32 console, (4) 96-point patchbay setup and added my thoughts over time. The plan is to follow it up with my current thoughts on owning a semi-large console.
The Dream
For years I've dreamed of having a big ass Neve or SSL. Once I recorded my first band, I had this gut feeling that I was going to max this stupid thing out. (That stupid thing being this craft of recording and not necessarily the band. ). No one really told me that the hardest way to build a big fancy studio is to start with a small one. That's another topic, but it reminds me of that joke about the fastest way to become a millionaire is to start out as a billionaire and start an airline. Regardless, I had high hopes of getting to the top. I'm certainly not anywhere near the end of my journey, but over a year ago I made huge progress towards this elusive goal.
The Reality
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Much like some movie where you find that the love of the game of football is nothing but a big business with Al Pacino's boss basically forcing people to play doped up so his stock goes up or something, the bigger studio has it's drawbacks. First off, I didn't go all out.....at least not yet. I had eyeballed various consoles ranging from totally impractical to mostly impractical and finally landed on the fairly impractical Toft ATB32. What's not practical about a Toft ATB32? Even though I had to take the screen door off in order to get the box in the house, I bought a $160 dolly just to make sure this thing didn't take a dive when getting it into the house, and I had to invite a buddy over just to lift it onto my table thing, my nonaudio brother sees it and says, I thought it would be bigger. Oh well. The screen door was easy. That took four minutes of my time and probably only four four-letter words to complete. No problem. I paid an additional $500 for big ol' batch of cables, 2 96-point TT patchbays, and a bunch of headaches. My entire living room looked like the Indiana Jones snake pit. It hurts to even think about it. So what was I doing for the first three weeks? Soldering! What else? Nothing. Just soldiering. Another story, which I'll get into later, is in order to install the meter bridge, I had to turn the console upside down. Of course, I had to make arrangements for my brother to come over just so we could flip the console and toss it on the couch. I asked him to pull out of all the jacks in the back. I went off and looked for a blanket to pad the console in its inverted state. Five minutes later I came back and he was STILL pulling out jacks. I'm not using all the possible inputs on the console (it has multiple inputs per channel), but I got bored counting after 140. Lots Of Jacks What are all these jacks? Each of the 32 channels and 8 subgroups has an TRS line input, a TRS insert, and a TRS direct out. (I'm not using the XLR ins.) That's 120 jacks. When you factor in 6 aux sends, 8 FX returns, 2-bus outs, 2-bus inserts, and whatever else I'm forgetting it doesn't take long to see why this is such a damn mess!
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Pretty much every one of those 140 1/4 jacks was soldiered by myself or one of my buddies who helped. Considering I can get through about 12 of these jacks per hour, that puts this thing into a bit of scope. Each of those jacks costs $1.33 new at Redco. So there's a good $200 in 1/4 jacks. That, too, also puts this console mess in scope. Don't forget that most of these are balanced so every jack has 3 wires to soldier. That doesn't account for the stripping, tinning, and soldering the other three wires at the patchbay end. It doesn't account for the design of the patchbay either. Designing A Patchbay Design? Yes, DESIGN! You do have to DESIGN a patchbay. A Comprehensive Guide To Patchbays You can't just sort of start soldiering and hope you didn't screw up. You have to plan the thing WELL. This is the kind of planning like figuring out what you want to be when you grow up. You can't halfway start until you halfway THINK you know where you will end up. I had planned for 3 patchbays and sort of forgot about inserts. Whoops. I hopped on the Redco website. I picked up a new patchbay, some bulk cable, and a variety of connectors. That only killed me for another $760! The puts the cable bill up to $1276. Bla! It turned out that I needed more snakes, another patchbay (for FX Returns and such), and more connectors. That bill was $470. So that brings us to $1746. Bla! Bla! Again, let me recap.
Things I Didn't Expect To Deal With When Commissioning A Console

Taking screen door off Buying an expensive dolly Dealing with half the purchased cables being screwed up and needing re-solder Dumping additional $760 on wiring paraphernalia Dumping another $470 patchbays, jacks, and wiring
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When The Console Falls Over Of course, I already knew I had a hell of a soldering gig anyway. I planned for that. I had not planned for lateral movement in my console table design. Yup, I was sliding the console out of the way to get to the rear and the damn leg broke off. I knew my design (yes DESIGN...again) was very strong in the downforce department, but wouldn't take much from the side. Oops. So add, Lesson in lateral table strength to the list. (This is unacceptable for me as I've watched numerous construction documentaries on the triangle this past year.) The good news is I was the one sliding it when she lost her leg and the console started to go. My ancestors fought off saber-tooth cheetahs so I could have that kind of inthe-clutch reflex. I managed to catch it and rig it so it wouldn't hold over while I rethought my design....again. Note: Keep in mind that this console does not need to be commissioned. It's a plug in and go kind of console....not too far up the food chain from a Mackie at least in terms of ease-ofinstallation. A console with manuals the size of a set of encyclopedias actually needs to be commissioned. They use this term because install is what the guy does for your rent-toown DVD player. Commissioning sounds more like switching Poland over to capitalism, executing the D-Day Invasion, or maybe building a damn in which at least 20 people die. D-Day and economic switchovers are practical if you have every resource on Earth. For example, I believe it's quite common for studios with big ol' consoles to also have double doors. Not only do they have interns that COULD help, they just hire exlinebackers and therefore don't need them. Us home recording guys, who are used to doing everything ourselves, are at a serious disadvantage with this console stuff. The jury is still out as to whether the Pyramids were built by slaves. All I know is if you want to hook up even a practical console, stay sane, and not ignore your website for 3 weeks, it's highly recommended that you kidnap someone from the nearby tribe and force them to do your work. Just be sure to be politically correct and exploit all races equally. SMILEY
5 Days Later
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It's been five days and I'm still soldering. I did the unthinkable and blew a small fortune on Apogee converters (One Apogee AD-16x and Two Apogee DA-16x's) which require the use of db25 connectors* as opposed to the standard 1/4 and XLR cables I had made about a year ago. These look like printer cables from the old days, but allow you to send 8 balanced signals through one little jack. I could see this being helpful on some kind of live recording rig where you needed to hook 8 racks together in 12 seconds. For my much-more-set-in-stone setup it's a bit tedious. Then again, tedious has been my way of life here lately. * Denotes foreshadowing music for next week's article. Forgetting Everything! Last night I fired up Cubase for the first time in two weeks. I had forgotten the shortcut key for snapping to the next bar (J). It's clear that soldiering fries the brain. Either that or a person will quickly forget their own name if they don't use it. That was a hair demoralizing. I've never went more than a week without opening Cubase. Yuck!
10 Days Later
Soldiering is finished (so I think!). I'm now in the testing phase. I installed the 2 main patchbays for the console to function and so far I've not had one bad cable. I would NOT have predicted that. The only goof up so far is 3 of the aux sends (from the console) used wires that were too short. Oops. My meter bridge came in today. Since I have the Pilot version of the ATB32 (not the 2.1), it turns out I have to flip the console over. That means I have to unhook all my wiring and invite a buddy over for a while. There was a cool video on installing the ATB32 meter bridge on Youtube.
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I did play around with the EQ a bit on a mix I had done a while back. Wow! I can see why Fletcher from Mercenary called this EQ panty wetting. I can see that this console and I are going to get along just fine when I get the damn thing set up.
Not Even Necessary
The funny thing about the console is I don't NEED it. In fact, you may have read my section in Killer Home Recording: Setting Up entitled Why You Don't NEED A Console. The truth is, the only new, functional thing I get from the console (which I couldn't do before) other than ergonomic and aesthetic benefits is the ability to sum signals on the way in. That and I have EQ on every channel on the way in. That's it. I'm excited by this notion, but in and of itself this feature probably isn't worth all that much to most of you. Other than that, I could do pretty much everything digitally using my RME HDSP5296, Cubase 5, and a few good plugins. This includes everything from monitor sends / headphone mixes to custom volumes for each of my studio monitors (when my ruckus unit is jamming).
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Update: While I could TECHNICALLY do quite a bit of this using just my RME's software, it would not be NEARLY this functional in a real situation. Update2: Not long after the console I decided to pursue hardware synths. Those WOULD NOT be anywhere near practical without the console. Update 3: I had no idea just how badass it really could be to sum multiple guitar mics to a single channel, EQ it, compress it, and record it to a single track. Wow!! I want to make it clear that most of my motivation for wanting a console was convenience. I'm not expecting any life changing impact on sound quality. I'm certainly not expecting to listen back to my work in four or five years and be able to point out if a song was a pre-console mix or a post-console mix. We'll see.
2 Months Later
Drum Tracking I love the console. I tracked the best drums of my life (in my tiny little room). Being able to EQ on the way in was outstanding. I'm not sure what it is, but for every GOOD decision you make earlier in the process, it seems to give exponential benefits later on. Adding some top end to the hi-hat is a no-brainer. I may as well get it out of the way now. I've made my views on analog EQ known.
I have to admit that I had to be very careful with the EQ choices I was making. The isolation between my control room and live room would rate dismal on the strokability scale. However, even in this totally unideal situation, I'm 100% positive the EQ made life better for me. The full-blown patchbay setup was a mega pain, but now it takes me 10 seconds to patch in a compressor. Just for fun (and the fact I had the extra time due to the efficient setup) I tossed my Royer R121 in front of the kit at about 4' high and crushed it
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to death with the Distressor. It wasn't quite like running a room mic through a Marshall Plexi, but not too far away. This ended up being the driving force of the entire session. It led to us overdubbing the cymbals, which will lead to some ultra fun mixing options. Without the console, I'm positive we would not have ended up in such a happy place. You don't need a console to record drums with no cymbals, but in this case we did. It's one of those interesting hands that life sometimes deals you. Mixing I've not attempted to do any full-blown analog mixing. It gets crazy when you have about 1/3 the stuff you need for full-blown analog mixing and trying to do all kinda of hybrid crap with plugins here, hardware there. I just finished mixing a project in which I summed with the console. The project was tracked about a year ago. This was the first project I had mixed using the console and UAD plugins, all in a new mixing position. Basically so much changed that it's impossible to say what the impact of the console was. All I know is it turned out fantastic. Even though this was a sludgy rock project (some of the time), it had a clarity and 3Dness to it that I haven't heard in my mixes. We got it very loud without sounding smashed and boring. So I can't say which tools contributed to this, but I'm not giving any of them back. Vocal tracking The singers love zero latency. I don't think I covered it intensely enough here: Latency As Vocal Producing Obstacle Part 2 Having the hardware reverb permanently on FX Return #2 has been ultra-time saving. Direct monitoring as a default way of working can not be beat. Fast Forward To Feb 2012 All of this was written 16 months ago. What are my thoughts on the console now? Was it worth the cash and extreme investment in time, cables, etc? Do my mixes sound w a r m and "analog"? Tune in to this same bat channel next week. Brandon

So You REALLY Want A Console

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When The Console Falls Over: So You REALLY Want A Console?