The Essentials, Part One.
Allen & Heath's Zed 24 fit all of my needs into a small package.
While it’s all well and good to use this gear I’ve inherited, it turns out there’s stuff needed to make the gear useful. Here’s my list so far:
Extra Inputs and outputs: Behringer ADA 8000 (2) Yeah, I know I talked a little about these in my post about the Urei 546, but I’m bringing them up again here since they’re the gateway into the analog realm. My plan was to have as many analog outs as my system could sustain. When I priced out extra I/O, I realized that I also needed units that my business could sustain. I had read about the Behringers in Mix magazine, when they did their article about analog summing. I got these two units in a scratch-and-dent sale (Dad would have been proud, he never paid full price for anything). They connected easily to the Presonus Firestudio through the ADAT lightpipe ports and I was off and running. From there, I routed the audio through…
..The Console:
Dad had a 12 channel console that was built by the CBS techs to do remote recording. According to Dad, this console was used to record the New York Philharmonic. When I was doing the singer/songwriter thing in the early nineties, Dad recorded demos of me and my band, using this console and a DAT machine, live to two-track. When I started going through Dad’s gear in North Carolina, that mixer was the first thing I looked for. It still had Dad’s handwriting from those demo sessions on the label strip above the faders (Jim’s VCL, Jim’s GTR etc.). As if that wasn’t compelling enough, the vintage API 550A’s in the EQ section got me pretty excited.
The thing about this console though, was that even though it was “portable”, it was still huge. This was built long before “small format” consoles were developed. It also needed to be connected to an enormous rack that housed the preamps and the I/O section. Nothing was labeled. It seemed like the guys who built it were the same guys who used it and they didn’t feel the need to explain what did what. Also, the ginormous elephant trunk cable that went between the rack and the console seemed to have gone missing. As interested as I was (and am) in this console, it was way more than I wanted to take on at the time. I decided that I’d deal with it later. Of course, I pulled a few of the 550A’s out and brought them back north with me to put in a Lunchbox. But that’s another post.
I still really wanted to try mixing outside of the computer. It was just too easy to start clipping in Logic. If the channel itself isn’t clipping, the master bus is. I got tired of pulling back the faders or putting limiters across everything. It’s just too easy to run out of headroom. Even so, I knew I could still cook up a million excuses not to get started (“I don’t have a good mixer”, “I don’t have any outboard gear” etc.). I decided to jump in with the only mixer I had, a Mackie 1604 Classic.
I didn’t have particularly high hopes for the Mackie, mostly because of all the negative posts I’d read on message boards. The lesson? You gotta try stuff out for yourself. I was really shocked at the difference in the sound coming through that board. It’s not that it sounded so great. In fact, it sounded terrible. Well, I sounded terrible. Suddenly, I could hear mistakes that I hadn’t known were there. I could hear flubbed notes, bad timing, the chair squeaking, the train going by, leaf blowers – I suppose I should have been discouraged by this, but I was thrilled. I immediately got to work fixing it all. You’d be surprised how much those things can improve a mix. (It’s not like I didn’t know that these things shouldn’t be in a recording, it’s just that I wasn’t aware of them while mixing in the computer).
The next surprise was how much less reverb seemed to be needed. In Logic, I usually set two stereo auxes with different sized “rooms” from Logic’s presets. The first is “Wooden Room” (a nice short reverb) and the second is “Nice Vocal Room” (a longer reverb). I set these channels at unity and ran busses from the audio tracks, adjusting the busses on each track as a mix. When mixing through the Mackie, I was sorely tempted to leave the mix dry. There just seemed to be more space in the tracks. In the end, however, I routed Logic’s reverb channels into the stereo auxes on the Mackie, adding the reverb “outside the box”. As it turned out, I only ran the vocal tracks through the reverbs (and just a little bit, at that). This also made for a much more detailed, less cluttered mix. Cool.
I suppose I could have happily mixed through the Mackie for some time, but I quickly ran up against some of its shortcomings. First thing I noticed was that the faders are really short. I found it hard to get levels exactly where I wanted them. I suppose I could have set them at unity and used Logic’s mixer to get where I wanted, but that defeated the purpose of the exercise. The second problem was that the Mackie only has six XLR inputs. That seemed like it would cause problems later on.
Well, now what? I started looking around the net for other, more “professional” boards. I looked at Soundcraft Ghosts on Ebay. They were sorely tempting, but still pretty big for my very small space and priced between $3,000 and $6,000, a bit steep for an experiment. I also saw a Soundcraft 1600 for next to nothing on both eBay and Craigslist. It turns out that the studio that was selling it was just a few towns over from me. I talked to the owner and, again, was sorely tempted. This board is way larger than the Ghost and the reason it was selling so cheaply was that “there was untraceable noise all over it”. I realized I was losing my mind and decided against it.
What I needed to do was sit down, list the features I was looking for in a console and see if such a thing existed. Here’s what I came up with:
100 mm faders: Hell yes. Dad’s console has silky smooth (and dang big) API faders on it. I wanted something like that.
XLR’s on every channel: To me, it was a connectivity issue. I got pretty tired pretty quickly of looking for ways to connect XLR outs to 1/4 or (God forbid) RCA ins and vice-versa. I’ll post more about this later.
Serviceable EQ’s on every channel: Sure, I’d just inherited a bunch of cool EQ’s, but I had (and still have) no guarantees that any of this stuff is in working condition. I just wanted to be able to shelve off a little high or low end without having to rely on potentially questionable gear. Besides, even though I’m calling this an experiment, I still have to turn out work.
A guarantee not to be DOA: Sure, it’d be cool to buy some groovy vintage console, but the likelihood that it would arrive in my studio with no issues was pretty slim.
Flexible I/O: Well, there’s really not a lot to explain here.
Affordability: As much as I don’t want to admit it, I’m running a business here and I have to watch that bottom line.
More Channels: What good is having 24 analog outs if I’ve only got a 16 channel board?
Size: I’ve got a small room and not a lot of desktop space.
Is all this too much to ask? I was getting worried that such a thing didn’t exist. Tape Op Magazine had an article about Dan Garcia and the custom console that he’d built for himself. Well, that’s one way to go- but again, I could see myself getting mired in a project that I’d never finish.
What’s a guy to do?
I hit the net and started searching in earnest. It wasn’t long before I found exactly what I was looking for: the Allen and Heath Zed 24. As it’s name implies, it’s a 24 channel 4 bus analog mixer (16 mono channels, 4 stereo). It’s got 100mm faders, stereo returns, xlrs on every mono channel and (weirdly enough) a USB port. So how much does something like this set me back? I hope you’re sitting down. $699.00. No, really. I sold off a guitar and a keyboard and it was paid for.
So, where can you get one? That’s another story. I called Sam Ash. “Oh, yeah, we’ve got that.” So I went up to the store only to find that they didn’t. They completely denied telling me that they had it in stock. Whatever.
Guitar Center’s website also said that the location near me carried the Zed 24. When I got there, surprise!, it wasn’t in stock either. The pro audio sales guy had the balls to tell me, “You don’t want that.”
I admit it. I hate being told what I do and do not want. I hate being talked to like I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m the guy who’s actually making a living doing music. It’s my recordings that are being played on television. Don’t tell me what I want.
Even so, I kept my mouth shut and decided to see what the GC guy thought I might want. Everything he showed me had tiny little faders on it, very few XLRs and felt crummy. When he finally pulled up the Zed 24 on GC’s computer, even he was shocked by the Zed’s feature set-especially given its price range. “We can order it for you, but it’ll take a few weeks.”
Screw that. As much as I like to “shop local”, the local shops were useless. Musicians Friend had the Zed 24 in stock, free shipping with an Audio Technica dynamic mic thrown in for good measure. I got it in three days.
It was a leap of faith. I had never actually seen the Zed 24 in the flesh.
I don’t know why Allen and Heath seems to be keeping this mixer a secret. I haven’t been able to find much information about it. There are a bunch of mixers in this series in all kinds of different configurations.
With the console set up, I began mixing in earnest. The first project I worked on was a CD of the music I do at historic sites. I had made a short run of these a year earlier, mixing in the box. It had been a rush job so that I’d have product for a festival I was doing. I wasn’t exactly happy with the end result but it would do. Now, with more time, I would re-do the mixes.
Sitting at the console, playing with knobs and faders, I suddenly found myself having a suspiciously familiar experience. In my rush to get this CD done, I left a lot of takes in that I shouldn’t have. There’s no fix for that except to redo the tracks. So I did. But now, I was monitoring through the board as well. How is that different? Well, in Logic there is a setting for low latency monitoring. While it’s good, there is still some latency. I hadn’t realized how off-putting I’d found that to be. It’s an issue of focus; even though I wasn’t conscious of the latency, it was distracting enough to affect my playing. Monitoring through the Zed felt more natural. I didn’t have to adjust my timing to match the other tracks.
Once the offending takes were re-done, I got back to mixing. I was still puzzled about why mixing on a console was so different from mixing on a computer. Then it hit me. When I mix on the computer, I’m looking at two monitors. There are all kinds of things going on there; wave forms scrolling by, meters rising and falling, eq analyzers gyrating- it’s another level of distraction. My console is at a right angle to all this. The computer monitors are to my left and behind me. There’s nothing to look at. I’m just listening. Really listening. Um, duh.
So maybe there is no “analog magic”. Maybe the math works out in the digital domain. I don’t know. I don’t care. For me, just being free of those visual distractions is reason enough to work this way.
I’m not prostelytizing. I’m describing my experience. Your mileage may vary.
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