Catalyst Studios
Rehearsal and Recording
Analogue Summing
Summing your mix through an analogue console naturally adds small pleasing harmonics and distortions that can help ‘glue’ your mixes together and sound professional. The Origin contains a drive function on every channel that can also help and these will be engaged to taste.
This service includes a summed console mix and three other mixes summed through the console using the studio’s Neve, Tegeler and SSL Mix bus compressors inserted into the console signal path to give a choice of ‘glue’ and polish to your song.
It’s what the ‘pro’s’ do!
To use this service what you will need to do is send us what is going to be your final mix balance as separate stereo ‘stems’ that have been ‘bounced’ together with all their EQ, Effects and any other processing and we’ll do the rest. We will run these stems through the console and then each of the compressors and record these mixes back into the computer. You will then have a choice of 4 mixes to send off to your mastering engineer.
You will receive the following mixes :-
1. Console Summing – Straight console summing with nothing inserted into mix bus.
2. Console Summing – Console G Bus compressor inserted into mix bus signal path.
3. Console Summing – Neve 33609 compressor inserted into mix bus signal path.
4. Console Summing – Tegeler Crème compressor/eq inserted into mix bus signal path.
What are ‘stems’?
People these days mistakenly use the word ‘stem’ to refer to what would have been separate tracks on a multi-track tape but that isn’t what we mean. The term is derived from the film industry where they would mix the final film soundtrack using premixed ‘stems’ for dialogue, music, foley and fx. So think of ‘stems’, in our case, as a grouping together of similar instruments. So, for example, a typical ‘stem’ layout you would send could be made up of the following stereo ‘stems’ :-
· Drums
· Bass
· Acoustic Guitars
· Electric Rhythm Guitars
· Electric Lead Guitars
· Keyboards
· Percussion
· Lead Vocal
· Backing Vocals
When these files are all fed through the console with the faders at 0 (unity gain) you will hear your final mix balance.
You must remember to bounce all the effects and processing with the ‘stem’. For instance, you would bounce the lead vocal together with the effects such as reverb or echo included.
Here are the main guidelines to follow for us to be able to provide this service :-
· Make sure all stereo ‘stems’ have the same start point.
· We have 32 console channels available, so the maximum number of stereo ‘stems’ is 16.
· Files can be Wav or AIFF recorded at 44.1khz, 48khz, 88.2khz or 96khz. 16 or 24 bit.
· Files can be sent via WeTransfer or Dropbox.
Contact us for details of uploading, project pricing and if you have any general questions.
Price per song - £30
Tel : 01744 733222