Mixbus Group Buy

blobb

I'm a convert to Harrison Mixbus - it comes in two flavours: standard (v4) and full (v4 32c).

The basic one is good, 32c has a full recreation of the console eq.

Over at SoS forum, a group buy deal is being set up to bring the price down.

We need to get as many signatures as possible, basically you enter your email and you go on their mail list. They are not an intrusive company in terms of spam and they often send out offers. Signing up doesn't commit to purchasing anything but the more names we can get the better the deal they will give us.

SO I'm scavenging around looking for people who either fancy getting in on the group buy or wouldn't mind adding their name to help fellow musicians get a good deal. Here's the link:

Mixbus group buy sign up: https://harrisonconsoles.lpages.co/soun ... group-buy/

SoS forum post: https://www.soundonsound.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=58406

Many thanks.

blobb

Thanks to everyone or anyone that joined in with this. We managed over 800 requests!

• Bonus: over 800 requests and you get it all; Mixbus, Mixbus32C, and the Essentials Bundle for $99! (retail $457) Goal met! Sign up now if you haven't already.

$99 is about £75

Looks like the offer is still valid (was, as of today anyway) for anyone wishing to sign up, I might have a couple of tickets I don't need.

thanks again.
Nick...

digitalscream

I really must get round to playing with Mixbus...I've got the Linux version installed (not 32c, though), and it seemed pretty good. Probably need to learn how to use it properly...

blobb

Not so full featured as other DAW's, not so good at midi etc.. but competent at what it offers.

Big plus points for me are
1. Ease of use. It just does what you want, want to split a track? Hover the mouse where you want to split, press 's' for split. Simple I know, but extend this logic up to wanting to set up a temp map ......no more scouring the cubase manual!
2. Workflow. it's a console emulator, each channel is based on a strip. Dead easy to get good levels and sounds from the first minute you use it, which leads to
3. Sound. Lots of hot air and exhaustive nay-sayers with a/b tests - who are probably right - but the ease of use and console approach means things work together. So the result sounds better. It's not anything to with algorithms in my opp. Built in loudness meters help with this and I believe (not used myself) it has a spectral analyser built in somewhere.

32c offers the expanded eq which is worth it. The deal above gets the in house Harrison plugs, which are great.

To be honest, try the 32c demo. It's full featured but inserts some hiss periodically. Depending on the recordings you make, this can be annoying or disappear completely.

If you try the 32c demo, they will offer you the $99 dollar deal at some point. I'm in this group buy for the plug-ins mostly.

Cirrus

Signed up for the group buy and tried the 32c demo last night. I'm pretty impressed, to be honest. The only reason I decided to try it was that a plug I'd got earlier in the week was crashing my usual DAW, Sonar X3, and I wanted to test it on something else.

Exported the uneffected tracks for a song I'm working on in Sonar into a new Mixbus project and was quite surprised just bringing up the faders on the drum tracks - heard a difference even before doing anything, things sounded a bit more solid and punchy. In Sonar, and most DAWS I suppose, I've always have the feeling when just bringing up the faders that I need to start *doing* stuff to make things sound good. Also, Mixbus I felt like I could choose how I wanted to balance the kit much more freely without exposing problems.

The EQ is great, though on my screen the controls are pretty small. Not having any Q-control or numeric readouts for freq and gain forces you to dial it in by ear and not get too analytical about things, but I was quite surprised that just using the EQ, I ended up with a pretty sweet drum sound. With the same project in Sonar I found myself doing two or three big tight cuts on the toms for example to get rid of boingy low mid resonances and using a character Neve-style EQ for some boosts. Mixbus's EQ seemed to do the same job with a single cut of about 5dB around 400hz, a 100hz boost and a 10k boost. Didn't feel the need to go hunting for problems.

The built in channel compressor is really quite usable. And the tape emulation on the busses... what's going on there? It sounds great. Does exactly what I want it to do - round off the transients without loosing punch or depth.

Then I scanned for my trusty plugins and tried some of my favourites. They all opened fine and functioned. Except I felt like Mixbus really clearly let me hear exactly what they were doing, and it wasn't always what I hoped. For example, in Sonar I like to use console emulation, tape plugs, saturation etc to thicken things up and add character. In some cases, that worked well - the drum overheads for example benefited. But elsewhere, I heard what they were doing as a loss of punch and making things sound smaller/ flatter, and I didn't like that as much. Trying some plugs on the busses and master had the same effect - whether for better or worse, I really felt like Mixbus was letting me hear more clearly what the plugs were actually doing to the sound, where in Sonar I sometimes found the differences very subtle and hence harder to judge.

The ability to put plugs anywhere in the channel signal chain is nice too - including post-fader, a real oversight in Sonar I think.

By the end of my 90 minutes of playing round with making a rough mix, I felt like I'd arrived at a place where the mix sounded good without as much processing - in Sonar, basically every channel would have 2-4 plugs on it. Some of the tracks in Mixbus only had the desk eq and anything else would have been over-egging things.

There was one major issue, though. At some point during the session, an error occurred that stopped Mixbus being able to save the session. Not fantastic. If I can get to the bottom of that, I'll definitely be buying this. It actually does sound better, which is a bit of a shock.

guitarfishbay

@Cirrus ;

Have you demoed Studio One? It might work for you.

I don’t use this feature but it has something called mix engine FX that you might find interesting. Basically allows for crosstalk between adjacent channels and driving a virtual console etc.

https://youtu.be/Z90grQ7EcsY

https://www.presonus.com/press/press-releases/CTC-1

http://www.studio-one.expert/studio-one-blog//studio-one-mix-engine-fx-passthrough-mode-explained

blobb

For me, the 32c eq shines when you start using it in an iterative way. I'm recording mic'd guitar/bass and adding SD2 drums.

The drums come already mixed from SD, dial in the bass eq to suit then start carving up the guitar to get the harmonics in the right place. Then go round the loop again. Eventually, I can tease out textures and saturation from the eq that I could never get with a visual system (ex Cubase user talking!). The 'use you ears' thing mentioned above really stands out. I used to sweep for bad freq's and cut. Now I carve out a sound, tuning it to the other sounds in the arrangement similar to tuning synth OSC's. At some point you want to automate it and again it flexes muscles there too. Gain staging is really simple to grasp in Mixbus and boosting regions is dead easy.

BTW, the channel compressor has three settings: comp; leveller; limiter - it's one click and a mouse wheel roll to drive against the limiter and then go back to std compressions to see how it sounds. You really learn how to mix, rather than learning how to use some software.  

 Downsides for me: some crashes, mainly when I'm pushing processor use. As each channel effectively has plug ins loaded by default, the cpu use can be high at times. Watch the meter top right. Some users reporting crashes with various plugs, can't say I've had any issues though so it sounds pot luck. They do release updates often though and v4 is a great improvement over v3 in terms of stability. Save often.

Some good videos on YT on how to make the most.

Cirrus said:

It actually does sound better, which is a bit of a shock.

£ for £, I'm not totally convinced it sounds better. But, without a doubt, it makes you better at mixing which in-turn sounds better. I've got about 6 tracks which I did in Cubase, then re-mixed in MB. One is all about quality: clean and precise, controlled. The other is rampant guitars, valve amps, thumping bass and mad drumming.

  

Cirrus

@guitarfishbay ; never tried it, no. Does look cool from the demo, though I have to admit that hearing such a major change in tone between the three modes over a youtube video does make me wonder if it'd do too much for my taste. The channel crosstalk emulation is interesting for sure, I don't think many plugs out there do that other than SKnote's channel.

I mean, I've only used Harrison for a couple of hours last night so I definitely need to get more involved in it to have a balanced opinion, but hearing it sound good off the bat kinda helped me understand something I've seen lots of pros say on various forums - which is that DAWs make you work harder. But more than that, some of them say something that's never made much sense to me, which is that in DAWS you actually lose something.

Well, digital theory is beyond reproach and so is the mathematics behind digital summing. So how can that be? By nature it's got to be perfect. So the conclusion is that perfect is bad, and the imperfections of analogue are good - that losing information through distortion, non-flat phase and frequency response, natural differences across multiple channels, inability to track or reproduce fast, high transient signals actually gives you a sound that's subjectively better.

And that's great, because DAWS and digital audio by nature are perfect. So if you just get the modelling right, you can totally 100% create those same imperfections in the digital environment and get everything you feel is *lost* in the computer compared to an analogue setup. So you approach it from the point of view that perfection has been achieved, and you just have to find the right imperfections to sound pleasing.

But then I started seeing posts from people involved in the coding side over many years saying that actually DAW audio engines get stuff wrong, and that things like gain scaling, sample rate conversion for oversampling, dithering between plugins/ channles/ busses etc actually isn't always handled very well.

Which makes me think, what if DAW audio engines actually aren't perfect, and something *is* being lost compared to analogue, in a very slight, cumulative and insidious way?

From some browsing over at the Harrison forum (doing my due diligence!) the developers do mention that low level stuff as being part of the reason for their claim that Mixbus's audio engine is superior. I wonder if that's actually more important for depth of field, stereo width, ability to hear into the mix etc than loading 50 console emulation plugins that add harmonic distortion across the entire mix?

All just idle musings, I don't have the answer and I'm not smart enough to understand the processes at a code level.

guitarfishbay

There’s also this if you weren’t aware of it - 72 individually modelled channels

https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/products/bx_console_e.html

Cirrus

I've heard that's fantastic. Have you tried it?

guitarfishbay

No I haven't, not sure I want to spend more money on SSL/Neve emulations right now, already have Waves and Slate versions as it is. 

Octatonic has used the SSL ones at least, he seemed to think it worked though and a lot of the feedback has been very positive online.

http://thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/comment/1615836/#Comment_1615836