Mixers

The craze for mashing up wildly different records to create illicit bootleg mixes has moved into the mainstream, and underground producers such as Richard X and Mark Vidler now find their services in hot demand from artists and record labels.

I'm looking to buy a moving-fader control surface for my DAW and I'm wondering if it's worth paying a bit extra for one with touch-sensitive faders. How important a feature is this?

In 1996, the Fugees came like a breath of fresh air into a world of hip-hop that was becoming stale around the edges. Now Wyclef Jean is a star in his own right, and has deployed his production talents for artists ranging from urban legends like Funkmaster Flex and Cypress Hill to Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson and even Tom Jones.

Although many of the most famous music mixing engineers have been in the business for decades, we find out how a new generation of up-and-coming stars are combining traditional and cutting-edge recording techniques to make their mark on modern production.

Last year's Love & Life album saw R&B superstar Mary J Blige reunited with Sean Combs (aka Puff Daddy, aka P Diddy) and his Bad Boy production stable. Mix specialist Tony Maserati spent two months at Miami's Circle House Studios working on the project, and recorded his experiences in this unique diary.

I was told by a sound engineer that, when mixing, it is not a good practice to have all the channel volume faders way up and to have the master fader down, and that this applies both to analogue and digital consoles. Is this true?

Different mixing consoles and multitrackers have different kinds of faders — long- and short-throw, motorised, touch-sensitive, conductive plastic, and so on. Clearly, not all faders are created equal, but what are the essential differences?

When Jimmy Page decided to mine a massive archive of decaying Led Zeppelin live footage for a DVD and double CD, the epic task of restoring, editing and mixing the audio went to rock specialist Kevin Shirley — who has gone on to help veteran metallers Iron Maiden return to the upper reaches of the charts.

Please can you explain the difference between 'soloing' a channel and using the other buttons marked 'PFL' and 'AFL' to listen...

Blur's latest album has taken the band 18 months to make, commuting between London, Devon and Morocco. Somehow, producer Ben Hillier also found the time to produce new records by Elbow and Tom McRae...

If you don't think the sampler can be a musical instrument, then you haven't been listening to the music of Amon Tobin!

Can I use my drum pads to trigger drum machine sounds? • Are red indicators in audio software significant? • What is 'zero level'? • Can you advise me on vocal recording and microphones? • Why have my faders stopped working? • Does normalising have any adverse effect on audio? • Can I obtain better orchestral sounds on a budget?

Queen's seminal 1975 album and the worldwide hit from it, 'Bohemian Rhapsody', might almost have been tailor-made for surround sound. Now guitarist Brian May and engineer/surround specialist Elliot Scheiner have remixed this masterpiece for what promises to be a genre-defining DVD-Audio release.

More than ever before, it's possible to reproduce the functions of a hardware mixer with software in a computer. But can you completely replace a mixer with software — and, more to the point, should you be trying to? Paul White plays devil's advocate...

I am thinking about upgrading the audio setup of my computer system (G3/300 tower with 92Mb RAM). I am looking at the MOTU...

I need to upgrade my 16‑channel Mackie 1604VLZ mixer to 32 channels, but there is a cash problem. The price...

Although he started his working life as a producer, Tom Lord-Alge chose to narrow his field of work, and now ranks alongside Bob Clearmountain and his brother Chris Lord-Alge as one of the best mix engineers in the world. We discover what makes a TLA mix tick...

Since coming to prominence through his work with the KLF, Spike Stent has become one of the most sought-after mixers in the world. Paul Tingen visits him in his new purpose-built London studio to talk about the role of the specialist mixer.

Hugh Robjohns shrinks to microscopic size in order to show you around the conglomeration of knobs, wires and circuits that make up a mixer.

Two men, a girl and an electrical appliance meet under strange circumstances in the Swiss Alps. Ted Fletcher reports.