“I’m pretty intimate with my outboard gear and my setup allows me to utilize them efficiently to color a track in accordance to what it might need.” Indeed so. The artistry of Niko Schauble of Pughouse and his collection of vintage outboard EQs, compressors and preamps was exactly what I needed. I figured since I had already put in this much work, Niko’s warm boxes would be icing. The exported tracks from Singapore were imported into a ProTools station. Some of the reverbs were replaced with Sony Oxfords and Lexicon Native. Niko’s suggestion of using Sound Toy’s Echoboy turned out to be what some of my vocals needed for that slight touch of glimmer in the mix. The signal path went from the playback machine (ProTools) through an Apogee Symphony, into a Neumann Vintage Maker Summing Mixer and then out to a second system via an Apogee Duet (which essentially has the same converters as the Symphony) and was recaptured at 24 bit 96 kHz. This process was recommended by Joel and accommodated by Niko who actually went out and bought another Apogee module for my session! On the heavier tracks, we also ran through a pair of Neve 51 channel strips post summing mixer and the cleaner tracks were run through the Earthworks 1024. On the whole, I was pretty ecstatic about how the mixes turned out, punchy on the tracks that needed to be and shimmery on the cleaner acoustic ones. I have always been reticent to use descriptions like “wide” and “deep” but what can I say? The Vintagemaker made my mixes sound “wider” and “deeper” and dare I say, there was a certain “sweetness” that in-the-box mixing does not give you. So the colors available though analog summing did shine through in the end (although mine was more of a hybrid mixing process) and if you’ve spent substantial time and effort tweaking your mixes as I have, it might behoove you to visit a studio like Pughouse for what I’d like to call “post-processing” before your down mix.”