Hi Todd and all. No word today from Alan. But I did work with him in 2004 and we talked gear quite alot.
I have had the pleasure of working with Alan, Flood, Al Sutton (Kid Rock's dude), Paul Logus (google him, you won't believe how much he's mixed), and many other top mixers.
Parallel compression is pretty much yes, alot, on everything, with most every mixer.
Alan's fave in 2004 on drum sub (all drums submixed through 2 channels) was Vac Rac stuff. The origional, hard to find, highly sought after EQ's. He added a nice little boost of somewhere around 150 to 220, somewhere in there. I actually reacted to his darkening of my drums by pulling up a plug in eq and adding like .4 db of 10k back in. This was during my turn at the protools rig, we were trading off now and then. The first thing Alan noticed when he resumed his shift was that the drums didn't sound the way he had left them. He quickly pulled up the plug-in (McDSP, which I find aggressive for a plug) and turned and asked "Who put this plug in on the drums?" (because Flood was taking turns too). I said I did and explained why. He seemed perplexed and bypassed and unbypassed it several times. He left it in, but I couldn't tell if he hated it or not.
But I think Alan is not afraid to leave things dark, or better said, to not add highend to things. He definitely uses compression, super small amounts from very expensive boxes. He definitely uses alot of stereo eq's, little tiny dashes from expensive boxes.
This is 'High End Mixer' normality. You have learned to not overcompress and usually all of your vu's are doing little taps. A four band Massive Passive might just have one band boosting a little low mid, because that's where the box shines. You'll see Neve 32264's. Blue stripe 1176's. Expensive stuff and none of it responsible for heavy lifting, but all of it adding up to a great sound.
When Alan got a mix where he dug it, it was practically all on 12 faders. 6 Stereo pairs. All the guitars on one, bass on one, drums, back vox, keys, lead vox. You could make heavy decisions with a fraction of a fader. He liked to run a few different ones, no buss comp, one with...then lets all run out to the car and see what we think, which one is better.
This is another H.E.M. normality, use boom boxes, use lots of stereos to check stuff on, multiple monitors.
I'm going to go gently nudge Alan for everyone now. Please remember my request to make your questions easy to answer, I know we'll get some answers, but the easier for him the more likely and quickly he might keep this going.
