I remember when the original UAD-1 came out almost (if not more than) 10 years ago. At the time is was ground breaking for the computer audio mix engineer that was interested in being able to mix in the box and use very high quality plug-ins that didn't completely drain the host CPU resources. I got one and never looked back. The UAD-1 was better than anything else available at the time that I can remember.
Now with the UAD-2 available and well established we see the possibilities have grown tremendously for DSP mixing as a single UAD-2 solo card is 2.5 times as powerful as the UAD-1 and that's just for the the lowest powered version. The quad card is a full 10 times as powerful as a UAD-1 on a single card (and you can use four of them at once). The funny thing about all of that is not only has outboard DSP power increased 10 times or better in a very short period of time, but native CPU processing has also increased to immense levels. One does not even need a UAD to get the processing one might want for mixing a particular project if a well specified computer is used.
What all of this processing power amounts to are virtually limitless options for the in-the-box mixing engineer in terms of signal processing selection and individual instances of processing per channel available. That might seem like a good thing and it is in many respects. But there is a downside.
The downside is that many inexperienced mixers are relying on too many plug-ins to get the job done and their mixes are suffering for it. Too much signal processing is really a problem with a person's idea about what is needed to accomplish signal processing goals. The irony is that even though we have so much power and selection at our disposal the best way to use that power and selection is as conservatively as possible.
The overuse of signal processing or instances of signal processors in a single project is something of a new problem for would-be professional audio engineers in general. Back in the day it was a rare thing to have anything near the amount of signal processing available in one studio as the average home recording enthusiast has available to them inside their computer today. Yet even without the kind of selection available back then mix engineers managed to come up with some excellent mixes. Why? Well firstly, and perhaps most importantly, because they were working with great recordings many times to start with. But also they knew that it was more important to give just enough and let the record speak the rest of the story all on it's own. That's a lesson a lot of new in-the-box mix engineers could stand taking to heart.
Too much processing is like using too much makeup. If a person has a pretty face they don't need much makeup to enhance what's already there. So the goal to getting the perfect makeup job is to have a pretty face to start with and then not tossing on so much crap that the face doesn't look realistic or recognizable anymore. Audio mixers are a lot like makeup artists. The best ones have a few key pieces of gear that they use on almost everything just to tactfully enhance the good qualities already present in the recordings and to carefully and subtly minimize any flaws. That's what it's all about. Just because you have 10 compressors available to use doesn't mean that you'll need to use more than one or two at best. Just because you can put an EQ on every channel doesn't mean that you actually need to do so. Sometimes the best thing one can do is as little as possible.
Plug-in manufacturers make a lot of money from convincing those that don't know that they don't have a complete set of tools until they buy the latest and greatest plug-ins or bundles of plug-ins. But it's important to realize that a lot of that stuff all does the same kinds of things that most people already can do. If more in-the-box mixers understood how to tweak their basic signal processors they would find that they could get by not only with using a lot fewer plug-ins per mix but also with not purchasing the big name, big dollar plug-ins that are so often pushed as "the solution" to all your audio woes.
I recently mixed a project for a customer who had apparently had someone else do a mix of the same song before me. The customer brought both their un-mixed tracks and their "rough mix" to me to listen to so that I could use the rough mix to get an idea of where they had wanted to go. As I listened to the rough mix I found several instances of overuse of plug-ins that had the mix sounding messy, crowded and overly processed. It didn't breathe and it lacked definition and punch. But apparently this mix engineer was convinced that they were really doing something cool with the mix by over processing everything. I ended up mixing that project using no more than a UAD-1, a few plug-ins from the Waves Native Power Pack and Cubase's stock plug-ins and I still had 50% DSP available from the UAD. I might have used 8 individual instances of signal processing on the entire 20+ track mix. In the end the mix came out wonderfully and it just goes to show that the key is restraint.
It won't be long before Universal Audio (a great company by the way) releases the next version of their UAD card, which will undoubtedly be exponentially more powerful than the current version, thus enabling users to have thousands of instances of simultaneous, even real time plug-ins at their disposal. But even and perhaps especially then it will be most important for the in-the-box mix engineer to use restraint. The whole thing reminds me of the high sample rate craze that has been propagated by gear manufacturers. The great irony is that these days digital recording and signal processing technology is at the point that if used well it's every bit as good as analog for all typical end listeners so we really shouldn't ever need orders of magnitude more DSP or more plug-ins to do what we can already do quite well now. What we need is to learn how to make good use of what we already have.
