In a recent post about Mixbus 32c’s mixer I discussed some ‘issues’ with the EQ. I’ve since discussed this issue with a number of people, including engineers at Harrison.

So the purpose of this post is to clarify some things, correct a potential error, and help you understand (at a very basic level) how and why digital EQs differ.

This doesn’t cover EVERYTHING, just one specific difference between EQs in the context of this discussion.

Let’s get on with it!

Recently I came in to possession of a Laguna Resaw King bandsaw blade. I heard that it leaves tablesaw-like quality cuts, and would be superior to my Spectrum Supply KerfMaster or Highland Woodslicer.

So to test this, I took a piece of Jatoba which is a wood I use very often, and rip cut it on the same Grizzly G0555X with a riser block with various blades. I timed myself to try and keep the feed rate identical. From there I also prepared samples with low, medium and high angle blade setups in my Veritas bevel-up smoother, my tablesaw with a Dewalt DW7140PT blade, and both sides of a Gyokucho Ryoba for hardwoods.

From there I took macro photographs of each sample in the same lighting. I used a Canon 600d with a EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS on a Reversing Ring. The angle of some photos is changed slightly to help accentuate certain details. You may notice a large variation in colour across the photos, but that is representative of the changes in the wood itself as a result of the preparation method! The frame size is ~4mm.

I’ve organized the images in order from what I feel is worst quality finish to best.

Let’s get on to it…

Mixbus is often seen as a program that, after doing all of your work in another DAW, you drop in stems and mix with. I don’t think that this is necessarily the best use of Mixbus, since it’s a fantastic full-fledged DAW in its own right, however it is one of the best aspects of Mixbus.

The mixer in mixbus is not your typical digital summing box. Each channel has a selection of features that optionally can be sent to a mixbus with a number of features that goes to a master bus with a number of features which can optionally go through a monitoring section with a number of features.

Let’s just dive in and go through what the Mixbus 32c mixer offers.

Blog updates will be paused for the next ~5-7 days or so. I am in the direct path of Hurricane Irma.

I am taking care to be safe, so don’t worry about me. Just don’t expect any updates here for the next week or so!

This time in Mixbus we’re covering some workflow enhancers that are rarely found in other products.

• Meter Bridge
• OSC
• Scripting

Don’t forget Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

This time I’m covering some quality of life improvements that Mixbus offers. Seemingly little things that make day-to-day studio life much easier.

None of these are really ground-breaking features, but they can easily save you hours a week… and probably some stress too.

• Spectral Analysis
• Inline scopes
• Basic Editing
• Automatic Range Editing

Don’t forget Part 1, Part 2 and Part 4.

In part 1 I covered some cool features in Mixbus 4. Here in part 2 I’m going to cover three more awesome features in mixbus.

• Loudness Analysis
• Export Features
• Persistent Undo

Don’t forget Part 1, Part 3 and Part 4.

If you take a look up on the menu bar, you will see a new feature on the site: The Reaper Script Showcase.

I have compiled a number of the flashiest and most useful Reaper scripts in to a central location and created very short videos+explanations of their usefulness. If you know of any cool scrips then please let me know!

Sometimes in a project you may have some items with

• “Preserve pitch when changing rate” off, so that you can stretch them and change the pitch.
• “Preserve pitch when changing rate” on so that you can stretch the item and not change the pitch.
• Pitch changes via the “Pitch Adjust” parameter.

The following script consolidates the selected items so they retain their length and pitch, but with “Preserve pitch when changing rate” on.

It does this by finding items with “Preserve pitch when changing rate” off, then it translates the rate to pitch, assigns that to the pitch value and turns on “Preserve pitch when changing rate”.

Thanks to Canopy for the idea EDIT: 17th of March - and he corrected the script to work with non-rate pitch-based offset.

Mixbus has a number of awesome features that don’t have anything to do with its much lauded ‘Mixbusses’. This begins a multi-part series covering some of these aspects, and eventually the mixbusses themselves.

• Optimize Polarity
• Audio Connection Manager
• Grouping

Let’s dive in!

Don’t forget Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.