Imagine if you could mix your music in one of the finest sounding controls rooms in the world.
Well, that is what Waves have done here with Abbey Road Studio 3. They’ve taken their NX Technology and combined it with 2 years of development of the Abbey Road Studio 3 plugin.
It has a really impressive result, whether you want to mix using it alone or you want to mix with your headphones and then use it in conjunction with your headphones to find out how it would sound in another environment. – Either way, it’s a wonderful piece of technology.
What I love and one of the most important things, is that you can now hear what your music would sound like in a room that you can 100% trust.
So many of us are mixing in environments where we aren’t sure if it’s going to translate. Some of the greatest albums and some of the greatest producers, engineers, and mixers have mixed and to this day continue to mix in this room.
It’s considered to be one of the finest mix rooms in the world. – Now you can listen to your music in that environment!
In this episode, we’re going to have a lot of fun because we just got back from London’s Abbey Road. Where we had a great time, curtesy of Waves, because they have a brand new plugin!
You may have already checked it out, it’s Abbey Road Studio 3 for the NX Series. We went there and heard from Mirek Stiles, who is Abbey Roads representative and part of the design team with Waves.
Let’s check out a little clip of Mirek Stiles talking about the technology they’ve come up with to find out how and why they did it.
There are a lot of opinions on this, so I will say I’m firmly on the opinion of “I like this.” – You might ask why.
The reason for my opinion is I came up with this idea a couple of years ago to do this myself. – Last year I approached a company to do this very idea.
I mix on headphones out of necessity and I know you can mix on headphones, in fact, I have done a ton of live streams where I mix on headphones and I get good results. – Check them out!
But I don’t enjoy it as much, I find that I’m listening to music almost forcibly, It feels as if it’s going straight into my ears. There is not the experience of being in a room.
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I like mixing with monitors, I also like mixing in rooms I like the sound of. Headphones are a different animal, don’t get me wrong there are many many people that mix on headphones that get great results. Andrew Scheps, for instance, mixes on Sony 7506 which in America are considered to be studio standard headphones.
We do know that people can mix on headphones and get great results. However, predominately most people still mix on monitors. There is something enjoyable about the process, I love sitting back relaxing, turning it down and just getting the experience of being in a room.
Many people talk about leaving the room and hearing from outside of the room to get a different perspective. – There is just something wonderful about mixing on monitors.
The idea with the Waves NX and specifically Abbey Road Studio 3 plugin are to experience what it is like mixing in that room.
So we went to Abbey Road, saw the presentation, but as we like to say in England “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
They had a bunch of Pro Tools stations set up with a pair of headphones plugged into each of them. – nothing fancy but the software.
They have the system modeled for different headphones, they currently have about 10 or 12 headphone emulations and I hear they’re bringing out a ton more.
Each of these stations had a pair of headphones, why is this so cool? Because I could listen to the music there and then immediately go into the control room (the actual control room which this software is modeled on) with all three sets of speakers to compare, near field, mids, and the mains.
The far setting, in particular, was mind-blowingly good.
Watch the full video below to hear about my whole experience.