<p>Anyway, once I began to get into 'serious' studio work in commercial facilities, I mixed on a completely analogue system (Studer A820 tape machines and a vintage Neve console -- those were the days!) retrofitted with Neve's touch-sensitive Flying Faders system. The thing that was wonderful about this system (and indeed the automation on the big SSL desks) was that it offered a mode called 'relative trim' that made recording mix automation a joy. Once you'd set up your basic fader balance, you'd enter relative trim mode and all the faders would jump to their 0dB positions, but without your actual channel volume levels changing. Then if you ran the tape and touched any fader, it would start writing automation <strong>as an offset to any underlying automation that was already there</strong>. This meant that you could play the track again and again and iteratively tweak the automation without the faders whizzing around the whole time, and without having to think about what the automation curves actually looked like. You'd just listen, tweak faders, listen again, tweak further, etc., etc. -- it was almost as musical a process as playing an instrument, and a super-quick way to work, especially when automating things like lead vocals which typically need a lot of detailed rides.</p>

<p>When I moved out of the commercial studios to work for <em>Sound On Sound</em>, I suddenly found myself in the world of in-the-box mixing, and there were two things I missed in particular from the old hardware setup. The first was nothing to do with hardware control: it was the ability to route audio <em>anywhere</em>. Early DAWs were dreadfully restrictive about how and where you could route audio, side-chaining possibilities were almost non-existent, and plug-in delay compensation was a joke. Fortunately, this was all solved when I moved to Reaper, which is great in that respect -- and this kind of thing has also since improved a great deal in most other DAWs, to be fair. However, the second thing I missed was relative trim mode, and while many other DAWs have implemented this in recent years, it only become possible very recently in Reaper. (Grrr.)</p>

<p>As such, until very recently I've actually felt no need at all to have a hardware controller for mixing. It's not that I've not tried any -- I have -- but honestly the mouse and keyboard have never felt like the speed bottleneck when mixing on a computer. Most of my mixing process is listening, not doing, fundamentally, so the mouse can keep up with that just fine. Admittedly, I can appreciate that a bank of hardware faders makes setting up initial balances quicker and more intuitive (which is why I <em>do</em> have a 24-fader hardware controller for my new location recording rig), but to be honest most of my projects have so many channels and folders that dealing with all the banking and stuff has always felt like a faff with any reasonable-sized control surface. After all, I'm not having to mix live events, so I don't really need that 'instant reaction' ability of leaping for a fader that's out of balance the moment I hear it.</p>

<p>But, of course, where I've long cursed my lack of hardware control has been at the automation stage. However, without relative trim mode, hardware faders for automation aren't much use, so it's only now that Reaper's (finally!) caught up with the pack that I've got myself some control hardware for mixing. And because I only do detailed automation rides on one channel at a time, I only need one fader, so I just got a Presonus FaderPort. And it's brilliant -- just thinking of the hours it saves me on every mix these days brings a smile to my face!</p>

<p>So, to answer the question directly now: what are my opinions on using control surfaces during the mix? Well, for mixing purposes, I don't think hardware control offers much of a time saving except at the automation stage (assuming your DAW provides relative trim mode), so I wouldn't feel any compulsion to invest in anything other than a single-fader unit. I know from my analogue days how nice it is to have all the physical controls laid out in front of you, and I've tried systems such as Focusrite's AutoMap which give you remappable plug-in controls, but fundamentally hardware control beyond a single fader isn't something that I think really justifies the investment in terms of workspeed -- certainly when set against many other things that usually warrant the expenditure much more in most project studios: monitoring hardware, acoustic treatment, microphones, instruments... (Bear in mind, too, that hardware controllers, like any computer peripheral, will have a shelf-life that'll be limited by their operating-system and connectivity compatibility, so a big investment in hardware control will get you probably 10 years use at best, and will at that point be all-but-valueless, whereas monitors, mics, and acoustic treatment tend to hold their value for a greater length of time.)</p>

For tracking or live sound, however, the situation's different, because having one fader (and mute/solo/select button) per track makes an enormous difference in terms of being able to react super-quickly under those circumstances. So if your system serves double-duty, that might swing your vote towards using more comprehesive hardware control at mixdown.</p>