Dark or gnarly sounding mixers

My pride and joy, Boss BX-8. Honestly, I just use it as a transparent mixer for the most part, but I have driven it a bit crazy and actually ended up releasing some of those tracks.

It’s really just a simple reliable mixer (and cheap usually).

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Wow, it looks great! Please share your tunes.

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This, this, and my tracks on this were all tracked live through it with clearly varying results. Some stuff I just smashed while others I was a bit careful with. I’m still using it now with far more dynamics. It’s really just a flexible and reliable mixer (though limited).

… and some cleaner unmastered unreleased stuff (also live through the mixer): this, this, this

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A&H Zed 10 distorts nicely too, especially channel 3 and 4 with high Z

Some classy grooves. :+1:t2: One can clearly hear the sizzling sounds of the BX.

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UB802 abuse. No additional distortion

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Second test with UB802 as distortion, and self oscillation (feedback). Still dirty. :pl:

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My favorite was a Yamaha MT8X tape multitracker/mixer. The distortion when slamming the inputs sounded amazing and seemed to really compress the sound so that you could saturate/overdrive things really hard without the perceived level going way out of step with the rest of the mix volume wise. This isn’t from tape compression, it was something about the mixer itself.

Old Mackie CR1604 sounded dark and grungy and sounded cool (but not as good as the yamaha) when overdriving the inputs. Problem was it was hard to manage the levels when overdriven. In contrast the newer 1604-VLZ3 sounded awful when overdriven, but overall I 99% preferred the cleaner and more transparent sound of the VLZ3.

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The MT4X also had an awesome bag. It can easily (and inconspicuously) fit two small and one big Elektron (i.e. DT, AR, AH) comfortably with room for cords and cables!

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Another one. No samples! Only noise feedback generated by the mixer, sequenced by OT.

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Coming in to say the same thing about the MTX4. I got the MTX4 over the summer and often times find myself just using the mixer to get some saturation and not dropping anything on to cassette. Also, as far as 4 tracks go they are still pretty reasonable compared to the the Tascam equivalent.

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I have a bx600, bx8, km60, and ms1202. Slowly collected them over the last couple years by watching used ads like a hawk.

KM60 is best for overdrive from light to severe. It also cuts bass, would not recommend for running a kick through. But for adding a bit of colour to synths or as a bass guitar preamp, works great.

Ms1202 I think is my favourite mixer. Versatile, sounds good, can also be clean. I don’t like distortion as much on it as the BX’s but read below for what I currently do…

The BX sounds best acting basically as an overdrive pedal with both channel gain and master gain set to max. When you do this though it’s completely useless as a mixer. As a mixer they are both pretty limited: noisy, bleed, and completely useless FX loop due to noise.

Currently I run my 808/909 through the ms1202 wIth the BX600 on the aux2 send. So I am doing parallel distortion. The BX600 does what it does best (harmonic distortion) Without taking over the mix.

I can also assert the Feedback Modules PRE BX, PRE KM, eurorack modules sound authentic. I started with those!

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boss km 60

Off topic: Overdriving a mixer like on the videos can produce any damage on the saturated channels? It’s something I’ve always want to give a try but I never dared to do

It shouldnt damage the mixer. What i think happens when you increase the gain so it distorts is that the opamps of the gain stages doesnt have more “voltage” to give. It hits a ceiling, so a sine gets squared off. Its not like you are sending 100 volt in, and only get 17 volts out.

But i guess operating at max voltage might heat up circuits more than at a lower level, so might be more stress on some components.

This is what i think! Hopefully someone corrects me if i have this very wrong.

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Won’t harm your mixer, but can harm speakers/ears at higher volumes, especially if you start mucking about with feeding channels into each other and making feedback loops etc.
It’s always a good idea to have a limiter at the end of your audio path when mucking about with this sort of thing.

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But seriously

Hah… I almost scared myself to death with a mistake I made like this the other day… A limiter is definitely something I should look into! :grimacing:

I’ve ended up with ringing ears a few too many times to do this kinda stuff without a limiter anymore (in my case just a Heat preset that I’ve made that just shoves the volume back at maximum when above the threshold)

I do feedback loops and no input mixing almost daily and never use a limiter. I do have a boss limiter pedal, but as long as you check your gain staging and volume levels you should be fine without one. A limiter does affect what the feedback sounds like.