An odd thing...

I have a question for you: do you think that people that learned how to engineer in a “real” studio (and by that I mean an API and a Studer A80) that have now migrated to digital are still mentally bound to the limits set by working on 2-inch?

I never really noticed it before, but something came up today that made me realize that I’m really stingy with track counts. Of course, if you worked in a studio with only one deck, you were by necessity limited to 23 tracks, or 22 if it was a not-too-well-maintained machine and you didn’t want to hear the SMPTE whirring away. Or 21 if you didn’t want the foot spread across three channels. (And for extra credit, how many people reading this have spent more than a thousand dollars discovering that you can’t print a 909 foot next to SMPTE and expect it to still be, like, useful?)

I was just thinking that there are major parts of my production/engineering style that are informed heavily by the fact that I learned how to do everything on analog desks and decks, even though the last time I mixed anything off 2” was almost a decade ago, and the last time I mixed anything with any deck at all was five years ago. (The size of the tape on those Mitsubishi digital machines for some reason made the music seem less present, even though I know it wasn’t the case.)

Anyways, I don’t mean to get all maudlin; I’m seriously curious. Did you learn in an analog room, and do you find that you still work within those constraints, even though you don’t have them any more?