I am no means an expert, so feel free to take my opinion as far as you want. I still consider myself an amateur who has primarily learned from the web and reading books. After reading
Mixing Audio: Concepts, Practices and Tools by Roey Izhaki, I developed a personal style of using Sonar for most productions. I will provide my technique first then I will explain my reasoning why.
My technique or I dare say rules are.
1. I never allow an audio track to play directly to the audio interface.
2. I almost never connect an audio track directly to the master bus.
3. I generally create buses for instruments groups (percussion, melody, bass), frequency ranges (highs, mids, lows), and sometimes nested groups.
4. I apply filters to the audio track only if it applies to the general nature of the instrument. (For example: improving bass drum kick, making an instrument have an echo, etc.)
5. I apply mixing filters (equalizers, reverb, etc.) to grouping buses.
6. I occassionaly add mixing filters to audio tracks to build groups (For example: balancing a bass drum, snare drum, and cymbal for the percussion track.)
I learned a lot from the
Mixing Audio book, but the biggest concept that applies to this discussion is that how mixing incrementally can influence your expectation of the end result. By mixing incrementally I mean mixing a couple tracks together, then adding more tracks to the mix afterwards. Another important detail to my technique is that I sometimes create different editions because of different venues (including portable devices versus CD's destined for good sound systems).
I try to develop each track as if the others tracks don't exist, making that track sound as loud and perfect as possible. I leave the final mixing of the song as a whole to be the last step. Thus, by having the buses grouped in meaningful sections means I don't have to search through possibly a dozen or more tracks to make simple adjustments.
post edited by barusa - 2011/05/13 19:14:24