Soft synth to audio question

Just a quick one...

When you're bouncing a soft synth track to audio that you know will be lowered in volume and panned at mixdown, do you zero your fader and center your pan so that the audio track is in a neutral starting state and then adjust from there? Or do you get the mix right before you bounce and then bounce it as is?

Doug

Same here, start with everything on a level-ish playing field. If you bounce down to a level or pan setting what happens if you change you mind or want to make a tweak?

Yes, that's what I was thinking. 

Thanks guys.

Doug

I've never completely understood the whole "freeze" thing. I thought it makes a temporary "hard copy" of the synth track WITH all of the settings applied in order to free up processor resources while you work on other parts. Then, when you're ready to mix, you unfreeze and bounce to audio.

I guess I'm wrong there? 

I get the synth as close as possible using MIDI volume and panning automation and then freeze it. Because further automation after the freeze is likely, there'll always be a volume envelope (and sometimes a pan envelope) added to the frozen audio track. 

Where this method falls down is when I need to do some creative panning as part of the mix, and it's a stereo synth track. In that situation, I'll either drag the frozen audio into a new track and insert Channel Tools for pan automation, or freeze the track without freezing the fx bin. The latter method lets you unload the synth so it's not using any resources while retaining all your options for effects, including stereo panning.


For very large projects with many synths (more than a dozen or so) I'll freeze each synth track, gather them up into a track folder, and then ctl-drag each one into a new track. The original frozen tracks are then archived and now I've got an all-audio project ready for mixing. Even my aged machine can easily handle a hundred-track project when it's all audio.