X3 - 133 Tracks Very Cool

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TomHelvey
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2014/07/05 01:52:54 (permalink)

X3 - 133 Tracks Very Cool

I've been working on cover project over the last couple weeks and I'm pretty amazed at what I've been able to do using Sonar X3.
The song is Blue Monday by New Order. Here's a link to it: https://soundcloud.com/thomas-helvey/blue-monday-take-1. If you listen to it, I'd appreciate any comments that might help me improve the mix and sound.
Sounds:
One of the signature sounds of the song is the DMX drum machine kick. I found some DMX samples on the interweb and loaded the kick drum sound I wanted into SD3, viola the perfect kick for the song. I also used SD3 for the real snare and HH sounds. I used a Drumazon for claps, snare, and the other HH track. I noticed that the DMX kick sounded a bit thin so I added my favorite kick from my Fantom and augmented it with a Z3TA. I used another Z3TA for the synth tom parts (stock patch).
The bass is a couple Predator patches. The intro synth is a Z3TA with some recorded mod wheel automation. The synth vox parts are an MTron Pro mixed with Omnisphere patches. Strings are all Omnisphere patches. The outro plucks are another Z3TA. The clav sounds are a Dimension Pro. The polysynth and saw bass parts are 2 more Predators. The ska bit close to the end is a real baritone guitar combined with another Z3TA. Pretty much everything was done in the box with the exception of the vocal and baritone guitar parts.
Mix:
I bounced everything to mono so I could use part of the mix for backing tracks. I used the Blue Cat stereo widener to fill out some of the string and vox patches. I used the pro-channel stuff a lot for most of the equalization and light compression and the Sonitus EQ for notching out some ick on some tracks. I used Waves plugins for the rest, their SSL console plugins are pretty nice. I used an iZotope Ozone on the master channel. All in all there are 40 audio tracks in the final mix. The channel color coding is pretty nice when you have a huge mix.
 
This is still a work in progress but I'm pretty amazed at how many tracks, soft synths, and plugins I was able to use without any serious problems. Back in the day, you had to go to a studio to do a 24 track project and a big expensive studio to do anything more than that, now you can do it in your living room. Pretty nifty!
 
 

System: i7-6900, 64Gb, AMI X99 Carbon Pro Gaming, AMD Radeon HD 7700, Win 10 Pro
PCIe: UAD Octo
USB: MOTU midi express 128, OB-6 Module, Akai MPK-249, Moog SUB 37, Antelope Orion 32 HD, Softube Console 1, iLok, eLicenser
DAW: Cubase Pro, Ableton Live, Sonar Platinum
Plugins: Waves, UAD, Xfer, Lennar Digital, u-he, Reveal Sound, Spectrasonics, SoundToys, VPS, Blue Cat, iZotope, NI, Valhalla, Lexicon, etc.
 
https://soundcloud.com/thomas-helvey
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    lawajava
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    Re: X3 - 133 Tracks Very Cool 2014/07/05 11:48:27 (permalink)
    Nicely done!  Clean sound, sounds very New Order authentic-ish.  Great song to work with to get some of those cool sounds.
     
    I just looked at my "Blank Song" template file.  It has 100 tracks and 24 busses.  In other words, I start each song out of the gate already with 100 tracks ready to go.  Sonar is great for handling that as long as you have a computer that isn't gasping on an old operating system or limited memory etc.

    Two internal 2TB SSDs laptop stuffed with Larry's deals and awesome tools. Studio One is the cat's meow as a DAW now that I've migrated off of Sonar. Using BandLab Cakewalk just to grab old files when migrating songs.
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