mixing tips

hi
i read in a magazine recentley that you should mix everything in audio is that correct so should i convert all my midi parts to audio
 
 
thanx

A lot depends on what your computer can do before it starts showing signs of strain. One popular option is to freeze soft synths. That bounces the track down to audio, including the FX bin, but only temporarily. While frozen, the tracks can be treated like standard audio tracks. But if you want to make changes to the midi you can unfreeze the track.

I've made that mistake, we always want to mix before we've finish tracking. Cakewalk should have a NON-TWEAKING feature where it won't allow you to make any edits until you're done tracking basic drum/guitar/bass/vocals. That might sell one copy

+1 on Herb's post.

I think it all depends on what you're doing. If you have a band, with an arrangement worked out, and are just tracking, then absolutely don't do much with the mix. On the other hand, if you are like the vast majority of Sonar users out there, you are by yourself, so do whatever it takes mix-wise for you to finish tracking.

Shoot, a lot of times when I am mixing, I notice things that need to be re-done or need to be added. Most of my mixes contain an element that was not there a day before the final mix.

Chappel


A lot depends on what your computer can do before it starts showing signs of strain. One popular option is to freeze soft synths. That bounces the track down to audio, including the FX bin, but only temporarily. While frozen, the tracks can be treated like standard audio tracks. But if you want to make changes to the midi you can unfreeze the track.

I'm sure there's an option which allows you to exclude whatever's in your Fx bin from the freeze.

In fact I'm sure this is the default option. I bloody well hope so because I've always got Fx in the audio track prior to  freezing and if these were applied to the track upon freezing and I'm not noticing the difference, I may as well give this up now.

Clarification would be extremely useful at this point.

Are we by any chance confusing Freezing a synth with freezing a track?

That would be my guess. I've never frozen a track - only a synth.

Thanks for the screenshots - they seem to confirm what I believe to be the source of the confusion.

When I freeze a synth, I have noticed that the FX bin is frozen as well.

That is why I mentioned that before I mix down I will go back and unfreeze the synth and BOUNCE it to an audio track. That allows me to apply FX to the bin if I wish, and have them fully functional.

I don't recall the exact problem with a frozen synth/FX bin but I recall there is some sort of problem getting NEW fx to work in a frozen track/synth/fx bin.

I bounce soft synths to audio for archiving.  That way in 5 years even if I no longer have the soft synth I have access to  the track.

I've been watching Alan Parson's "Art & Science of Sound Recording" and his old school methodologies I've applied to my modern practices with excellent results.  You can buy individual modules for $1.99 and I highly recommend "A BAND TRACKING SESSION" and "MIXING" modules.  You can watch and hear Alan mix in real time on the MIXING module.  It's pretty cool.

http://www.artandscienceofsound.com/

I've sat in old-fashioned Analog studios and now working in the box, and I still love watching an experienced mixer at work.  Besides, c'mon, it's Alan Parsons - the guy who mixed Pink Floyd's DARK SIDE OF THE MOON!

Basically, he mixes everything but the drums and bass (muting the latter).  Gets it sounding good and balanced, then he moves on to bass and drums (while muting everything else).  He learned this from Beatles a beatles mixologist.  I then grouped my drums to make it easier to bring them up.  Besides a touch of EQ, it really got things sounding nice and balanced!

You know what - it really helped me!!!  I did it last night and was very happy.  It may be my new methodology.  I needed a game plan!!  LOL.

I have the Alan Parsons DVD set if anyone wants it. It's in like new condition. I'd trade it for a guitar pedal or something.

Oh, no, it's not that I didn't get anything out of it. I've just watched it enough now, and I was watching the downloadable  versions for quit some time before the DVDs were available, that I've absorbed the lessons at this point.

I think it's a well done set. It's actually three DVDs, not one, so there's quite a bit of info there. There's also some nice interviews with well known musicians, engineers, and producers that are very interesting as well. It covers the gamut from hardware, software, EQ, compression, gating, delay and reverb, room treatment and acoustics, studio construction, mixing, recording bass, guitar, drums, keyboards, and vocals, mic'ing technique. Ultimately it leads up to a full studio session to record and mix a song. There's also some extras stuff like recording a choir and whatnot.

So there's quite a lot of stuff in there. It's not going to be anything that an experienced engineer would be suprised about, but that's because it's for folks like us who aren't fully experienced yet. As with any such endeavor as this, you aren't suddenly going to get 10 times better after watching it. It's still about learning how to apply what you've learned. It just gives you a lot of stuff to start learning how to apply and explains why you would want to. It's fairly agnostic about hardware vs. software, and he demonstrates both. Clearly you know where his preference lies, but he uses a fair hand to demonstrate both options.

I also had Mix it Like a Record at one point. The two aren't very similar really. MilaR obviously is all about mixing. It's a ummmm... mix'ture of at the DAW in the box mixing of a single song, interspersed with more philosophical thoughts about mixing as an art.

The Parsons stuff, as it says, is more about recording. Ultimately I think that recording is much more important. If you can do that really well, a lot less mixing is required. A big reason that mixing is so hard in the pro world is that so much of what they get isn't recorded well and they have to make it sound like it was. If you watch Milar, the bulk of what he does is take a song that was recorded one way (not really badly, but a particular way) and makes it sound like it was recorded a completely different way. Ultimately, to me, though that's obviously a very useful and powerful skill, I don't believe it's really something that any of us self-recorders should strive for, since if you have to do that you aren't recording yourself right to begin with.

So I think that the Parsons material is vastly more appropriate for the self-recorder, at least it's vast more important for those folks who are interested in learning how to do it right to begin with. Yeh, when he does his mix he does it on a big board, but if you look at what he does, it would make for a quite spare mix setup in an ITB mix. The material was well recorded to begin with, so it doesn't need a lot of twiddling. Though he does show a vocal comping session as well where they take some best of vocal phrases on his own vocal part.