Daniel Carroll
New member
Can someone explain how to do this properly? I mean should I bounce it all with reverb and without reverb?
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bouncing tracks to audio for mixdown
- Thread starter Daniel Carroll
- Start date
My rule of thumb is if you're adding an effect to make something sound better, remove it. If you're adding an effect for the creative aspect, leave it.
Something like a delay might be very specific to the sound that you want and someone mixing your track might not think to add a delay like you would. If you added a delay to vocals because you think it makes them sound better or it hides imperfections, I'd leave that off. If you want to distort a sound a specific way and used a processor to accomplish that, you'll want to leave that also. If your sound is distorted for whatever reason and you tried to fix it somehow, remove that processor and explain it to the mixing engineer.
You can also export both all of the dry tracks and send over a rough mix that you did. That way, your engineer will have a good idea of what you're looking for.
Something like a delay might be very specific to the sound that you want and someone mixing your track might not think to add a delay like you would. If you added a delay to vocals because you think it makes them sound better or it hides imperfections, I'd leave that off. If you want to distort a sound a specific way and used a processor to accomplish that, you'll want to leave that also. If your sound is distorted for whatever reason and you tried to fix it somehow, remove that processor and explain it to the mixing engineer.
You can also export both all of the dry tracks and send over a rough mix that you did. That way, your engineer will have a good idea of what you're looking for.
Can someone explain how to do this properly? I mean should I bounce it all with reverb and without reverb?
No, the proper way is to ensure ultra low latency in the software domain, then route the tracks into the hardware domain and from there after all hardware processing and summing, straight to the final playback format as a summed stereo track. The parallel effects you can have summed to a few dedicated fx type based busses, that you then finally sum in the hardware domain. This could be things like compressors on one fx bus, expanders on one fx bus, stereo fxs on one fx bus (including reverb and delay) and other fxs on one fx bus. This gives you 4 fx busses to balance with very distinct characteristics, which is a quite practical number of fx stems. Even better is to double this to 8, so that you have 4 busses for fxs in the software domain and 4 busses for fxs in the hardware domain. This makes it possible to balance hardware vs. software, which is useful.
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