All in The Box Creator Thoughts?

Compressor61

New member
Hello all. First post as a new member here.

So I'm pretty much an all in the box kinda person, using Logic mostly. I do everything from writing to mixing there. So the idea of a traditional process of tracking in a studio, then mix, then master, etc. doesn't apply to what I really do. I write in multiple styles, not much EDM type stuff, so I don't use a lot of loops. I do use a lot of virtual instruments and hire out the vocal work. As I work thru my projects, I find myself pivoting back and forth between what might be considered the "writing" mode and the "mixing mode". I find myself needing to get great sounding parts to be inspired to flesh out the rest of the song. It's almost like production is it's own kind of instrument and is vital to the process of creation, it's not a refinement of something that's already created. I also find myself constantly evaluating the balance of "real instrument" sounding parts vs "synthetic/software generated" parts. Both are important to my work.

Anyway, does anyone else work in this type of model and if so, have you established any kind of process or approach that you can share? Lessons learned, advice, dire warnings....Maybe we can get some good thoughts flowing on this thread around this....sorry for the rambling and thanks for reading this.
 
I feel this! A lot of times when I'm arranging I will have to do some light mixing and producing to inspire myself to finish the arrangement in an organic feeling way. A lot of times I'll get to where I want to go and delete the light mixing before I export stems ad just redo whatever I just deleted to the audio files. Or occasionally I'll export with some light mixing still in the original if its something that hardcore changes the midi or audio files.
 
Hello all. First post as a new member here.

So I'm pretty much an all in the box kinda person, using Logic mostly. I do everything from writing to mixing there. So the idea of a traditional process of tracking in a studio, then mix, then master, etc. doesn't apply to what I really do. I write in multiple styles, not much EDM type stuff, so I don't use a lot of loops. I do use a lot of virtual instruments and hire out the vocal work. As I work thru my projects, I find myself pivoting back and forth between what might be considered the "writing" mode and the "mixing mode". I find myself needing to get great sounding parts to be inspired to flesh out the rest of the song. It's almost like production is it's own kind of instrument and is vital to the process of creation, it's not a refinement of something that's already created. I also find myself constantly evaluating the balance of "real instrument" sounding parts vs "synthetic/software generated" parts. Both are important to my work.

Anyway, does anyone else work in this type of model and if so, have you established any kind of process or approach that you can share? Lessons learned, advice, dire warnings....Maybe we can get some good thoughts flowing on this thread around this....sorry for the rambling and thanks for reading this.

What you are describing is pretty much how all pros work. You have to kind of rough mix as you go so you have context and know that whatever part you are working on will work. It's always been that way even when all sequencing and samplers/keyboards were hardware-only. It was that way before electronic instruments too. And it's still that way for music that uses no sequencers or electronic instruments. As a mix engineer, I usually get a rough mix of the song I'm going to mix. Sometimes it's just where they left off after tracking everything - they print that and send it to me for reference. Other times they will finish tracking and do more mixing to get it closer to their vision and send me a version of that. Sometimes they will go all out and spend a bunch of time trying to get the best possible mix they can get and send me that for reference.
 
Thanks for the insight and perspective, Chris. To expand on this train of thought, I also sometimes find that once I get to a mixing stage, I sometimes find the need to change a certain part or even modify the arrangement in some way and I only came to this conclusion once the mix started to sound ok. Since I use a lot of virtual instruments and MIDI, if I had bounced everything to audio tracks before mixing, I would have to keep a "production" version of the project with all the MIDI tracks in place and then go back and make the change there and export the audio tracks again and import them into the mix version. Do that a bunch of times and then the two versions get out of sync and it gets messy. So I've started trying to keep everything in one Logic Project and just bounce every track to audio right underneath the MIDI track, freeze the MIDI tracks and mix from the same project. That way if I need to make changes to a part or the arrangement, I can unfreeze MIDI tracks and do it, then just bounce the track again. Since writing, recording, mixing and even basic mastering seem to bleed together into my process, this seems the best way, but it does tax my Mac CPU a lot and I get overload errors despite my best efforts to avoid them. I does make me wonder if top shelf producers would ever do this. Also, would top level mix engineers ever recommend mixing MIDI based tracks without bouncing them to audio first? Then of course, there's all them plugins.....argh....what to do...
 
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