getting more channels out of le

T

thomaswomas

New member
i've just purchased pro tools le as the daw for my bands recording studio. we're going to record an album soon and will probably need more than the available 48 tracks.

a producer/engineer told me we could get the pro tools production kit which will enable us to have access to 48 stereo tracks, and we could use this to get 96 mono tracks out of it if we are clever.

can anyone tell me how this would work? do i need to get plug-in which splits the stereo channels into 2 mono channels?

thanks
 
my protools le allows me a maximum of 48 stereo or mono tracks.


as far as i can tell, the only 'trickery' you could use is to have



stereo track one, outputting to bus 1+2,

then two mono aux tracks, with one inputting from bus 1 and the other from bus 2.

stereo track two, outputting to bus 3+4,

then two mono aux tracks, with one inputting from bus 3 and the other from bus 4.

etc etc etc....





this will give a maximum of 32 mono tracks plus the remaining 32 stereo tracks (because there are only 32 busses)



bare in mind though, this will severely limit your use of protools for bussing effects etc



another thing to consider is careful use of plugins. for example, waves eqs will allow me to unlink l+r, so i have a separate eq and volume for left and right channels of a stereo track.

this idea would potentially give you 96 tracks,,but i don't fancy being the guy who's mixing the session :P

hope that's useful.
 
Another consideration is your processing power, I/O and hard disk configuration. 48 audio tracks, most likely routing to a number of aux stems, loaded with plug-ins is going to take a lot of processing power. What host are you running on?
 
or...

you could just use what you got since the toolkits are a lil pricey and learn how to bounce tracks to a stereo pair and get the sound your after without wasting your track count :rolleyes:

justa suggestion no offence
 
thanks for the tips.

the less complicated i can make the sessions the better as i think we'll be getting the tracks mixed by a pro mixing engineer.

i didn't realize the tool kit 2 upgrades you to 64 channels, i thought it just let you have 48 mono or stereo, so we'll probably go with this option, as we've been using cubase essentials up until now which has a 64 channel limit on and we've never needed more than that.

we'll be running the whole thing on a new quad core mac pro so i reckon it should handle the demand for tracks.

thanks for your help guys
 
illsoulprod said:
you could just use what you got since the toolkits are a lil pricey and learn how to bounce tracks to a stereo pair and get the sound your after without wasting your track count :rolleyes:

justa suggestion no offence
Click to expand...

yea...I mean...I cant imagine needing more than 48 tracks....Im not saying you would never need them but what are you recording where you would need that many???
 
the guitarists in my band like to record quite a lot of little intricate guitar parts and we like to double track guitars for thickness.

we also like to double track vocals and layer the backing vocals for a big sound.

it depends on the song really but on a few occasions we've hit the 60 track mark after all the guitar and vocal layers.

just got the digidesign tool kit 2 and it turns out it's not 64 tracks but 48.

we will probably have to record on pro tools in our studio then mix on cubase at home.
 
If you have Pro Tools 8, Music Production Toolkit 2 definitely gives you 64 mono tracks.

If you only have Pro Tools 7.x then you're correct, Music Production Toolkit gives you only 48 mono tracks.
 
that is an absurd amount of tracks for home recording. no offense meant.. but 48 tracks should be enough. "should"
 
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