So do I slide the master down during the recording of a given track ? That will affect the volume of all the tracks simultaneously ?You fade out the master, not individual tracks, or if you were me, I do it in Soundforge that I use for final mastering and level tweaking - and just highlight where I want the fade and let it fade it out for me. If It's not quite right, I can tweak and do it again.
Fades are the last thing you do to a track while mixing - don't fade anything before you mix.I'm trying to fade out a song, do I just move the master volume slider down ? During the recording of a track, individually ?
Thanks guys ! To answer your question Rob, I am using Reaper with a Scarlett 4i4 autio interface, Windows 10 on a laptop, and I use Audacity to open the mix as a stereo file. Reaper is the DAW that I am using for recording the tracks, I just need to fade the song out for effect. Can I do the fade of the whole song in the last minute in Audacity?You don't turn anything down during record? You record all your tracks, mix them, eq them add effects - then depending on your software, you automate the master fader, so when you export the audio, it follows that fader - or as I do it, do the fadeout in a different piece of software. The entire point of DAWs is that they are not destructive. The original recordings do not get tweaked at all. Can you explain a bit what you are using and the context, because it seems a very simple solution that isn't working because you've got crossed lines somewhere? I might be misunderstanding what you are doing?
That's pretty much what I do. I'll render the song to WAV, drop that back into Reaper on it's own track, then add the fade. There is a menu for various 'waves' to be applied to the fade - just choose one, then drag the fade icon from the end of the song back to where you want it to begin sloping.As Rob says. you do it on the Master - after rendering the mix down to stereo. But, I also (using volume automation) fade out individual tracks in the mix so that the master fadeout sounds like what I want - in other words, maybe its the strings that carry that final sound, or maybe its the whole 'band', or the long sustain of a guitar chord.
A guy named Kenny Gioia on YouTube did it that way, after some research. It works for me anyway...Oh no! Not 'the volume fade to the Master channel' ...!!! Run for your lives!
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He's the go-to-guy for Reaper, IMO.A guy named Kenny Gioia on YouTube did it that way, after some research. It works for me anyway...
I see that #3 is definitely the way to go. Thanks for pointing out those different points.Yes, there are a lot of different ways to do it.
1. You can select all the tracks and put a fade on all of them at the track level. The problem with this is any level dependent processing will be affected, like compression.
2. You can automate the master volume to fade. This lets all the track processing to stay the same, but can mess with any mastering compression.
3. Mix it without a fade, master it, then take the mastered file and put a fade on it. This keeps all the processing consistent throughout the fade.
Since I tended to do a lot of metal, I had a ton of compression going on, so fading things in a way that the tracks would come out of the compression would mess up the balance of the mix during the fade. So I would always fade after mastering.