Chrisulrich
Member
Dear Anyone.
I use notation and MIDI for everything, am disabled, can't use anything else.
Am trying to get the hang of mixing the New Age music I'm trying to write and I've hit a dichotomy (don't worry, am suing the guy who left it in the road!) I've read that in MIDI notation it should be one track one sound - so kick drum on own track, snares on own track, bass on.... you get the drift! I then read about busses in mixing, you're supposed to put multiple sounds on one bus so you can feed them through the same effects.
So here's the questions, if they're dumb, feel free to laugh like drains as you answer them.
One. Why the heck would you WANT to? I mean, if I'm EQ'ing - say - a piano, why would I WANT to EQ anything else exactly the same way? Surely the chunks of sound I'm removing to make the piano sound right in the mix wouldn't make the - for instance - guitar sound right, I'd have to remove different frequencies from the guitar, if any. So why would you WANT to bus multiple sounds to one plug-in? The only time I can think of doing that is if you wanted to raise the volume of the entire mix and that surely would be on the OUT channel (I don't know the techie names, have patience!) anyway.
Two. Assuming you've all convinced me that using busses is a wonderful idea (gonna take a bit of convincing that damaging two different sounds in the same way when the POINT of damaging one is to get it out the way of the other is a good idea, but anyway!) - how does that tie in with keeping different drums when writing the parts using MIDI on different tracks/channels is also a good idea. If I'm going to be bussing all the drums to the same plug-ins, why not write them all on the same track in the first place and shove the plug-ins on the track's output? If you have to apply different - for argument's sake - EQ settings to kick drum than for snares, you couldn't bus them anyway because that would be applying the SAME EQ settings to BOTH kick drum and snares, wouldn't it. I've read that it's to send different AMOUNTS of the sound to the same plug-in setting but what's the point? Surely it's more flexible to just shove the same plug-in on each instrument and adjust to taste? Or for things like drums, keep 'em on the same MIDI track and put the plugin on that.
So I'm confused dot com, mightily so!
I'm using Quick Score Elite Level 2 on XP SP3. It's one stave per sound/instrument and each output can have 4 plug-ins on it. It DOES have MIDI-Yoke and Rewire to join it up to other things like Cubase but as I'm a simple composer, piano'n'strings'n'pads (or flute'n'..... anything else'n'.....!!) I really think Cubase is overkill for what I do. I'm just trying to make sense of the vast amount of confusing mixing info. there is out there, all of which seems to apply to .WAV stems, not MIDI output. But this bussing business has me jiggered, it don't seem to make sense.
Yours hopefully,
Chrisulrich.
I use notation and MIDI for everything, am disabled, can't use anything else.
Am trying to get the hang of mixing the New Age music I'm trying to write and I've hit a dichotomy (don't worry, am suing the guy who left it in the road!) I've read that in MIDI notation it should be one track one sound - so kick drum on own track, snares on own track, bass on.... you get the drift! I then read about busses in mixing, you're supposed to put multiple sounds on one bus so you can feed them through the same effects.
So here's the questions, if they're dumb, feel free to laugh like drains as you answer them.
One. Why the heck would you WANT to? I mean, if I'm EQ'ing - say - a piano, why would I WANT to EQ anything else exactly the same way? Surely the chunks of sound I'm removing to make the piano sound right in the mix wouldn't make the - for instance - guitar sound right, I'd have to remove different frequencies from the guitar, if any. So why would you WANT to bus multiple sounds to one plug-in? The only time I can think of doing that is if you wanted to raise the volume of the entire mix and that surely would be on the OUT channel (I don't know the techie names, have patience!) anyway.
Two. Assuming you've all convinced me that using busses is a wonderful idea (gonna take a bit of convincing that damaging two different sounds in the same way when the POINT of damaging one is to get it out the way of the other is a good idea, but anyway!) - how does that tie in with keeping different drums when writing the parts using MIDI on different tracks/channels is also a good idea. If I'm going to be bussing all the drums to the same plug-ins, why not write them all on the same track in the first place and shove the plug-ins on the track's output? If you have to apply different - for argument's sake - EQ settings to kick drum than for snares, you couldn't bus them anyway because that would be applying the SAME EQ settings to BOTH kick drum and snares, wouldn't it. I've read that it's to send different AMOUNTS of the sound to the same plug-in setting but what's the point? Surely it's more flexible to just shove the same plug-in on each instrument and adjust to taste? Or for things like drums, keep 'em on the same MIDI track and put the plugin on that.
So I'm confused dot com, mightily so!
I'm using Quick Score Elite Level 2 on XP SP3. It's one stave per sound/instrument and each output can have 4 plug-ins on it. It DOES have MIDI-Yoke and Rewire to join it up to other things like Cubase but as I'm a simple composer, piano'n'strings'n'pads (or flute'n'..... anything else'n'.....!!) I really think Cubase is overkill for what I do. I'm just trying to make sense of the vast amount of confusing mixing info. there is out there, all of which seems to apply to .WAV stems, not MIDI output. But this bussing business has me jiggered, it don't seem to make sense.
Yours hopefully,
Chrisulrich.