The Next Step

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Mr. TCE

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I've been creating music for a good bit of time now. I use an apogee duet 1, mac book pro, logic x, aka perception 420 mic and Rokit 5 monitors. My setup is nice for my home studio and I believe I'm getting some pretty good mixes (close to professional if not professional let others tell it). I use a ton of plugins that I believe take up a lot of cpu. Correct me if I'm wrong but my theory is with a rack taking some of the work load off the computer itself and putting it on external eq's and compressors will do me justice on the time and efficiency of my mixes. Also, I would make it possible to have a good pre-mix as I record instead of using lifeless raw vocals and then adding effects (compression, eq, reverb, etc.) in post. If this is true, I'd like to start investing in putting together my first rack. Where should I start? Whats more import in having my vocals cleaner before editing to save on time? Can I do this without ditching my apogee duet?

Attatched is an mp3 from my last project. Since then I've gotten a little better but the learning doesn't stop.

View attachment 02 SMD (Prod. By SkinnyMooXe) ft. DeSean WIlliams, UNO, & Zay.mp3
 
You would have to ditch the duet. If you wan to save CPU you could bounce the tracks with effects engaged.
 
It depends. I know you would need something with a good amount of outputs if you want to start buying rack gear. How many channels do you need? What is your budget?
 
Really just one or two. Budget average. Not the best of the best but something fairly cheap. I need a combo that will produce the sound I have or better so I can expand from there. We mostly do rap but we also have singers. For guitars and this I'll just resort back to the duet until I expand my knowledge on the rack and get a better idea of what I need. Really looking for basic I spend most of my time enhancing raw vocals that I can't expand into the effects to get whatever sound I'm trying to get. The rack would be focused on vocals.
 
If you are just using outboard gear on vocals you could pick one of these up and have 4 outs and 4 ins: Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 Audio Interface | Musician's Friend You are going to need at least as many ins as outs if you want to use rack gear to mix.
If you want to use compressors or EQ's on the way into your DAW then you would simply put a preamp before it in the chain
 
JG96 said:
You would have to ditch the duet. If you wan to save CPU you could bounce the tracks with effects engaged.
Click to expand...

This sounds like the best approach to begin with. There are several ways to ease the CPU burden while mixing:

Lighten the the load on your CPU by freezing/rendering individual tracks. Then mute or remove the originals.

Use aux send effects for things like reverb, delay, etc. so that multiple tracks can use a single instance of a plugin.

Keep effects off of your master bus while mixing, export your raw mix into a stereo WAV file, and edit that as a separate project for master bus effects/compression/etc. My last computer would choke if I tried to compress a master bus inside of my multitrack project. It handled it much easier when the project was rendered a single stereo WAV file.

Or maybe look into something like the UA plugins and their supporting hardware so that the effects DSP takes the burden off of your CPU.

If you're using sample libraries, figure out how to remove any unused samples that are loaded into memory. This reduces the amount of swapping from the pagefile into memory and vice versa, which in turn reduces CPU burden.
 
Do you have a budget?

Btw I use logic x with an old, weak computer, and I do some outboard for mixing. Running the outboard loop uses some cpu but more importantly if I hit 100% due to other plugins when outboard is active, something happens and the outboard gets really static-y / crackly and I have to reboot to recover from it. Kind of sucks, so I usually wind up disabling all the plugins and the printing the outboard track to a new track - works well, but if that happens to you then it would kind of defeat your original purpose.

I have found that using a nice compressor when tracking vocals can make a difference - especially if the singer likes what's being monitored in the headphones - can result in better performances.
 
hardware is nice but to be honest with the plug-ins I've got now I honestly feel like I don't need it, the only thing I like hardware for is pre-amps, and compressors, the 500 series is a good option, that is more affordable, I've had good experiences with it so far.
 
Screen Shot 2014-12-10 at 12.03.03 PM.pngScreen Shot 2014-12-10 at 12.03.14 PM.png

Here's a picture of a mix I'm doing now. A lot of my other projects are similar, I just tweak and exchange plugins for different sounds.
 
You're definitely getting your money's worth out of the Waves L1 :)

Yeah man, freeze some of those puppies. You can always unfreeze them and tweak. Freezing a track just "prints" the audio along with all of the effects. Then you're just playing the audio and not doing all of the real-time signal processing. It sounds identical to the original, and it'll take a huge load off of your CPU.
 
totally agree with tadpui - your CPU is hovering above 50% at idle (I assume you took the screenshot when it wasn't playing) -- you're using the same plugins consistently, like L1, so the load is probably spread fairly evenly across the tracks, but if you freeze a track and then see that idle CPU load drop noticeably, then probably a plugin on that track is chewing up the CPU.

By the same token, if you were to switch to outboard, (say to replace H comp or something), you'd probably have to loop out on a ton of tracks before you could hope to put a dent in the CPU load, and that would require a whole lot of inputs and outputs (and outboard compressors, for my example - those add up quick cost-wise) -- but because the CPU is managing the buffers on all that I/O, having that many round trips might even use more CPU than what you're doing now (just speculating).
 
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