Do you treat individual tracks?

[Monkey Allen]

What I mean is, let's say you record an acoustic guitar rhythm track first, then a vocal, then a bit of lead....do you take each of those recordings as you record them, and put them into a program like Wavelab and apply some noise reduction and de click?

For example, I record into Guitar Tracks Pro 2 and then if I have time and could be bothered I take each segment as I record it, mix it down to stereo WAV, open it in Wavelab and treat it with denoise etc...then go back into GTP2, delete the original and import the new treated track.

It's quite laborious, but the results are pretty good as the recording ends up being cleaned at each step, each track.

I don't record multiple things at once, since it's just me recording acoustic, maybe some vocals, lead etc one bit at a time, till I build a song.

Anyway, I've only ever done this once and it does sound pretty clear and good. But it is time consuming.

Anyway, my question is do you do it?

thanks

 

[NYMorningstar]

I treat individual tracks only when they need them. Before you get into the habit of doing that though, you might want to check why you have to do it first and fix that problem. Each time you process your audio tracks you are degrading them in some fashion.

 

[Monkey Allen]

I hear what you're saying. Generally I wouldn't do it, but I have done it in the past....when I used to work with an SBLive! and a $19 mic. Now I have a Presonus Firebox and some good mics.

A little bit of ambience on the track is fine with me, whether that be scatchy guitar strings or a bit of room noise or even a TV somewhere in the background.

Yeah, so I did it a couple of times just to see if it would greatly improve the quality of the sound. It does I think, but I see what you're saying about checking the sound quality beforehand.

So, normally people (with a good straight up signal) would not treat each track like I have described?

 

[Minion]

I usually do this in the Recording Software that i am useing....I will usually record a Track and then listen to it and add some EQ or Compression or whatever I think it needs and then record the next track and listen to it and add any filters or eq untill it sounds good with the other track and then record the Next track and do the same ....

When I get each track to sound good with the other Tracks I will add Filters and/Or eq or compression ect to the Whole song to get the song to sound good by it"s self....

after I have done all of this I will render the Song and Import it into an audio editor and do any fine tuneing....

This is the way I do it and it is the way it seems natural to me, I suppose if I was really serious about getting the best possible sound I would import each track individually into a Audio mastering program to fine tune the sound the best I could but I haven"t had the need to yet.....


Cheers

 

[Monkey Allen]

Hey, that's the exact way that I usually do it.

How's that M-Audio Delta? Is it pretty sweet?

 

[Minion]

Hey, that's the exact way that I usually do it.

How's that M-Audio Delta? Is it pretty sweet?

It is a pretty good Card and very easy to use But I am starting to have the need for more Inputs as I am slowly building more preamps...I"m thinking maybe if I can find another Delta 44 for cheap or maybe a delta 1010 used for cheap then I would have enough inputs to keep me busy for a while....


Cheers

 

[gecko zzed]

yes i treat each individual track. what i do electronically is the same as sound techs did physically with spot erasing and stuff. sometimes there is residual background noise. other times there are grunts, sniffs and other assorted incidental noises that you would rather not have.

 

[Monkey Allen]

Yeah, it makes for a clean job when you go to the trouble of treating each track

 

[Creamyapples1]

I treat each track as needed, but not until everything for that particular mix is tracked. I don't denoise, or anything like that though. I take great care in setting up mics, etc and track the best possible sound that I am capable of producing. IF there is an unwanted tone, noise, hiss, whatever, If it's not fixable via slight EQ, then I'll go back and find out why it's there and fix the problem at the source and retrack.

Too much "tweaking" is a great way to ruin a perfectly good track.


Purely my opinion, if it works for you, do it.

 

[Mindset]

After everythings ready to be mixed together, I usually run some plug-ins to treat the tracks as needed, but only if it's really needed cause any minor flaws, I'll treat the whole mix at the end.