sushi-mon said:
When you say "create" a submix, don't you mean "record" a submix ? If you just create a submix, but don't record it, "freezing" the mixed tracks won't give you any input to the submix.
Just trying to understand what you are saying.
Literally, I route the output of 5 tracks to a return channel. Route the return channel to the master. I call that my submix. Then I freeze each of the original tracks. I am not bouncing down to a new audio file - this I assume now is what you are trying to do. So, what I have is a virtual mixdown I guess. I still have to carry the load of the original tracks with my CPU, but at least any plugins are minimized by the freezing process. Is this more clear?
Someone above laid out the other example: go ahead and bounce the tracks to a new one, then close down the original tracks. You will always have them on your hard disk for later use. This actually is kind of like creating stem files. Create multiple sub mixes of different parts of the song and use those as the main tracks as you create additional parts. Then, if one is out of balance in the new mix (most likely in my experience and why I made sure I got plenty of GHZ in my new DAW) all you have to do is go back and open up the sumbix (now a separate song) and then make changes, and then import the stem file (submix) back into your working version.
Here is an excerpt of an article on stems. Could not get the link to work:
Divide and Conquer
By Julian McBrowne
Sep 1, 2004 12:00 PM
In the not-so-old days of not-so-total recall, engineers hedged their bets by printing a slew of alternate mixes at the end of every mix session. They'd print mixes with vocal up, vocal down, bass up, bass down, and so forth. If a revision was called for, and you were lucky, you had an appropriate version tucked away on a DAT. If not, it was back to the studio for an expensive recall session. Somewhere I have a listing of 21 alternate mixes that one record company required for a final-mix delivery.
If you're mixing from a DAW multitrack, in which syncing up multiple files without adding additional noise is a simple proposition, a technique called stem mixing gives you the ability to generate virtually limitless alternate mixes without having to go back to the multitrack master and recall your mix session. In a nutshell, it entails separating various mix elements into subgroups to be recombined later (see Fig. 1) and printing them as separate files, called “stems.”
Tobias
Tobias