help me settle an argument!

S

syn

New member
in your recording experience which is better:
a)recording onto seperate tracks and doing your mastering or..
b)recording down onto a single stereo track and then tweaking

it seems to me that no matter if you were using semi high end instruments, that you would have more control over a track and actually have a better chance of making all the sounds fit together than you would using a single stereo track
now the other argument says that if you get your mix perfect before hand you dont need to bother with mulititracking your song.
any ideas, opinions, suggestions, experiences?
 
uhhhhh...how would you know how it would all sound together unless you listened to all the tracks at once to do the mixing....mixing is, after all, stirring all the parts around to make it come together, so you tweak while listening to all the tracks, get the sound you want, then record yer "master" with the tweaks set to whatever you're gonna dupe from....the product is gonna be listened to as stereo, by whoever hears it and on whatever they play it on if you wanna get it out to the public or even a record company....good monitors will help you...but even then, you need to make some dupes and play 'em on boomboxes/homestereos/car units/etc to make sure they still sound like you want them to....
 
what im sayin is that i know you have to get it near perfect in your equipment but after that is it better to multitrack and fix problems or just use the eq and effects that you have onboard and mix down to a stereo track burn to a cd and start selling it at the storesmaybe some backgroud info would help a little:

korg triton
waldorf Xt
boss dr-770
delta 66
cakewalk & midisport
no mixer no compressors no outboard effects at all really

is that really how mastering is done?
was i wrong the whole time? :-)
do the pros just have all this million dollar equipment and just shoot it through effects chains and such to a stereo mix and then off to the mastering house for "sweetening", like it says in the mastering faq?
it just makes more sense that you would make the entire song sound as good as possible with the equipment u have and then record each instrument onto a seperate track in case one needs a little <insert effect here> or the hihats could use a little less <insert freq here>

thanx and sorry if u have trouble understanding what im getting at because i do have a hard time getting my point across sometimes

ps this forum is the best and we hope to have some tracks for you and everyone else to critique very soon!

[This message has been edited by syn (edited 06-24-2000).]
 
By "Mastering" I'm just referring to home recording....the real pros most certainly do use the best equipment....but for what most of us have here, the premise is the same although I know that it would not come close to professional mastering...someone like sonusman would be needed to do "real" mastering, because of his expertise as well as his equipment, both of which are superior to most of our smarts and our gear....and I don't know how much mastering he does, he might pass that on to people who have even better stuff...but to get the best finished product for a home'recr, we work with what we have, so , if I understand what you mean, my previous post pretty much covered it....play all the tracks at once, tweak as necessary to yer ears, duplicate, play on different units, and either settle or re-tweak, (or re-record)....and yes it's nice to have good recording equipment/playing in the first place....it's real hard to tweak a bad bar....mixing is what us home'recrs do, actually, because a master in the real sense is the super quality product used to make all the copies from....hope I'm making sense here, and that master has to be as close to perfect as possible....which in the home environment, we can aspire to, but probably not attain...gibs

[This message has been edited by gibs (edited 06-24-2000).]
 
yo, im under the impression that youd be INSANE to try and nail the mix during takking if you had the option to multitrack.

BUT thats how they used to do it.. all those Older Beatles and blues tapes... recorded to 2-track. If you happen to be a recording GOD, you too do that.

xoxo
 
maybe im just coming from a different recording background (guitar,drum machine,bass) because im used to doing things one at a time
id first lay down the drums and then playback to do the bass and same with the guitar. i would already have a VERY rough draft to begin with but then id make the mix more coherent when everything was laid down in different tracks its totally different using electonic instruments via midi
hey and maybe i have the terms "mastering" and "mixing" all wrong, and thats why im not making sense to myself but still (mixing down?) just to a single stereo track really scares me :-0, I gotta get my bro in here soon to make his point so he dont burn me for only giving u my side of the story
also when we post stuff to the mp3 clinic what should we encode to? 196 or something higher?
 
Hi, all. I'm the other side of the argument. I've got a few pieces of gear, with very limited mixing/mastering capabilities, and as I progress in the development of a track, I naturally try to get them to sound good, but they're not perfect. I put it all into my Delta 66's inputs, and it all goes through the computer, and out to the monitors. Of course, I know that if I want to fix the whole mix, then I have to boost/cut each track's frequencies separately, but if I do this at the digital, inside-computer level, then I will have to put up with all the additive noise of 15 audio tracks. Plus, this would be very tedious, since I've got to test the effects one at a time, and most likely not in real-time.
What I'd like to do is get it all sounding great at play-time (when the midi data is sent from cakewalk to all the gear) so that I can just capture the performance to one stereo audio file, which will be my _final_ version. I already thought of a mixer, but I don't have much money, and if this is the solution, then why do soundcards come with so many inputs? The Delta 1010 has ten inputs, but if pros just use their mixer, then why use all those soundcard inputs? I know there's something I'm missing. Would someone care to fill in the blank?
Thanx.
 
I do live recording on a limited budget (read: zero) and I can't pay roadies to lug my shit around, so I track direct to two channels on a standalone CDR drive. Is it very flexible once it's burned? Nope. But if you pay attention to getting the mics placed right and your levels set OK then you can get a beautiful recording and not incur back damage carrying load after load of multitrack crap to the gig.
Works great for acoustic music.
If you don't mind carrying more stuff, then mixing down to two on the spot is still a timesaver even if at the expense of not capturing later remixing possibilities.
 
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