Vegas Audio 2.0 test

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pglewis

New member
Some of you might know I've desperately been trying to get out of my relationship with Cakewalk. It's been tough, since I have to admit that Cakewalk does have a lot to offer. But it's abusive to me. I tell all my friends that I just fell down the stairs, but I think they know better. Vegas Pro came so close, but dropped the ball in a couple of important areas. Now that Vegas Audio 2.0 is out, I thought I'd give it a shot. I used one of the 2 remaining "problem mixes" for the Tryptophan demo to stress test it a little with a real project. I didn't play on this one: Dave did the drums, once again, and Austin did the rest. Here's the particulars and my initial take.

* 14 tracks (8 mono, 3 stereo)
* 5 busses (drums, bass, guitars, vocs, effects)

I started hitting the wall while adding the last track, so I had to make a drum submix in order to keep going (4 mono source tracks to a stereo pair). Not a big deal, since I was using a few CPU intensive plug-ins. Fewer busses would have probably been more efficient, but I liked the convenience of 'em so I opted to submix the drums instead. By my very unscientific subjective estimates, I got roughly the same CPU load that I could sustain in Cakewalk... YMMV.

I drew quite a few envelopes, and I drew them fairly quickly. I never could have managed it in Cakewalk. It's not that Cakewalk couldn't do it, it's just too much of a pain to bother. Automation and "virtual mixers" blow, envelopes rock.

Smarter/faster zooming (which works) and not having to switch through a bunch of windows saved a lot of time as well. Resizing the height of the tracks was still klunky like Vegas Pro, though.

All in all, it worked pretty well for this song. I can't really blame any mix problems on the software :(. Enough of the blah, blah, blah.

Song: Coaxial Jack
File size: 6161823


I know the vocs are a bit low in spots. That's the one thing that's hard to change. Austin likes the vocals to be at that barely intelligible point. I always raise 'em a dB or two when he goes to get more coffee, but I can't get too much past 'im.
 
I would like to diss CW as well. But only from my limitted use of it. Ive found Cubasis to be far more friendly and much easier to abuse!

Bit of a pumkins sound happening there. A little more bass mabey?. Ahh those drums were played well and sounded sweet.
 
I could probably live with the quirks of Cakewalk if it actually worked with my 8/24. But I have a somewhat rare problem with the HW/SW combo (I'm in contact with about a dozen others with the same prob). Sometimes playback drops to half-speed out of the blue. Going to the Audio properties dialog and then just hitting 'OK' fixes it for a while. It might start doing it again 2 seconds later, or it might work fine for 4 hours straight.

I'll take another listen to the bass. It's the "fuzz bass from hell". A little trickier for me to mix than other bass sounds I've worked with.

Dave cut drums for like 3 songs that same day... pretty much cold. He'd heard rough mixes with drum machine a few times, but that was it. I remember he did this one last as he was "dreading" this particular song. I think he could coax a sweet sound out of coffee cans-- have to try it sometime.
 
Hi

Yeah, I liked the sound, but I have to agree with Kaputo in that it lacks bass. You might have also overdone the treble on the singing (but then, I suppose, what else could you do since Austin likes the singing so quiet?). I feel the strong point of the mix is the drums which are particularly well compressed, as is the whole mix, in fact: no instruments suddenly jumping out of the mix!

unreal
 
Yeah, you guys are dead-on about the bass. I think part of the problem is that the distorted bass is getting "absorbed" by the distorted guitars. That's cool for the "soupy" aspect, but I'm pretty sure I can do better.

The high-end on the vocs is another trick I try to use to bring the lyrics out without bringing the vocs up. It's probably overkill on my part... to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

This mix is so much better than any of the previous attempts that it's easy to overlook some things... thanks for the ears.
 
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