What Does Bouncing mean??

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Noah Nelson

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nobody knows where the term "bouncing" comes from! can someone tell me? It seems like "mush all layers together" sounds more appropriate...:spank:
 
It comes from tape deck days.

With smaller track counts....like a machine that only had 4 tape tracks...you could record on 3 of the tracks and then mixdown and "bounce" them to the 4th track, freeing up the other 3 tracks for more recording.

Now days with digital audio, the term "bouncing" gets used for a few things...like submixing many tracks to an aux track for processing or for creating as stems for simlified mixing, or it might mean the creating of a new audio track with FX/Processing when you can't run a lot of plugs in real-time....and I'm sure there are a few other meaning that people in the digital world have applied to the term....but it comes from tape days.
 
Noah Nelson said:
nobody knows where the term "bouncing" comes from! can someone tell me? It seems like "mush all layers together" sounds more appropriate...:spank:
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Your thread title asks what it means, but your first sentence says nobody knows where the term comes from. Which one do you want to know? They're 2 different questions.

I also don't know where it comes from, but I couldn't really give a crap. As far as what it means, it means you're taking more than one track and making them end up on the same track. It's a technique that's less and less needed since most DAW's give you un-limited amount of tracks. But in the days of tape and stand alone recorders, you were limited to 4, 8, 16, 24 tracks, etc.....So, you often needed to bouce some tracks together to free up space for other tracks.
 
miroslav said:
With smaller track counts....like a machine that only had 4 tape tracks...you could record on 3 of the tracks and then mixdown and "bounce" them to the 4th track.
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Or in one famous case, recording all four tracks on one Studer and bouncing those down to one track on a second Studer.
 
bouldersoundguy said:
Or in one famous case, recording all four tracks on one Studer and bouncing those down to one track on a second Studer.
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Yes....that too.

I use to do an unusual tape "bounce" back in my 4-track days.
I had a 1/4" 4-track and 1/4" 2-track machine, and I would do the usual bounce from all 4 tracks of the one deck and mixdown and record to the 2 track deck in stereo on both tracks.
Then, since the heads of the decks were the same type and the 2-track was two in each direction....the head tracks/gaps of both decks were pretty much lined up relative to the tape.
Mind you, this was in my younger days, and I didn't really lose a lot of sleep over proper alignment and all that stuff... :D ....so I would simply take the reels off the 2-track machine and put them on the 4-track...and it worked! I would have 2 empty tracks and the other two played back perfect off the 4-track head as a stereo pair. :cool:
 
Another use is converting a MIDI file to an audio file via a VSTi.

Saves time by not having to play the MIDI file through the VSTi in real time to print the audio track.
 
Noah Nelson said:
nobody knows where the term "bouncing" comes from! can someone tell me?
Click to expand...
If no one knows, then how can someone tell you ?


The term originated in the tape era and comes from the phrase "ping pong" which is a euphemism for table tennis. Because tracks would either leave their original tracks and go to another or leave one machine and go to another and sometimes move back to leave more room for recording, it was metaphorically like a table tennis ball moving back and forth, hence the term "ping~ponging", which, given the natural association of what a ball actually does, became "bouncing".
Once you got to 16 track, theoretically, there was little if any need to bounce although Queen, recording on 24 track bounced so much during the recording of "Queen 2" that the brown stuff came off the tape.
I have a 12 track DAW with 238 other virtual tracks so bouncing is a regular part of my schtick.
 
Noah Nelson said:
nobody knows where the term "bouncing" comes from! can someone tell me? It seems like "mush all layers together" sounds more appropriate...:spank:
Click to expand...

It doesn't always mean blending tracks together into a stereo file though. People bounce individual tracks out of their daw to import into another daw or share with someone.
 
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