Do you track out your dawless creations to stems, or record live performances? Or both?
I have a hybrid studio made up of an A&H ZedR16 FireWire mixer, some synths, drum machines, Digitakt and Ableton Live. I always start my tracks by using the amazing ERM Multiclock, building live sequences on each machine, then adding clips in Ableton.
With a load of ideas I take them over to the track view building a MIDI sequence, but I’m finding I get mixing congestion unless I stem everything out, which I’m yet to do.
Do you track out your ‘live’ performances?
Can anyone give me any thoughts tips on how you complete tracks with hardware?
I use the arrangement (song) mode to build a basic arrangement in my Toraiz SP-16 then render the song length tracks to audio and finish arranging, mixing, and do a master bus polish in my DAW. I often add ear candy and additional layers in DAW as well. Most of the creative FX work is done in DAW as well. I am not into the whole jam video thing and am bad at recording live cuts.
Thanks - I think I’m going to do the same thing. The A&H allows all 16 inputs to be recorded at once. I’ve got a lot of synths / drum machines that don’t respond to much midi data other than velocity, so recording each one to audio makes more sense.
My biggest issue is mids and highs getting too congested. I’m finding my processor can’t handle too many plugins, so audio seems the way forward.
Yea I just have a basic i5 Asus Zenbook so I mostly work with audio.
Do you just have too many tracks/instruments etc in the mids and highs at once?
I use the digital multimode filter on the SP-16 pretty aggressively before the audio hits my DAW. But I am also limited to 16 tracks so it keeps me from getting too carried away.
Note: I’m a hobbyist and in no ways a professional. I love single-pattern jams.
For a long time I thought I needed to record everything to stems, and in hindsight wasted a lot of energy trying to set things up for that, not to mention the time fiddling on the computer, often resulting in a worse mix.
Typically the bulk of a track is recorded from the stereo out of a mixer, or the Octatrack. This still results in plenty of bad mixes, but much more efficient for me. And if something is egregious, I’ll have to re-record it, which trains me to start hearing those things earlier on in the process.
I don’t know how much this is relevant to your goals, but currently for me, the performance is the track, so it should be recorded as real-time as possible. And maybe it’s just because I’m ultimately lazy - I’d rather do some cheap mastering on a single audio channel, export, and move on to the next one.
Thats exactly how I approach it. Ive done multi tracking in the past, used 100% DAW also. But as time went in I found hardware more fun, and more engaging.
I tried different methods over the years, and change things up periodically. However, my preferred workflow is arranging the full track in song mode(s) and performing hands-on tweats/adjustments live while recording a stereo audio file via handheld recorder. The said arrangement provides consistency in regards track length and instrument mutes. Once the mix is properly setup, I record several takes, and either choose a favorite or edit a final version on the computer.
That said, I only use DAW-less setups for Techno and similar genres of music, which is primarily a side interest. In my opinion, Techno is well suited for hardware-based studios. For music heavily reliant on vocals, live instrumentation, and/or video syncing, I use the DAW as the focal tool.
I have done both methods, exhaustively. Each has its own advantages and merits. I will say that it largely depends on your music and how intricately arranged it is. I don’t believe there’s a catch all solution. It’s easy to ruin a good track by multitracking and losing the vibe. Its also easy to mess up something during a live jam and then get discouraged and trash it.
One setup I’ve had in the past was a multi-track mixer attached to my computer via USB but also recording the output of the mixer directly with a small Tascam recorder. That way I had the live jam captured exactly the way I wanted but I still recorded the stems individually for later if I wanted to tweak or redo it.
I stem it out, but I record a live performance of said stem.
I could record multiple items at once, but prefer to concentrate on one at a time because its till allows me to “play” the performance of that item. It’s far more easy for me to concentrate on one thing at a time, and I tend to get better “performance” results when I concentrate on each item individually.
If you’re getting mixing congestion by recording the mix, then try stemming it and see if it works for you.
We can all tell you what we do, but very few, if any of us, have minds that work like yours. You have to find for yourself what works for you.
That’s where I am at. I did the last tune I recorded as a part live performance but realised there was way too much going on, so I recorded my Poly D and the TD3 as I kept making mistakes trying to remember the path.
Listening back once the ideas are solid, I think I need each element as an audio track so I can surgically EQ / compress / saturate with regard to each section of the tune.