my buddy rodger gave me a track of his to mix the other day. it was a sly attempt to get me back to the studio and over the fact that other things have been taking up my free time. his idea worked because i've been spending time in the studio again and its been fun enough that i've been thinking about it a lot and anticipating each night's tasks. in other words, i'm back in the studio again...
the song was tracked in live5 and there was about 20 different tracks in the project. rodger doesn't work in clip view so i had to work in arrangement view, something i rarely do until i'm ready for the final "take" during a song's creation. i'll even record dj sets in clip view and just apply some tweaks on arrangement view and most of that is easy because i'm only manipulating 3-4 different tracks.
my first task was to consolidate the tracks into single audio files. for the tracks that had been "frozen" it was simply a matter of using live6's "flatten" feature which takes the frozen track and makes it the audio track, removing all of the effects and such. that worked like a charm. the other tracks were multi-selected and rendered into stems making sure that all tracks were starting at 1.1.1 so they could easily be synced up after importing into a new format. most of the renders were done clean (no effects) except the drums and the tracks that had been laid down originally with effects. with the new imac, it took about 30 seconds to render each track. that's a huge difference from my powerbook, which took about 2-3 minutes per track. normally this process would be expected to take about 2-3 hours for a 20 track project. i was able to get through everything in about 30-40 minutes at a leisurely pace.
after the stems and single track renders were completed, i imported them into a new project in logic pro using the audio window and the "create arrange track" feature. it was a simple process and very fast. at this point i had all of my instruments available to me for use as well -- the nord's 4 voices, instrument tracks with the rhodes plug-in (evp-88) and my own bass, 10 bfd drum tracks (singly miked drums, cymbals and overhead/room/pzm mics) and guitar tracks (mapped to the pod xt outputs).
i then spent the rest of the night laying down drum tracks using bfd. they sounded great, as usual but i'm facing some weird bussing issues that need to be sorted tonight. it appears that some of the bussed drum outputs are being doubled which make mixing difficult. its some environment window routing issue, no doubt, which is still a bit of a mystery to me. i have a much better understanding of it than i did a few months ago but some of the routing details related to aux and bus tracks are murky and require some experimentation and education.
as a sidenote, buying logic pro was a big step forward for me. its everything i needed and expected from a d.a.w. and each session adds more depth of knowledge and ideas. it was a pricey option but once installed and put to use, its value becomes vibrantly apparent. rodger and i were discussing it from a cost perspective. if you total up the value of the synths, the rhodes and b3 plug-ins, the convolution reverb (space designer), the other logic effects (compressors, gates, maximizers, exciters, and mastering tools available), marker tracks, beat mapper, *and* the d.a.w. sequencer/tracker/mixer, you get a price far in excess of $999. add in the imac and the pair of them become a fantastic tool in the studio. and i'm not just justifying my expenses! its a bad-ass setup!
i'll try to post some screenshots of my project interface and screenset layouts when i get a chance. i might post some clips of the drum mix too, so you can get a sense of the "live" sounding bfd drums.
