How do you route your sequencer/host's mixer? (for producing a song)


I currently have it set up so that every track runs through a pre-master and then that goes out to the main master so I can put effects on the whole song if need be. I usually have a tuner, EQ (it begins to roll off at 97Hz and then completely cuts off at 20 Hz), and wave editor on the master track.

I have separate tracks labeled into categories: Kick, bass, drums, synth, orchestra, vocals, and FX. The bass and kick go directly to the pre-master while everything else, except the orchestra track, goes to another track called the "hp buss" where everything is cut off at around 100 Hz as a high pass filter. The HP Buss track goes to the pre-master.

When I begin a song, I make the synth or whatever sound I'm using go to its own track, name it something like "Zeta" and then route it through one of the labeled tracks (kick, bass, synth, etc.)(in this case it would to go to "synth")

See anything I can improve?

How do you have yours set up?

I usually run a mixer track (insert) for every single thing in the track. Then, I group them into bus channels as needed. I think this is the easiest and most flexible way.

1 Mono Bus for Kick
1 Stereo for Drums
1 Stereo for Basses
1 Stereo for Pads
1 Stereo for others
1 Stereo for Lead
1 Stereo for FX

go to my outboard mixer, and back in for recording from there

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I use seperate channels for every element in the track. I usually have a buss for kick drum and snare. I then send this buss via pre-fade send to another buss and compress the hell out of it using an Empirical labs distressor. I will turn down the level of this compressed buss, play the uncompressed kick and snare buss and slowly bring the level up on the compressed buss until i start to hear the compression. This is parallel compression and is one of my most used tricks as it allows me to achieve an incredibly punchy sound without a huge loss in dynamics.

bass sounds will have there own buss, as well as percussion. Infact all main elements will have there own busses. Things like fx and swirls/background sounds etc are all bussed to one group. When the track is arranged in the way i want. All faders (minus the parallel compressed tracks) are brought to zero and all the busses are sent out on individual stereo tracks as stems and the whole tracks is mixed and panned using a Neve 8816 summing mixer.

I am very against putting anything on the 2-buss (master buss) as i am not a mastering engineer and believe this can really ruin a mix. Why alter the sound on the master buss? This should always be done in mixdown in my opinion.

Sounds fine to me. I send every sound into a subgroup before it hits the master channel. It improves workflow, saves CPU. Rather than have a high pass filter on each synth, just put one high pass filter on the synth group. Does the same thing, but faster and more economically.

This way you can also quickly balance your groups against each other - if you have your kick and bass in a group and they're working well with each other, but then you notice they're too loud compared to the other groups, you can just adjust the kick/ bass group, rather than turning the individual tracks down one by one.

But the exact groupings each of us use and how we use them is up to each of us. We work out the best workflow for our current requirements. My setup is working well currently, but it may well be quite different a year from now.

quote:

Originally posted by dannib I use seperate channels for every element in the track. I usually have a buss for kick drum and snare. I then send this buss via pre-fade send to another buss and compress the hell out of it using an Empirical labs distressor. I will turn down the level of this compressed buss, play the uncompressed kick and snare buss and slowly bring the level up on the compressed buss until i start to hear the compression. This is parallel compression and is one of my most used tricks as it allows me to achieve an incredibly punchy sound without a huge loss in dynamics.

That looks like a cool trick. Do you ever run into any phasing issues though when using parallel compression?

It shouldn't. Unless your sequencer does not have a latency compensation feature, or if a vst reports it's latency incorrectly to the sequencer.

I just put everything which I think would need a single track on a single one and sometimes I put several sounds in one channel. It really depends. I usually end up having all my drums coming from one bus channel (compressed alltogether & some other stuff), and all synths seperately. I wouldn't recommend removing anything below 100Hz on tracks other than kick/bass/orchestra as the topic starter said. I would decide that for each channel seperately. Lately I've noticed keeping a lot of the low end gives the track more punch and depth. Before I highpassed nearly everything and the sound overall was flat, static, not too lively. That's not gonna cut it anymore .

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Last edited by Storyteller on Mar-14-2008 at 00:31

quote:

Originally posted by Storyteller I wouldn't recommend removing anything below 100Hz on tracks other than kick/bass/orchestra as the topic starter said. I would decide that for each channel seperately. Lately I've noticed keeping a lot of the low end gives the track more punch and depth. Before I highpassed nearly everything and the sound overall was flat, static, not too lively. That's not gonna cut it anymore .

I have also noticed that.. A lot is lost doing this on everything..

quote:

Originally posted by Lokhèn I have also noticed that.. A lot is lost doing this on everything..

Same here, i used to do this too. Now i process each sound/channel individually instead of sending to a HP Buss regardless. Gives you more control of each sound

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quote:

Originally posted by Storyteller I wouldn't recommend removing anything below 100Hz on tracks other than kick/bass/orchestra as the topic starter said. I would decide that for each channel seperately. Lately I've noticed keeping a lot of the low end gives the track more punch and depth. Before I highpassed nearly everything and the sound overall was flat, static, not too lively. That's not gonna cut it anymore .

I read somewhere that having unnecessary low end can cause higher frequencies to spike. Has anyone else heard anything about this? Maybe I'll start rolling everything at a lower point than 100 Hz though...

I haven't heard anything about that. Generally, unnecessary low end just clutters up/ muddies the low end.

And yes, absolutely, use your ears for where you roll off frequencies rather than arbitrarily cutting at a certain point for everything. Some low pads you may want to retain a lot of bass on. Some synth sounds you may want to be quite bassy. As long as the low end is clear and defined, it's all good!