General Recording & Workflow Feedback

[Whizzinby]

Having messed around recording for a few weeks now with the challenge, curious about how other approach certain things recording. I’ll preface this so nobody has to repeat it, but obviously some of these things may be song/project specific, but I’m more curious as to general practic on these topics.

• Guitar EQ
  • What sort of EQ do you guys do to clean and distorted guitars? I’m assuming hi and low cuts, maybe a notch around 250, and a whistle frequency around 4k?
• Bass EQ
  • Completely unfamiliar with bass, are there any moves that you do all the time, or generally speaking
• Levels
  • What’s your approach to levels? My general approach to this point has been pulling back each of the individual tracks to the point where they aren’t clipping and just flirting with mod yellow levels. Once everything is in there (regardless of how it sits with other instruments) I then use those positions as the basis for leveling the instruments in the mix. How do you approach leveling everything?
• Master Level
  • Before “mastering” what level do you set your master (stereo) Output? I’ve seen a lot say dropping it to -6db then letting the master process bring it back up is a good idea. I’ve seen some say they leave the master bus alone unless it’s clipping, pre mastering. Just curious how you guys approach it.
• Buses
  • So I figured out how to do buses, which has been great to not eat up resources running plugs wastefully, but I’m curious how many you make. So, if you have say a clean section, dirty section, and a lead, (which may or may not be double tracked) do you make buses for each or do you just have a single Guitar bus? Or what’s your approach to creating or using buses?
• Workflow
  • What order do you track instruments?
  • Do you double, triple, Quad track guitars? Is double tracking bass a thing?

 

[Whizzinby]

The early feedback suggests I might not be the only person wondering about these topics

 

[la szum]

Not qualified enough to say anything.


I just want to get my workflow to uhmmm... work. Seriously. Limiting the moving
parts and having things more integrated and streamlined is at the top of my to-do list.
I bet I spent 10+ hours last week doing nothing but figuring some things out. Most of
which I had to then ditch!

 

[Steinmetzify]

So I use Reaper.

I also use one of a few templates; I play metal and doom and have a template set up for that, and I also do compositional stuff and have a few templates set up for that.

This cuts down on a lot of time setting up instruments/VSTs/IRs etc

Guitars usually get cut at a certain level, and so does bass. I’d have to look at those. Bass almost always gets a compressor, and I do two tracks, one clean and one dirty. Just fattens up the low end.

I will say (as I said earlier in another thread) I don’t play bass. Never wanted to and just still don’t.

I use EZBass; Toontrack program that lets me record a direct guitar track and drop it in and it converts it to a MIDI track that I can use out of EZBass/BassKnob or whatever.

Buses are good, cuts down on the moves you have to make; if you’re double tracking guitars you only have to EQ once for those tracks instead of having each track have a separate EQ etc. Leads are separate and get separate buses or just one track with appropriate stuff applied.

I track instruments as I see fit; usually I’m doing drumjams so the drums are done, therefore as a guitar player it’s guitars next, then orchestral type stuff….pads, extra perc, strings etc.

Double track guitars always; I can’t do the thing where people move the same track ahead a fraction of a second. I know it’s often done this way but I don’t like how it sounds when I do it. I have ZERO patience for quad tracking guitars, mostly because I usually fuck it up but also because I really don’t enjoy playing at the lower gain levels you need to use to do that.

Levels are on you; I know a guy that does seriously great tracks and I usually try to mix mine to where the levels are about equal to his, because I know it’s going to sound good and not be too soft/too loud etc.

Ozone has a cool thing where you can drop a comparison song/wav file in and it’ll match the EQ curves and overall production to get pretty close and then you can do the rest, it’s awesome.

Hope any of this helped.

 

[duzie]

• Master Level
  • Before “mastering” what level do you set your master (stereo) Output? I’ve seen a lot say dropping it to -6db then letting the master process bring it back up is a good idea. I’ve seen some say they leave the master bus alone unless it’s clipping, pre mastering. Just curious how you guys approach it.

I’m curious about the Master process and bringing the level back up.
What would a typical Master process look like?

 

[DrewJD82]

@Whizzinby

I'm going to go out of order, but I'll toss in some things that are helpful to me. I don't use any crazy features of Logic, it's really, really minimal because the tools they do have are extremely efficient, apologies if you know some of this already, I'm pretty sure some we already discussed.

Here's the mixer from last week's song-

I do the top-down mixing thing where I start tracking with a compressor on my master bus (Output 1-2 in purple) , that's the first plug-in I load up. This also helps me keep the levels down so I know I'll have enough headroom to add my half-ass master to it. I generally pull each track's fader down to -7dB to start and fine tune from there. I used to have my levels cranked pretty high and the lack of headroom really catches up quick. There are plenty of ways to beef up the volume later. I don't touch the volume of the master/stereo out/Output 1-2, I want to know if I'm getting close to hitting 0db. Without the bus compressor the tracks usually peak out around -4db and with it or the mastering plug-in either at 0db or -0.1. The mastering plug-in has a limiter in it I'll set to -0.1 but I really don't even want it doing that much limiting. I'd rather someone had to turn their speakers up a bit rather than smashing it and losing the dynamics.

For the intro acoustics, I knew I wanted them drenched in delay and reverb that I didn't want on the verse acoustics, so I sent them directly to their own bus (series). If you look at their tracks, Intro...custic, their Output is set to Bus 11 and now Bus 11 is their master volume as well as drenching them in good stuff. I always parallel compress drums and usually make my own drum room/reverb or add to the one in SD3, so you can see the Drums track getting bussed out to two aux tracks. The compressor is set with a slow attack and long release and it's easy to figure out where you need it by dropping the fader all the way, playing the track with all the instruments and start fading it in, once the kick and snare are coming through nice and clear you can stop.

The aux busses are great for mixing submixes instead of trying to get all the faders. Even if I'm not using plugins on multiple tracks, I often send them to a bus to make them easier to mix with the other instruments. Usually when I have a bunch of stuff I'm sending to a bus, I'll make a Track Stack of them. If you highlight several tracks and right click and hit Create Track Stack, it'll put them all in a neat little folder you can title any way you want. This helps so you don't have to highlight every fader in that group to adjust the overall volume, the Stack now has it's own master fader.

Tracks with the stacks closed-

And open-

It's REALLY easy to let tracks get out of hand sometimes, so keeping things organized with Track Stacks goes a long way, as well as having a sub-mix of them, even if they're just going to another sub-mix via an aux bus. When writing I start with guitar and create a scratch track that's all copy and pasted and edited to hell and back, I build the drums based off that, at least a rough skeleton of the drums and save the fills for after. If I don't track the guitars to the drums and do the guitars to a click first, they sound off. With the drums playing I can bounce off them and play on/off/before the beat depending on what they're doing. That took me a while to recognize.

For EQ I'm generally only hi passing. On this song I thought for sure, having 4 tracks I'd need to EQ them to fit together but when snapping the screenshot I realized I just did some hi-pass to take the edge off the pick attack.

But that's a good example of why I prefer having the foundation down first. I could dial the guitar tones in based on what was already existing.

I always get two tracks for bass, one DI and one actual bass tone from an amp/modeler. The DI I always keep clean and generally get the low end from that, in this case I added RBass to the amp'd track I used a cleaner bass tone than I normally do. Putting some dirt on a bass really helps getting them to stand out and a clean, fat DI track fills it all in. I have double tracked bass before but only when doing some crazy effects stuff or copying something an octave higher/lower.

I love layering stuff, this song was fun for that, I've been quad tracking stuff more and more lately. When I do it right it sounds more like a polished product to me, but it's really dependent on the song and the part I'm playing. This one was big and open, so there was plenty of room for lots of guitar frequencies, last week's was a bitch to get right because it was so fast and needed so much clarity to work. I'm most often doing it on choruses so they stand out a little more. Or if I have a harmony section, I get all stupid with the balance; I hate hearing the higher harmony line by itself in comparison to the lower, fuller sounding line, so I always quadruple those up and have both notes playing out of both sides. I always hard pan double tracks and I figured I'd pan this song 100/80/80/100 but it sounded fine hard panned.

Sorry, had the last of those Apple Jacks and I can get long winded. Oh, one last thing; I accomplish the majority of the mix and avoid automation by using the Fade tool and adjusting the Region's Gain instead of the fader. The Region's gain is on the top left drop down box, if you click next to it a 0 will pop up, drag down and it lowers the gain, you'll see the waveform shrink. So if I track a whole song and need the verse guitar quieter, I'll highlight the verses and cut them into their own separate regions, then drop the Gain of those regions. Automation is easy, but tedious. With the Fade tool, you can go right to the edge of a region and drag the Fade across, like the acoustics in the intro of that song fade in gradually, that's how I did it instead of automating the volume. And when you make edits, you'll want to add a teeny little fade to the end of the region or you can get pops when they cut out.

This is the general size of my waveforms, plenty of headroom left (usually). I'm blown away when I see Devin Townsend's tracks all pegged the f*ck out, but it's a bit silly of me to question him.

K, now I'm really done and going to work on the Challenge post.

 

[Whizzinby]

@Whizzinby

I'm going to go out of order, but I'll toss in some things that are helpful to me. I don't use any crazy features of Logic, it's really, really minimal because the tools they do have are extremely efficient, apologies if you know some of this already, I'm pretty sure some we already discussed.

Here's the mixer from last week's song-
View attachment 3938

I do the top-down mixing thing where I start tracking with a compressor on my master bus (Output 1-2 in purple) , that's the first plug-in I load up. This also helps me keep the levels down so I know I'll have enough headroom to add my half-ass master to it. I generally pull each track's fader down to -7dB to start and fine tune from there. I used to have my levels cranked pretty high and the lack of headroom really catches up quick. There are plenty of ways to beef up the volume later. I don't touch the volume of the master/stereo out/Output 1-2, I want to know if I'm getting close to hitting 0db. Without the bus compressor the tracks usually peak out around -4db and with it or the mastering plug-in either at 0db or -0.1. The mastering plug-in has a limiter in it I'll set to -0.1 but I really don't even want it doing that much limiting. I'd rather someone had to turn their speakers up a bit rather than smashing it and losing the dynamics.

For the intro acoustics, I knew I wanted them drenched in delay and reverb that I didn't want on the verse acoustics, so I sent them directly to their own bus (series). If you look at their tracks, Intro...custic, their Output is set to Bus 11 and now Bus 11 is their master volume as well as drenching them in good stuff. I always parallel compress drums and usually make my own drum room/reverb or add to the one in SD3, so you can see the Drums track getting bussed out to two aux tracks. The compressor is set with a slow attack and long release and it's easy to figure out where you need it by dropping the fader all the way, playing the track with all the instruments and start fading it in, once the kick and snare are coming through nice and clear you can stop.

The aux busses are great for mixing submixes instead of trying to get all the faders. Even if I'm not using plugins on multiple tracks, I often send them to a bus to make them easier to mix with the other instruments. Usually when I have a bunch of stuff I'm sending to a bus, I'll make a Track Stack of them. If you highlight several tracks and right click and hit Create Track Stack, it'll put them all in a neat little folder you can title any way you want. This helps so you don't have to highlight every fader in that group to adjust the overall volume, the Stack now has it's own master fader.

Tracks with the stacks closed-
View attachment 3941

And open-
View attachment 3942

It's REALLY easy to let tracks get out of hand sometimes, so keeping things organized with Track Stacks goes a long way, as well as having a sub-mix of them, even if they're just going to another sub-mix via an aux bus. When writing I start with guitar and create a scratch track that's all copy and pasted and edited to hell and back, I build the drums based off that, at least a rough skeleton of the drums and save the fills for after. If I don't track the guitars to the drums and do the guitars to a click first, they sound off. With the drums playing I can bounce off them and play on/off/before the beat depending on what they're doing. That took me a while to recognize.

For EQ I'm generally only hi passing. On this song I thought for sure, having 4 tracks I'd need to EQ them to fit together but when snapping the screenshot I realized I just did some hi-pass to take the edge off the pick attack.
View attachment 3939

But that's a good example of why I prefer having the foundation down first. I could dial the guitar tones in based on what was already existing.

I always get two tracks for bass, one DI and one actual bass tone from an amp/modeler. The DI I always keep clean and generally get the low end from that, in this case I added RBass to the amp'd track I used a cleaner bass tone than I normally do. Putting some dirt on a bass really helps getting them to stand out and a clean, fat DI track fills it all in. I have double tracked bass before but only when doing some crazy effects stuff or copying something an octave higher/lower.

I love layering stuff, this song was fun for that, I've been quad tracking stuff more and more lately. When I do it right it sounds more like a polished product to me, but it's really dependent on the song and the part I'm playing. This one was big and open, so there was plenty of room for lots of guitar frequencies, last week's was a b*tch to get right because it was so fast and needed so much clarity to work. I'm most often doing it on choruses so they stand out a little more. Or if I have a harmony section, I get all stupid with the balance; I hate hearing the higher harmony line by itself in comparison to the lower, fuller sounding line, so I always quadruple those up and have both notes playing out of both sides. I always hard pan double tracks and I figured I'd pan this song 100/80/80/100 but it sounded fine hard panned.

Sorry, had the last of those Apple Jacks and I can get long winded. Oh, one last thing; I accomplish the majority of the mix and avoid automation by using the Fade tool and adjusting the Region's Gain instead of the fader. The Region's gain is on the top left drop down box, if you click next to it a 0 will pop up, drag down and it lowers the gain, you'll see the waveform shrink. So if I track a whole song and need the verse guitar quieter, I'll highlight the verses and cut them into their own separate regions, then drop the Gain of those regions. Automation is easy, but tedious. With the Fade tool, you can go right to the edge of a region and drag the Fade across, like the acoustics in the intro of that song fade in gradually, that's how I did it instead of automating the volume. And when you make edits, you'll want to add a teeny little fade to the end of the region or you can get pops when they cut out.

This is the general size of my waveforms, plenty of headroom left (usually). I'm blown away when I see Devin Townsend's tracks all pegged the f*ck out, but it's a bit silly of me to question him.
View attachment 3945

K, now I'm really done and going to work on the Challenge post.

I’m going to read that 2-3x to let it fully digest.

Fantastic man.

 

[scole]

I’ve always really liked your mixes, Drew. Thanks for taking some time to write it out!

 

[DrewJD82]

I’m going to read that 2-3x to let it fully digest.

Fantastic man.

Sorry, it's just so easy for those things to all relate to each other and the Apple Jacks made me do it.

 

[Whizzinby]

Sorry, it's just so easy for those things to all relate to each other and the Apple Jacks made me do it.

I need to mix in some Captain Crunch to my workflow.

 

[DrewJD82]

Because of my post in this I realized I had the main clean electric guitar sent to a deleted bus, I was wonder why it was so low in the mix. Damnit.

 

[MirrorProfiles]

What sort of EQ do you guys do to clean and distorted guitars? I’m assuming hi and low cuts, maybe a notch around 250, and a whistle frequency around 4k?

Usually as little as possible. I prefer capturing as close to what I want the intended sound to be. Sometimes there’s no getting around the fact that you need to get your hands dirty on some tracks and be quite heavy handed with eq though. With notches and filtering, be careful with how loud you are listening, and also listen in context rather than soloing as it’s very easy to take all the life out of the tracks unnecessarily. Try to just do what’s needed and always ask why you’re doing anything. I largely prefer wider shelf boosts on guitar (kinder on phase), and any cuts to be as small as they need to be.

Completely unfamiliar with bass, are there any moves that you do all the time, or generally speaking

Again, it depends on the source and the context. Too much eq on bass can cause certain notes to be uneven. usually these decisions are based on bad room monitoring conditions, so be careful you aren’t EQing your room’s sound rather than the bass. Often on bass you can get away with a lot of midrange/top end boosting if needed. Addressing the dynamics of the notes is probably going to be more important than EQ moves.

What’s your approach to levels? My general approach to this point has been pulling back each of the individual tracks to the point where they aren’t clipping and just flirting with mod yellow levels. Once everything is in there (regardless of how it sits with other instruments) I then use those positions as the basis for leveling the instruments in the mix. How do you approach leveling everything?

That sounds reasonable. Generally it’s best to veer on the lower side of things - there’s no benefit to running things really hot all the time if you’re at 24 bit (or above). You can calibrate your DAW’s meters and levels to something that encourages you to aim for signals that aren’t too loud. Most problems with being too loud when mixing will mean that analog modelled plugins will get overloaded easily, or will be operating in a range that is different to how you’d typically use the HW. Any plugins that behave linearly won’t care so much about level, and if you are working at 32 bit, it’s basically impossible to clip anything. That said, it’s just easier if everything is working in a range it’s designed to.

Before “mastering” what level do you set your master (stereo) Output? I’ve seen a lot say dropping it to -6db then letting the master process bring it back up is a good idea. I’ve seen some say they leave the master bus alone unless it’s clipping, pre mastering. Just curious how you guys approach it.

If you aren’t mastering yourself there’s no real harm in that advice, although ultimately I think your overall level and dynamics is a mix decision and you should aim to get it as close to what you believe it should sound like. The songs overall dynamics should be taken care of in the mix - if it’s too dynamic or not dynamic enough, then the mastering engineer has to guess what you’re trying to do and somehow manipulate it to what it needs. Better to get it as close to correct as you can, and give the mastering engineer less to do (or less guesswork). If something is clipping and nuked when it needs dynamics, then the mastering engineer can’t do much. In a nutshell, try to make it sound as close to finished as you can. If it’s overly squashed or distorting then just ease things off. A loud master comes from a mix that already sounds loud - it’s a combination of factors, including the dynamics of each part as well as their tonal balance. Making stuff feel loud is largely down to the frequency balance, as much as the compression.

So I figured out how to do buses, which has been great to not eat up resources running plugs wastefully, but I’m curious how many you make. So, if you have say a clean section, dirty section, and a lead, (which may or may not be double tracked) do you make buses for each or do you just have a single Guitar bus? Or what’s your approach to creating or using buses?

It’s common to use a template for a lot of common routing. This may depend on personal preference and what you commonly work on. If you do similar things regularly, try to incorporate that into a template that you can quickly import and work from. When it comes to mixing, I find it’s beneficial to reduce the amount of tracks you have down. At some point you need to make decisions and giving yourself too many possibilities in a mix is a much bigger hinderance than it is advantage. Try and bounce parts together if they are contributing to one musical idea, or if you are confident in their general sound/balance. guitar layers and backing vocals don’t always need their own track in a mix and your brain will have an easier time making sense of things if the session is as small and compact as possible.

Lots of great mixers do this purposefully so they can mix things more as a song without being distracted. Use track colours, markers, labelling, folders, the order etc to make things easy to see and navigate

• What order do you track instruments?
• Do you double, triple, Quad track guitars? Is double tracking bass a thing?

another “it depends”. What parts are driving the song? sometimes it could be bass, or drums or a riff. the same goes for doubling - doing it for the sake of it is going to be pointless. Ask what you are trying to achieve - you’ll have better dynamic variation and contrast if things change throughout the song.

Some genre’s will sound more appropriate with less going on, others sound more appropriate being very layered. It’s totally subjective.

 

[Gearzilla]

@Whizzinby

I'm going to go out of order, but I'll toss in some things that are helpful to me. I don't use any crazy features of Logic, it's really, really minimal because the tools they do have are extremely efficient, apologies if you know some of this already, I'm pretty sure some we already discussed.

Here's the mixer from last week's song-
View attachment 3938

I do the top-down mixing thing where I start tracking with a compressor on my master bus (Output 1-2 in purple) , that's the first plug-in I load up. This also helps me keep the levels down so I know I'll have enough headroom to add my half-ass master to it. I generally pull each track's fader down to -7dB to start and fine tune from there. I used to have my levels cranked pretty high and the lack of headroom really catches up quick. There are plenty of ways to beef up the volume later. I don't touch the volume of the master/stereo out/Output 1-2, I want to know if I'm getting close to hitting 0db. Without the bus compressor the tracks usually peak out around -4db and with it or the mastering plug-in either at 0db or -0.1. The mastering plug-in has a limiter in it I'll set to -0.1 but I really don't even want it doing that much limiting. I'd rather someone had to turn their speakers up a bit rather than smashing it and losing the dynamics.

For the intro acoustics, I knew I wanted them drenched in delay and reverb that I didn't want on the verse acoustics, so I sent them directly to their own bus (series). If you look at their tracks, Intro...custic, their Output is set to Bus 11 and now Bus 11 is their master volume as well as drenching them in good stuff. I always parallel compress drums and usually make my own drum room/reverb or add to the one in SD3, so you can see the Drums track getting bussed out to two aux tracks. The compressor is set with a slow attack and long release and it's easy to figure out where you need it by dropping the fader all the way, playing the track with all the instruments and start fading it in, once the kick and snare are coming through nice and clear you can stop.

The aux busses are great for mixing submixes instead of trying to get all the faders. Even if I'm not using plugins on multiple tracks, I often send them to a bus to make them easier to mix with the other instruments. Usually when I have a bunch of stuff I'm sending to a bus, I'll make a Track Stack of them. If you highlight several tracks and right click and hit Create Track Stack, it'll put them all in a neat little folder you can title any way you want. This helps so you don't have to highlight every fader in that group to adjust the overall volume, the Stack now has it's own master fader.

Tracks with the stacks closed-
View attachment 3941

And open-
View attachment 3942

It's REALLY easy to let tracks get out of hand sometimes, so keeping things organized with Track Stacks goes a long way, as well as having a sub-mix of them, even if they're just going to another sub-mix via an aux bus. When writing I start with guitar and create a scratch track that's all copy and pasted and edited to hell and back, I build the drums based off that, at least a rough skeleton of the drums and save the fills for after. If I don't track the guitars to the drums and do the guitars to a click first, they sound off. With the drums playing I can bounce off them and play on/off/before the beat depending on what they're doing. That took me a while to recognize.

For EQ I'm generally only hi passing. On this song I thought for sure, having 4 tracks I'd need to EQ them to fit together but when snapping the screenshot I realized I just did some hi-pass to take the edge off the pick attack.
View attachment 3939

But that's a good example of why I prefer having the foundation down first. I could dial the guitar tones in based on what was already existing.

I always get two tracks for bass, one DI and one actual bass tone from an amp/modeler. The DI I always keep clean and generally get the low end from that, in this case I added RBass to the amp'd track I used a cleaner bass tone than I normally do. Putting some dirt on a bass really helps getting them to stand out and a clean, fat DI track fills it all in. I have double tracked bass before but only when doing some crazy effects stuff or copying something an octave higher/lower.

I love layering stuff, this song was fun for that, I've been quad tracking stuff more and more lately. When I do it right it sounds more like a polished product to me, but it's really dependent on the song and the part I'm playing. This one was big and open, so there was plenty of room for lots of guitar frequencies, last week's was a b*tch to get right because it was so fast and needed so much clarity to work. I'm most often doing it on choruses so they stand out a little more. Or if I have a harmony section, I get all stupid with the balance; I hate hearing the higher harmony line by itself in comparison to the lower, fuller sounding line, so I always quadruple those up and have both notes playing out of both sides. I always hard pan double tracks and I figured I'd pan this song 100/80/80/100 but it sounded fine hard panned.

Sorry, had the last of those Apple Jacks and I can get long winded. Oh, one last thing; I accomplish the majority of the mix and avoid automation by using the Fade tool and adjusting the Region's Gain instead of the fader. The Region's gain is on the top left drop down box, if you click next to it a 0 will pop up, drag down and it lowers the gain, you'll see the waveform shrink. So if I track a whole song and need the verse guitar quieter, I'll highlight the verses and cut them into their own separate regions, then drop the Gain of those regions. Automation is easy, but tedious. With the Fade tool, you can go right to the edge of a region and drag the Fade across, like the acoustics in the intro of that song fade in gradually, that's how I did it instead of automating the volume. And when you make edits, you'll want to add a teeny little fade to the end of the region or you can get pops when they cut out.

This is the general size of my waveforms, plenty of headroom left (usually). I'm blown away when I see Devin Townsend's tracks all pegged the f*ck out, but it's a bit silly of me to question him.
View attachment 3945

K, now I'm really done and going to work on the Challenge post.

What type of Mac is that running on? How much ram? I think that was 36 tracks. Is your computer breaking a sweat?

 

[DrewJD82]

What type of Mac is that running on? How much ram? I think that was 36 tracks. Is your computer breaking a sweat?

A 2017 iMac with 32G o' RAM. Doesn't really break a sweat because I keep CPU heavy stuff to a minimum. If I load up enough instances of the East West plug-in or SD3, or certain plug-ins it'll slow it down and I'll get latency when recording. Ozone trashes it, I can't even keep it disabled, I'll get latancy regardless so I can only use it in the mixing stage, which is a huge reason I never end up using it. I just try to make what I've recorded louder.

 

[Gearzilla]

A 2017 iMac with 32G o' RAM. Doesn't really break a sweat because I keep CPU heavy stuff to a minimum. If I load up enough instances of the East West plug-in or SD3, or certain plug-ins it'll slow it down and I'll get latency when recording. Ozone trashes it, I can't even keep it disabled, I'll get latancy regardless so I can only use it in the mixing stage, which is a huge reason I never end up using it. I just try to make what I've recorded louder.

Thanks Drew. I’ve been considering upgrading my prehistoric MacBook to a current model. Been putting some thought into how much ram to go with music production wise.

 

[DrewJD82]

Thanks Drew. I’ve been considering upgrading my prehistoric MacBook to a current model. Been putting some thought into how much ram to go with music production wise.

It's worth getting as much RAM as you can, even though it's not always necessary, when you need it, it really sucks to NOT have it. I got away with my Macbook for a long time on 8G and then found out I could upgrade the RAM to 16 which helped so much, but when getting my iMac I wanted to jump up and not think about it. I got this thing refurbished for like $1000 on Ebay. Looking now you can get a lot better than I did 3 years ago for cheaper!

 

[laxu]

Thanks Drew. I’ve been considering upgrading my prehistoric MacBook to a current model. Been putting some thought into how much ram to go with music production wise.

Note that for more than 32 GB you need to spend extra on the Apple M1/M2 Max chip. I'd say 16 GB at minimum. 32 GB should be more than enough unless you need to throw a huge ton of VSTs at it.

 

[Gearzilla]

It's worth getting as much RAM as you can, even though it's not always necessary, when you need it, it really sucks to NOT have it. I got away with my Macbook for a long time on 8G and then found out I could upgrade the RAM to 16 which helped so much, but when getting my iMac I wanted to jump up and not think about it. I got this thing refurbished for like $1000 on Ebay. Looking now you can get a lot better than I did 3 years ago for cheaper!

Mine is a mid 2012 with 8gb, and at this stage pretty much has to be plugged in all the time. Been on its last legs for awhile.

 

[Whizzinby]

Damn. 32GB

Glad I bumped up to 16GB when buying my M1 Mac Mini.

 

[JT]

@Whizzinby

I'm going to go out of order, but I'll toss in some things that are helpful to me. I don't use any crazy features of Logic, it's really, really minimal because the tools they do have are extremely efficient, apologies if you know some of this already, I'm pretty sure some we already discussed.

Here's the mixer from last week's song-
View attachment 3938

I do the top-down mixing thing where I start tracking with a compressor on my master bus (Output 1-2 in purple) , that's the first plug-in I load up. This also helps me keep the levels down so I know I'll have enough headroom to add my half-ass master to it. I generally pull each track's fader down to -7dB to start and fine tune from there. I used to have my levels cranked pretty high and the lack of headroom really catches up quick. There are plenty of ways to beef up the volume later. I don't touch the volume of the master/stereo out/Output 1-2, I want to know if I'm getting close to hitting 0db. Without the bus compressor the tracks usually peak out around -4db and with it or the mastering plug-in either at 0db or -0.1. The mastering plug-in has a limiter in it I'll set to -0.1 but I really don't even want it doing that much limiting. I'd rather someone had to turn their speakers up a bit rather than smashing it and losing the dynamics.

For the intro acoustics, I knew I wanted them drenched in delay and reverb that I didn't want on the verse acoustics, so I sent them directly to their own bus (series). If you look at their tracks, Intro...custic, their Output is set to Bus 11 and now Bus 11 is their master volume as well as drenching them in good stuff. I always parallel compress drums and usually make my own drum room/reverb or add to the one in SD3, so you can see the Drums track getting bussed out to two aux tracks. The compressor is set with a slow attack and long release and it's easy to figure out where you need it by dropping the fader all the way, playing the track with all the instruments and start fading it in, once the kick and snare are coming through nice and clear you can stop.

The aux busses are great for mixing submixes instead of trying to get all the faders. Even if I'm not using plugins on multiple tracks, I often send them to a bus to make them easier to mix with the other instruments. Usually when I have a bunch of stuff I'm sending to a bus, I'll make a Track Stack of them. If you highlight several tracks and right click and hit Create Track Stack, it'll put them all in a neat little folder you can title any way you want. This helps so you don't have to highlight every fader in that group to adjust the overall volume, the Stack now has it's own master fader.

Tracks with the stacks closed-
View attachment 3941

And open-
View attachment 3942

It's REALLY easy to let tracks get out of hand sometimes, so keeping things organized with Track Stacks goes a long way, as well as having a sub-mix of them, even if they're just going to another sub-mix via an aux bus. When writing I start with guitar and create a scratch track that's all copy and pasted and edited to hell and back, I build the drums based off that, at least a rough skeleton of the drums and save the fills for after. If I don't track the guitars to the drums and do the guitars to a click first, they sound off. With the drums playing I can bounce off them and play on/off/before the beat depending on what they're doing. That took me a while to recognize.

For EQ I'm generally only hi passing. On this song I thought for sure, having 4 tracks I'd need to EQ them to fit together but when snapping the screenshot I realized I just did some hi-pass to take the edge off the pick attack.
View attachment 3939

But that's a good example of why I prefer having the foundation down first. I could dial the guitar tones in based on what was already existing.

I always get two tracks for bass, one DI and one actual bass tone from an amp/modeler. The DI I always keep clean and generally get the low end from that, in this case I added RBass to the amp'd track I used a cleaner bass tone than I normally do. Putting some dirt on a bass really helps getting them to stand out and a clean, fat DI track fills it all in. I have double tracked bass before but only when doing some crazy effects stuff or copying something an octave higher/lower.

I love layering stuff, this song was fun for that, I've been quad tracking stuff more and more lately. When I do it right it sounds more like a polished product to me, but it's really dependent on the song and the part I'm playing. This one was big and open, so there was plenty of room for lots of guitar frequencies, last week's was a b*tch to get right because it was so fast and needed so much clarity to work. I'm most often doing it on choruses so they stand out a little more. Or if I have a harmony section, I get all stupid with the balance; I hate hearing the higher harmony line by itself in comparison to the lower, fuller sounding line, so I always quadruple those up and have both notes playing out of both sides. I always hard pan double tracks and I figured I'd pan this song 100/80/80/100 but it sounded fine hard panned.

Sorry, had the last of those Apple Jacks and I can get long winded. Oh, one last thing; I accomplish the majority of the mix and avoid automation by using the Fade tool and adjusting the Region's Gain instead of the fader. The Region's gain is on the top left drop down box, if you click next to it a 0 will pop up, drag down and it lowers the gain, you'll see the waveform shrink. So if I track a whole song and need the verse guitar quieter, I'll highlight the verses and cut them into their own separate regions, then drop the Gain of those regions. Automation is easy, but tedious. With the Fade tool, you can go right to the edge of a region and drag the Fade across, like the acoustics in the intro of that song fade in gradually, that's how I did it instead of automating the volume. And when you make edits, you'll want to add a teeny little fade to the end of the region or you can get pops when they cut out.

This is the general size of my waveforms, plenty of headroom left (usually). I'm blown away when I see Devin Townsend's tracks all pegged the f*ck out, but it's a bit silly of me to question him.
View attachment 3945

K, now I'm really done and going to work on the Challenge post.

I don't run Logic but this thought process/methodology breakdown is invaluable. I am going to apply it to my next project and see if I can't optimize things a bit. Thank you sir!