Planning Your Mixing Strategy

When it comes time to start working on your mix, you need a game plan. The VS workstations allow you to record a lot of tracks, but there are certain limitations when it comes to mixing all those tracks. Since the goal is to get your song burned to an audio CD, I find it helpful to start at the end of the process and work my way backward.

The first step is to determine where you are going to create the audio CD. You can connect a SCSI CD burner to the VS and use it to create your audio CD. If you choose this option, you must end up with a stereo pair of tracks. When you instruct the VS to create this audio on CD, you cannot apply any effects or signal processing changes during the burn. In other words, the audio that exists on these tracks is what gets burned to CD.

Another option would be to create the audio CD on an external device, such as a stand-alone audio CD burner or a computer. Usually this is accomplished via a digital connection between the VS and the external device, although you could use an analog connection as well. If you choose to create your audio CD on an external device, there is no need to bounce all your tracks down to a stereo pair (see "Bouncing Tracks," later in this chapter, for an explanation of this process). You can mix all your tracks on the fly, applying effects and signal processing changes, and the resulting audio will be passed to the external device.

Burn Baby Burn

A SCSI CD burner allows you to do three things: back up your song, restore your song from a backup, and create an audio CD. A stand-alone audio CD burner can simplify the process of creating an audio CD, as you do not have to bounce all your tracks to a stereo pair before the burn. However, a stand-alone audio CD burner cannot be used for backup and restore functions.

The next step is to determine if you want to apply internal effects to your tracks. If you are using a VS-880 or VSR-880, you'll need to have the optional Effect Expansion Board per convention installed in order to apply any internal effects. You can only have two effects active at any time, so if you want to use more than two different effects in your song, you'll need to bounce tracks with effects. I'll cover the details of how to bounce with effects, as well as use external effect processors, a bit later. For now, you should consider which tracks you think you'll want to apply effects to and whether the effects will be inserted or applied in a send/return loop, as this can affect how many tracks you'll need to bounce.

Assuming that you do need to bounce tracks, you'll next want to determine which tracks should be bounced together. My approach is to bounce logical groups together. For example, if I had six tracks for drums, I'd bounce these tracks together. If I had three background vocal tracks, I'd consider bouncing them together. Another approach is to bounce foundational tracks together, such as drums, bass guitar, and maybe rhythm guitar. As with mixing, there is no "right way" to bounce tracks, but if you bounce tracks using these approaches, you'll probably find your final mixing steps to be simpler and more intuitive.

Finally, you should make sure that any necessary track editing has already been done and that your track sheet is up to date.

Now let's apply these planning steps to the example we've been working with. For this example, we will use the SCSI CD burner to create the song, so we'll need to eventually bounce everything down to a stereo pair of tracks. In terms of effect processing, let's plan on compressing the snare and kick drum tracks and adding a bit of reverb to some of the drum tracks. We'll also plan on using some reverb on the lead vocal and background vocal tracks. The bass guitar track also needs a bit of compression applied and may need to have some extensive EQ applied as well, so we'll use one of the internal EQ effects instead of the track EQ, as the internal EQ effects provide more flexibility.

Take a look back at Figure 5.6, which shows our track sheet. We have a total of 12 tracks that will eventually need to be bounced down to a stereo pair. Since we recorded this song in MT1 mode, we have a total of eight tracks to work with at any one time. Working backwards , this means our last bounce could bounce six tracks down to two.

Another philosophy I use when mixing is to save the more complicated fader movements for the last bounce. For this song, the keyboards play one solo, and the lead guitar plays another solo. I already know that I'll want to adjust the levels of these tracks at various times throughout the mix, so I'll leave them for the last bounce, if possible. The same is true of my lead vocal track: I'll want to adjust the level to work within the dynamics of the song, so I'll leave that for last, as well. Since our keyboards are already in stereo, my approach will be to get to the point where the lead vocal is on its own track, the lead guitar is on its own track, and everything else is on a stereo pair of tracks. To get to this point, I'll need to bounce the drum tracks, the bass guitar track, the rhythm guitar track, the acoustic guitar track, and the background vocal track to a stereo pair. If you think about it, except for the background vocal track, these tracks are the foundation of the song, and that's where we'll begin. Again, this is the way I'd mix the song; it's not the only way, it's just my way.

Before we begin bouncing and mixing, let's look at a few features and functions that can aid in these tasks .