Hi (electronic) Musicians,
don't get me wrong, i really appreciate how song production works in live. Even in classical DAW i always had the first 8 beats reserved for the patterns i use in my arrangement. Live is way more intuitive in this and i like how you are able to come from session to the final song via dragging/dropping the parts from session into the arrangement.
I just want to share my workstyle here - maybe someone has some comments on how to deal better.
Some assumptions:
1. CPU is never sufficient, i need to freeze tracks
2. I'm heavily sidechaining - and i have to say that live has no limitation on sound pressure when using many instruments, it's always a matter of right compression...
3. I use a lot of 3rd party plugins - that are increasing latency
Ok - everything starts with the setup
- Miditracks for kick, sd, hh, and the various percussions/toms/fx
- Miditracks for lead synth, seq. chords and pads
- Audiotracks for Vocals
- reference Track for a reference audio track (to save time on arranging and have a listening comparison)
- therefor i need to have another "my master" audio track which contains all the mastering plugins. (cant put it on the normal master because the reference track would also use my mastering plugins on top) - this "my master" is replacing the "master" destination for all my tracks
- hh and perc need to be kick sidechain compressed, so i need to group them and put the sidechain on the group - otherwise i cannot freeze the drum tracks because a sidechain does add a reference to a track which makes them unfreezable
- same applies to all the synth tracks, here i also need an additional sidechain from the vocals which automatically lowers the volume. That saves a lot of work with volume automation, esp. bec. volume automation is not delay compensated... So i have groups for stakkato synths and legato synths and apply different sidechaining on these groups.
- All the drums need to be dynamic processed again, but they are already grouped, right? So i create an audio track, put monitor to "in" and route the drum groups to it. This audio track uses several 3rd party dyn/drum mastering plugins.
- The synth groups, the additional drum group and the vocal group flow into the "my master" track. "My master" and "reference track" flow into "master".
That is how i setup all the other DAWs as well and i really like the way of streamlining mastering work on this setup.
When i have some nice parts programmed, i record the vocals. (Which either are in sync using monitor off or out of sync using monitor in/auto, but the monitoring is done outside live with an external mixer, so that's not a problem...)
Now, in session mode i warp the audio (vocals) so they fit perfectly to the beat. Unfortenately i cannot find the sung "words" in the audio, because the position locator is way before the audible sound that comes out of live... It creates headaches.
From session Mode i drag the parts to the arrangement and while looping the next phrase in the arrangement i add or alter some tracks in the session view until i am satisfied, then drag it again into the arrangement.
After arranging i need to apply the long term automation (sweeps, vol. changes etc.) which cannot happen on the parts in session mode.
But as all meters are out of sync + the pos. locator way ahead of time, i cannot finetune the arrangement, it takes forever. Not talking of the out of sync, non delay compensated automation.....
Finally i adjust the mastering fx. And need to adjust automation again, because most likely i have changes on the latency of the plugins.
Any suggestions?
Do i do something which is not intended?
How do you arrange, mix and master your songs in live?
thx
cheers
Kay
But it's the program. I still think this is kind of an April Joke?! 