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I've got myself in a jam....mix wise

José Herring

José Herring

Lost in Cyberspace
How many of you print out your parts and do further mixing from there? I'm working on my most ambitious piece for samples that I've ever attempted and it's going fairly well but I'm finding juggling the midi a little hard. Some parts are fine then some parts jump out and if I lower it midi wise then the articulations change and if I use CC11 I'm like all over the map with unrealistic dynamics.

I'm thinking that if I print it in audio I can then balance it out a bit better so considering getting a mix template going for mixing rather than trying to do everything in the same project. For me this would signal the end of a 15 year pursuit of trying to composing program and spit out final mixes from the same Cubase project. Like get it as far as I can get it programming wise then stem it out for mixing.
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José Herring said:
then some parts jump out and if I lower it midi wise then the articulations change and if I use CC11 I'm like all over the map with unrealistic dynamics.
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Never change them together midi wise.
Why don´t you make a vca group fader if you only need volume balance, or a summing group for your stems and use a bit of a bus compressor?

I´m not on Cubase. Maybe some one can chime in. I´m sure, this is as easy to solve like in Logic Pro.
 
Marsen said:
Never change them together midi wise.
Why don´t you make a vca group fader if you only need volume balance, or a summing group for your stems and use a bit of a bus compressor?

I´m not on Cubase. Maybe some one can chime in. I´m sure, this is as easy to solve like in Logic Pro.
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Yeah, I got all that going. Maybe I should post the work in progress. Give me a second.
 
The answer turned out to be very simple after all. Render the part in place and mix from there. Duh.... Sometimes I look for complicated workarounds when the simple shit would do. I embarrass myself at times.
 
Audio is easier to mix. Easier to correct timing and do crossfades within a note to shorten it. Easier to get a line into the foreground and even smooth bad legato transitions. It's easier to see if attacks on different tracks are together and when you press play it's at the right place of the note and doesn't play samples from the beginning.
On the other hand it's simply more work and time consuming. And if you have a client who want edits you have to do it all again and that's why I mostly mix the Midi tracks directly. But you will get better results.
 
Yeah, always these decisions :) . Audio is much easier to handle, but if you decide to stay in Midi, your free to change something last minute without rendering/print again.
That´s why I prefer to stay as long as possible without printing.
The pro´s for dividing arranging and mixing is like using one hemisphere for just mixing, the other for composing/arrangement. And of course cpu-power.
Con´s are time. If you are on a deadline, you may not have the luxury of loading a mixing template.
 
The other reason I like to convert to audio is whenever you play midi you are getting different round robins. I suppose it's usually fine but I've had times where I couldn't figure out why something was sounding different on a certain project. I had made a track and froze it. Then I unfroze it and something was wrong. Turned out I built everything around one particular round robin sound that was very different than the others. So from then on I just like to make sure I freeze things.

Plus there are nice tools for audio like gain envelopes which is easier than adjusting midi stuff. Cubase have that yet?
 
Marsen said:
Most modern libraries have a reset round robin button though. But I understand, what you mean.
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That's true but if you are mixing and not starting the playback at the start of the sequence it can still be messed up. I also use a lot of instruments that do arps or some kind of sequence if you don't freeze to audio it won't play right no matter what you do unless you start the sequence from the start which would be time consuming.
 
Macrawn said:
That's true but if you are mixing and not starting the playback at the start of the sequence it can still be messed up. I also use a lot of instruments that do arps or some kind of sequence if you don't freeze to audio it won't play right no matter what you do unless you start the sequence from the start which would be time consuming.
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Yeah, you're absolutely right.
 
The way I go about it is:
After i have finished the writing part and I am 99% sure about everything, I'd do:
Ctrl+A and Render in place. I then create a "disabled MIDI" folder for all the remaining MIDI tracks and disable them. If I need to go back to anything it's all there.
For mixing I need audio 100%. I cannot work on a final mix with live MIDI it's just not practical for me (apart from them already mention "random" factor in some libraries).
Also this way you obtain a session that is pretty much audio only and usable as a universal Kontakt and VI free version great for backing up and future compatibility.
 
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