Question Regarding Composing to Mixing

[Joseph]

I'm interested to know how others approach this. I work almost exclusively with virtual instruments so when it comes time to mix, my CPU starts getting eaten up fast. I've started freezing everything before mixing and that's working pretty well, but I almost always decide to change something in the music which means: deactivate mixing plugins, unfreeze track(s), make changes, refreeze track(s), reactivate mixing plugins, change settings, realize I'm not happy with musical change, deactivate mixing plugins, etc.

I'm curious if any one does a different method when transitioning from writing to mixing. Do you print/bounce/export the audio and then start an entirely new session with said audio dedicated to mixing? Is it better to keep the writing and mixing separate and only start the latter when the former is completely finished or are any of you mixing as you write? If so, how do you save on CPU?

I've found this particularly tricky when writing trailer/orchestral music as I end up using a lot of instruments that are CPU heavy. I've also found that you can purge unused samples in Kontakt instruments, but I still need much more.

Any advice is welcome.

-Joseph

[Russell Landwehr]

Hi Joseph...

When I'm composing, I usually have my buffers down around 128 or 256. But when I get toward the end of the process where I'm not recording any new parts, I often need to bump my buffers up to 1024. If I find that I need to go back and record something additional when I'm in that state, then YES, I might have to "freeze" some tracks so that I can fly in a part at 256 buffers before I put it back to 1024 and "unfreeze" my tracks for continued mixing with LOTS of plugins.

Russell

[Len911]

Joseph another approach is composition/notation software.

http://www.arpegemusic.com/
https://www.guitar-pro.com/en/index.php

or something like sampletank with a general midi module, https://www.esoundz.com/sounds/omnisynt ... /4736.html and you address the midi channel, bank, program ... in your daw. I mean it's cheaper sounds, but it is light on cpu useage, for composing, and then playing the better sounds on the midi tracks, and using effects??

If you use Ample guitars, guitar and bass vst's, you can play Guitar Pro Tabs, and if you need to change something, open gp make adjustment, save tab and open it again in ample guitar and play tablature. If you leave gp and daw open you can go back and forth composing until you get it the way you want.

there are numerous advantages to using composition programs, but if you are comfortable with composition in daw, that's fine also, or the disadvantage might be the immediacy of hearing your composition with the ultimate vst's and effects.

Is it better to keep the writing and mixing separate and only start the latter when the former is completely finished

There's no reason you couldn't compose in a composition software, and send 1 track at a time to your daw, and tinker some more there. Here's what I will say though, you have more tools in a composition software to flesh out your composition than you do in a daw, but you have better facilities for mixing, better instrument quality, and better audio effects and audio handling in general in a daw than you would a composition program.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... 4C77109721

[hummingbird]

What system are you running Joseph? How much memory and ram do you have? Are your samples on other drives? Can you give us a picture of what you have... might help. TY

[edmondredd]

As a start, I would reiterate hummingbird's comment: What is your system specification. Sometimes, adding some ram, could do the job.
Moving your samples to a different drive (preferable an SSD), and your projects on a yet different drive would help a lot relieving the pressure on your main hard drive.

If you're on Logic, make sure you tick the multicore, and do as Russell said. Change buffer size, depending on the stage you're at.
Kontakt has the purge button. Use it. Make sure also to unload the samples/articulations you're not using.
And use the freeze button. I do face the same problem, and I use the freeze button. the freeze option works faster with less track selected, so if I'm changing one, before moving to another one and unfreeze it, I run a freeze again.
Not the most convenient option, but probably the only one that makes me going, until I update my system,
HTH

[mojobone]

I'm ex-Navy, so I use the US military approach; I apply overwhelming firepower to the point of attack, LOL. I don't bother with freezing tracks; keeping options open is for suckers. I'd do a "save as" and render the tracks, if I ran out of RAM/CPU, but it hasn't happened since I moved to a 12-core Mac Pro with 40G. Otherwise, what Russell said, OR if you're network-savvy, you could set up a slave computer as a sample server on a LAN. That works especially well with Logic and Vienna Ensemble. Having separate drives for the operating system, the samples and the audio are a huge help, too; that's why the Mac has four conventional drive bays.

[andygabrys]

I'm ex-Navy, so I use the US military approach; I apply overwhelming firepower to the point of attack, LOL. I don't bother with freezing tracks; keeping options open is for suckers. I'd do a "save as" and render the tracks, if I ran out of RAM/CPU, but it hasn't happened since I moved to a 12-core Mac Pro with 40G. Otherwise, what Russell said, OR if you're network-savvy, you could set up a slave computer as a sample server on a LAN. That works especially well with Logic and Vienna Ensemble. Having separate drives for the operating system, the samples and the audio are a huge help, too; that's why the Mac has four conventional drive bays.

+1

I favor the superior firepower approach.

Not everybody likes macs but at this point you can get a used 2012 Mac Pro 5,1 with 32 or 64 GB and 12 core processor for about ~$1,500.

This is most cases mean you don't need to bother feeezing anything.

I can vouch for this. As can Mojo, Kayle Clements, Richard Emmet. We all have used 12 core machines.

[andygabrys]

Also streaming samples:

You can use SSDs in the 4 drive bays. At 3gb/s speed.

Or buy a sonnet tempo PCI card and put SSDs on it and stream faster than the SATA III 6gb/s standard. ONLY drawback is no thunderbolt on the Mac Pro 5,1.

[Joseph]

Wow, I totally forgot I posted this...

Thanks for all the replies! For the record, I'm on an iMac with 12Gb RAM. Most of my instruments are on an external hard drive and I'm using Pro Tools 12. The track freezing is working for now, but I'm going to consider the "heavy firepower" option for the future.

-Joseph

[hummingbird]

One solution you might try is, have 2 versions of a track you are working on. One for composing, one for mixing. When you have finished composing an instrument line, and are happy with it, run it off as a raw wav (stem) and import into your second version, which will be for mixing. This way when you move from composing to mixing the computer no longer has to try to draw all the samples from the external drive... and you'll still have the composing version if you need to go back and tweak something

HTH