We no longer have to worry about virtual instruments, MIDI interfaces, buffering, CPU spikes or audio gremlins but the journey in front of us is still going to take us into perilous wastelands. So now that we are left with all audio tracks, we are moderately safe. Reason being, again: it is good practice to lose any dependency in your session to make it easy to open by the mixing engineer, without risking weird error pop-ups (that might make you lose an entire session on the clock!). In case you don’t use a full-fledged sound library for your drum samples and instead use plugins that do real-time replacement, I would still recommend this step before heading into mixing. Do this for each virtual instrument and you will be able to effectively print each one into a separate track, in one pass. The easiest way is to create a new audio track (mono or stereo depending on your needs) and then set its input to a bus, then route the output of your virtual instrument to that bus. Then, when your track is produced, even if still not mix-ready, commit to your choices and print those samples. I would suggest you use all the MIDI you like during your production phase, because that is when you need to be able to take your ideas into reality in the shortest time possible. Moreover, they add dependencies to your session: not every sound engineer has the same exact sound libraries you have! Virtual instruments have always been the first and foremost reason for DAW crashes in my book, with their disk streaming, RAM buffering, multi-samples, built-in features, fancy interfaces etc. This is not the place and time to go into technical details but MIDI is known to get shaky, especially when a lot of data is being transferred (namely continuous controllers like volume pedals and breath controllers).ĭrum triggering does not require boatloads of MIDI data but we all agree that removing unwanted variables is a big plus. The reason for this is that, often times, what I recorded did not sound like what I had played. I understand I have become uber skeptical with the years because I now record my hardware synthesizers straight in audio with no regard of their MIDI capabilities.

even now it is definitely amazing to use and it makes life easier in a number of situations but - to me - it is a nightmare in any mixing session. Back then, MIDI was among “the” big things in music.

1 - Use MIDI, ditch MIDIĪs a pianist and keyboards player, I’ve been eating MIDI for breakfast (tastes terrible). My idea is to write it down as a sort of checklist so that you can keep it safely by your side whenever the S-word is said out loud in your control room (“S” for Samples.). Gathered within this piece of virtual paper is a collection of hints that really helped me out in the years. Half of the sessions I received in the last year featured a mixture of acoustic tracks and triggered samples for their rhythm section and pretty much all of them suffered from a number of problems that could have been avoided if the producers had followed some simple guidelines.

The reason why I wanted to write this article comes from the fact that in the last year I’ve seen this technique being used at an increasing pace, especially from artists and bands who decide to venture into self-producing their record. Since what matters in the end is the final sound of your record, drum triggering and sample enhancements can be exactly what you need to avoid endless chains of EQs and compressors that get you nowhere. Whether your audience is dressed up for an electro night or is showing off spiked bracelets and black leather jackets, some of the music it listens to will contain such mixing technique, without anyone noticing.Īnd there is no reason why they should, because no matter how coveted this technique is, it has nothing to do with cheating or avoiding using expensive microphones and preamps. Using samples to enhance drum tracks is common practice in more music genres than you would imagine.

Snappy snare drum processing