SunnO))) wrote:
Someone should be "final mixer." We should all record our respective tracks, and not cut anything, that way we can just drop them into a software, and everything will line up... once everything is recorded, THEN we cut and mix everything...
Univeral four count at the beginning? A specific point where everything matches up, or can be matched up? E-stuff is difficult sometimes...
who knows!? It'll buff out...
Good points. I'll do the final mixing--I mix my own records, and i've done songs that have 100 tracks and whatnot and am pretty handy with compression/ limiting/ EQ. 4 count to start off is a good idea....we need to find a way to make sure that all the tracks start off at the same place (at 0:00), just so that the next person that puts it in their DAW will know when the actual track starts.....for example, if someone records something halfway into the song (synth part or whatever), it will be recorded at that point, but the entire track starts off at the beginning. What i'd recommend is to just hit record at the beginning (with no mic on....just pure silence), and then record a dummy track of silence for the entire duration, and then later overdub what you're actually going to record/ play at a particular point, then bounce or consolidate that track--it will combine the dummy track of silence and then overwrite your actual part at the point that it starts. Depending on what format of DAW (Reaper, Audacity, ProTools, Cubase, Studio One, etc) this is probably the easiest way to line up tracks so that they actually correspond to each other when put in other DAW's, so that each track actually starts at 0:00 instead of the next person having to guess how far your actual part comes into the song.
I use Studio One Pro, and I could otherwise save it to a project where people would know where the overdubs start, but not everyone uses Studio One, so the other programs wouldn't recognize where other players' overdubs start. Confusing, I know, but hopefully this made some sense. Saving the files as WAV files makes the most sense, too.....for uploading/ downloading, it will take some time, but i'd rather it be done that way so that the tracks are in full fidelity.....it would make no sense to save and compress the files to MP3 to save some time, when you spent a good portion of time trying to get the tones and sounds correct. I have alot of hosting space at my website, so instead of going through MegaUpload or whatever, we could just use my server space to exchange tracks.
Another idea is that after everyone has had their first round of recording, we could always send the stems to everyone involved so that they could isolate the tracks and see exactly what everyone else came up with. Ie: the second person in the chain would have only heard the first person's output, not the fifth person's output, but if they had got the stems back after the first round of recording was done, they'd have a new perspective on creativity, just based on what everyone else came up with after you had given them some direction/ perspective. Sometimes when isolating tracks, they have a different perspective outside of the actual context of the song (ie: harmony/ counterpoint tracks), without the actual basic chord changes. Of course, these are all just suggestions--lemme know if that's too involved or whatnot.