Annoying Artifact Hunting-Solved..still baffled though..

[Neil Cummins]

Hi Forum,

                   I placed this in the General area as it probably has been experienced by many audio engineer/musicians in other DAWs,not just CbB,and probably has many possible answers...so here goes:-

Spent many weeks crafting a mix only to find an artifact "click" appearing when the full mix is played back,and naturally is made worse once the track is raised in loudness level.

Troubleshooting so far in CbB:-

64 track project into group Aux tracks,then into final group Aux before the Summing Bus.

All 64 tracks are frozen with their VST effects,the final Auxes have a handful of Pro-Q3 and one Pro-C2 amongst them,barely any noticeable CPU activity is seen in the Performance window with project latency set to 2048 samples.

Individual track playback of each stem is clean with Summing bus effects(one Pro-Q3 and one Pro-C2)active.

Individual Group playback of drums,bass,piano,synths,rhythm guitar and lead guitar are clean,with Summing bus

Blended playback introducing the whole band except lead guitar is clean,the artifact reappears once the lead guitar is unmuted.

RMS level at the Summing bus is -18 to -20 dB with a peak level of about -8,so no clipping.

There are no clip edges,splits or non-zero crossings at the location of the artifact which can be seen clearly on the mixdown waveform.

Any suggestions as to what may be causing the artifact to appear when the individual sum of the parts appear to be all clean?

Any help welcome!

Cheers,

Neil

NW England.

Edited December 1, 2022 by Neil Cummins
Typo.

[garybrun]

Have you done crossfades on all cuts?

[Neil Cummins]

That's one to try Gary...thank you.

[garybrun]

20 minutes ago, Neil Cummins said:

That's one to try Gary...thank you.

I think you will find this will fix your problem...

[Neil Cummins]

@Gary and anyone else interested...the root of the problem was found in a kick drum transient in the room stereo and mono mics,which when muted with lead guitar unmuted was clear.The puzzler was and still is if I mute the lead guitar and play all tracks minus this,it's also clear.So the combination of whatever is happening at the coincidence of the lead guitar timestamp and the kick transients on the room mics is causing the artifact.

Maybe this type of thing is regularly seen by professional mix engineers,I just do this in my spare time and entirely self-taught,so there's probably ways to ensure it's ironed out in the stem preparation.The two stems in question have been lined up with the kick close mics,so should be no phase problem there.

Good learning experience,and hopefully not too many electrons sacrificed in posting this.

Neil.

[bats brew]

gain staging, is key.