Light Grenade

Hi folks, I mix through a hardware compressor which sits on the master bus. I use the external insert plugin to do this. On the session I'm working on, I get no sound when I solo a bus, nor does volume automation work on any bus. Upon solo'ing any bus. no sound hits my master fader. However, solo'ing individual tracks works fine, as does muting busses. I can hear the mix fine when everything is playing, and manual fader movements on busses also work. All behaviour returns to normal when I bypass the external insert plugin. Any ideas?

I use AOMEI Backupper for hard drive backups. I do this for my audio folder and system backups. These are scheduled with the paid version, but the free version is still very, very functional. For cloud backups, I use Sync.com and it's seriously good. I sleep much easier now knowing that I have it. If you can get your system running okay with an internet connection, I highly recommend it. Backups in real time, encrypts at source, doesn't cache memory, has the ability to create rapid upload and download links for sharing files. It's much better than Google Drive & Dropbox.

I personally record and mix at 44.1kHz / 24bit. The difference in sound quality is negligible, and I'd rather work with audio that's easier on my CPU. A lot of my clients are still releasing CD's, so it makes sense for me to work in 44.1kHz. I am a bit of skeptic when it comes to sample rates, bit-depth, dithering and all that stuff. A good set of converters and you're good to go. It's far too easy to get hung up on this stuff, when a multitude of other things can make a much bigger difference to your sound.

I normally bounce to a track within my mixing session and trim on the stereo file. This works most of the time, but if I feel like being more pedantic, I'll navigate to where all my tracks approximately end, select them all and drag them to the same point and then fade. It's important to remember that some plugins introduce noise (tape simulators mostly) so you might need to automate a mute with a volume envelope on offending tracks.

Hello from Motherwell, Scotland. A post industrial town 15 minutes outside of Glasgow.

For a raw vocal, I think it sounds fine. Nothing a bit of EQ and general processing can't sort out. Maybe try taking a step back from the mic which should naturally roll off some low end, you could be inducing proximity effect. It's also important to judge and mix your vocal recording in context with the song, rather than on it's own.

I'm not a huge fan of Waves, but their H-Reverb is very, very good. It can go from realistic to crazy and it's as complex as you want it to be. I didn't realise how average BREVERB was until last year when I downloaded some new verbs. bx_rooMS & Slate Verbsuite are pretty good too.