Bouncing Selected Tracks to One Track

[CHCollins]

I'm sure this has been answered here but if so, I can't find it...  Say I want to bounce two audio tracks, with their automation and fx, to a third track.  If I use "Tracks" mode in the Bounce Tracks dialog, then the result is two additional tracks.  If I use "Entire Mix" mode with the selected tracks, then ALL un-muted tracks get bounced down to one track UNLESS I also designate the selected tracks as "Solo".   I must be doing something wrong.  There must be a way to bounce  just the selected tracks to a single track without having to "solo" the selected tracks first.  Thanks in advance for setting me straight.

[reginaldStjohn]

The best way I know to do this is route both tracks to an aux track, arm the aux track and then record the aux track with the two tracks feeding it. This is a real-time process.

You could also route the two tracks to a bus and then export the bus audio and then drag that rendered bus audio back into your project. I don't know of any direct way to "Mix" two tracks in the bounce to track method.

[lapasoa]

Don't complicate your life.

Mute all tracks except the tracks you want to mix together.

Choose Bounce to track.

Get the normal procedure checking mono without touching anything else. Check OK and Cakewalk create  automatically a new track.

After that remember to delete or archive the original tracks you wanted to mix together

[57Gregy]

Do you first Select the tracks you want to bounce together?
Still, that's pretty much like soloing them.

[Michael McBroom]

I've run into this before. As Reginald mentioned, I ended up doing it that way. I create an Insert/Stereo Bus track, then select that track for output in the Console view. Then I bounce, selecting Buses as the Source Category. This is handy for another reason -- you can do additional tweaks to the combined  audio tracks from this bus track, which will end up in the bounced track.

 

[John Vere]

I tend to not want to paint myself in a corner by committing to any "mix" of instruments that I cannot undo.  I cannot think of why I would bounce 2 tracks to 1 in  multi track audio since I stopped using my 8 Track .  

I combine guitar tracks all the time but I simply use a Sub mix bus. 

This way I can apply things like global effects to the Guitar bus. 

 I find this works best for me as I often will return to the tracks and tweek EQ , volume or compression of just one of the guitar parts. The more options I have during final mixdown the better. And I love having instrument sub busses. So easy to listen to a mix in my truck on the highway and go " I need to turn up the guitars a hair and just bump that buss up. If it's a guitar solo or fill,  then you return to that track and bump it up  but leave the sub bus alone. 

I can think of dozens of ways to accomplish this goal without bouncing the audio.  I guess that's OK as long as the originals are still available in the audio folder.  

[Kalle Rantaaho]

3 hours ago, lapasoa said:

Don't complicate your life.

Mute all tracks except the tracks you want to mix together.

Choose Bounce to track.

Get the normal procedure checking mono without touching anything else. Check OK and Cakewalk create  automatically a new track.

After that remember to delete or archive the original tracks you wanted to mix together

Exactly. It has never even popped in my mind to think any further: Select the tracks and bounce to track. Ten seconds and done.

[msmcleod]

14 hours ago, John Vere said:

I tend to not want to paint myself in a corner by committing to any "mix" of instruments that I cannot undo.  I cannot think of why I would bounce 2 tracks to 1 in  multi track audio since I stopped using my 8 Track .  

I combine guitar tracks all the time but I simply use a Sub mix bus. 

This way I can apply things like global effects to the Guitar bus. 

 I find this works best for me as I often will return to the tracks and tweek EQ , volume or compression of just one of the guitar parts. The more options I have during final mixdown the better. And I love having instrument sub busses. So easy to listen to a mix in my truck on the highway and go " I need to turn up the guitars a hair and just bump that buss up. If it's a guitar solo or fill,  then you return to that track and bump it up  but leave the sub bus alone. 

I can think of dozens of ways to accomplish this goal without bouncing the audio.  I guess that's OK as long as the originals are still available in the audio folder.  

I guess it's because I'm still tied to my old 8-Track workflow, but I quite often go for destructive editing as for me tidying up as I go along makes life easier for me - i.e. a lower track count is easier to manage.

If I really need to keep the originals, I'll just archive the original tracks and hide them... but I rarely go back to them.

I do use instrument sub-buses though... in fact, in more complicated projects I may have several. For example, I might have a single lead vocal track, but have it send to 2 or 3 different buses that in turn are sent to a main vocal bus (e.g. a  Vocal Verse Bus and Vocal Chorus Bus... both of them go to the Vocals bus ).  I'll use automation to control the bus send to the sub-buses at the appropriate parts of the song.  For the most part though, I can get away with going direct to a single lead vocal bus.

All I'm really doing here is using the sub-buses as different effects racks. But having my vocal in the one track for me makes things easier to see visually.

The other reason why I do this is because I tend to use the track Pro Channel/FX bin for sound design, and put any mixing EQ / FX  in the buses. 

Back in the old days, I'd have recorded the track with some compression & EQ (and obviously any analog magic) already on there. So using the track PC/FX is getting my track to sound how I would have recorded it if I hadn't gone DI into my audio interface.

This keeps it separate from the mixing phase, where I'll go to the buses to add any EQ or FX needed to get my "in the mix" sound.

At final mix-down I pretty much stick to riding the "main" bus faders, which I try to limit to around 8 so I can record my automation rides with my MCU.

[John Vere]

This is the funny thing about coming from the old 8 track days as I still tend to think of my projects as only needing very few tracks to sound good. It scares me to death to read about folks who have 120 tracks on a rock and roll song!  

At most I think my highest track counts are 20 and a lot of that is midi most times. If it's real drums that adds 6 tracks right there, but most of those are still well under 20. 

I'm big on not keeping bad takes. I delete whole tracks if I make more than a few mistakes. I tend to play through the song, delete, re take, delete and over and over until the entire  track is right. You play the track better and better each time anyways.  If I suck that bad I give up and leave it for a better day or come up with a part I can actually play   I do this for everything including midi parts. There's no bad takes lurking in my audio folders.. 

About the only thing I use a extra tracks on is guitar. Bass is always 1.  Vocals will have 1 lead track and then 1 harmony track. I use take lanes sometimes but mostly I do the big delete as I work my way through in segments. I like my vocals to be in sort clips. This is also handy if you find a clunker and resort to Melodyne. Melodyne loves short clips. 

I like to have about 5 or 6  busses,   Drums, Bass, Guitars, Keyboards and midi, and Vocals. Then usually 2 effects busses. Reverb, Delay. 

[RBH]

Msmcleod uses the same workflow attitude that I do. I came from a tape background  and for me it makes far more sense to work in destructive edit mode as much as required to keep things simple, straight forward and clean. I've been doing an album project for about the last year and I don't think I've had more than a 24 trk worth of DAW tracks for any one song. When I'm ready to mix, often my final mixes are flying faders on stems. This with a full drum Kit and 4-5 over dubbed vocals on backgrounds. The one thing I miss is that back in old days - you would have a focused session where decisions were made and all concerned band members, engineers and a producer were in the room. Now it's spread out and thrown around in cyber sphere, and it's not nearly as productive. lots more choices yes - but not as productive.

Edited December 1, 2020 by RBH

[John Vere]

In the old days we finished songs in a few days tops. All depended on side players coming by to play or sing parts. Now we can call on just about anybody in the world to collaborate with but it's not the same somehow. The 90's to me were my golden years of recording. I have never really gotten anything to really sound 'better' since then? And that was 8 tracks and an Atari for midi when needed.  

3 hours ago, RBH said:

lots more choices yes - but not as productive.

You got that right. Now people seem to have hard drives overflowing with musical dribble that if it ever sees the light of day.. oh well.  

I'll say one thing is I entirely love spending time in the studio puttering about with my stupid old songs and for the most part I'm trying to recreate what I did 30 years ago. I can barley play a C chord now , my thumb has arthritis. But there are legal ways to kill pain now and I've got all day! 

[Cristiano Sadun]

On 11/30/2020 at 8:13 PM, John Vere said:

This is the funny thing about coming from the old 8 track days as I still tend to think of my projects as only needing very few tracks to sound good. It scares me to death to read about folks who have 120 tracks on a rock and roll song!  

At most I think my highest track counts are 20 and a lot of that is midi most times. If it's real drums that adds 6 tracks right there, but most of those are still well under 20. 

I'm big on not keeping bad takes. I delete whole tracks if I make more than a few mistakes. I tend to play through the song, delete, re take, delete and over and over until the entire  track is right. You play the track better and better each time anyways.  If I suck that bad I give up and leave it for a better day or come up with a part I can actually play   I do this for everything including midi parts. There's no bad takes lurking in my audio folders.. 

About the only thing I use a extra tracks on is guitar. Bass is always 1.  Vocals will have 1 lead track and then 1 harmony track. I use take lanes sometimes but mostly I do the big delete as I work my way through in segments. I like my vocals to be in sort clips. This is also handy if you find a clunker and resort to Melodyne. Melodyne loves short clips. 

I like to have about 5 or 6  busses,   Drums, Bass, Guitars, Keyboards and midi, and Vocals. Then usually 2 effects busses. Reverb, Delay. 

Well, just a drum kit recorded for a modern sound takes at least 10 tracks for a basic kit.. :D

Often in a recording session you keep absolutely everything, you never know what the artist wants or not  and what may or may not fit.  "Beat it" famously has Michael knocking on a drum case. The session I did for recording bass a few nights ago added some 10 tracks just for it (we took 5 different grooves, each both DI and miked.. and of course they're all in the CW session), each of them has two or three take lanes - I duplicated tracks quickly to more easily differentiate what's what later on.
And even if we have already landed the "right" groove, they'll stay in the session as it may be that at a specifc moment it may be good to have an additional gear to shift.

Actually one thing that annoys me a little in CW is that when you have several tracks with many take lanes (a good singer will need three, a bad singer may need 30) the saving gets very very slow. It doesn't happen if you "just" have many tracks and busses, so it must be some overhead of the take lanes. Haven't tried with the most recent versions though.

As of buses, it's not uncommon to have at least 3 or 4 reverbs to send to, plus for vocals you may have a dedicated reverb, different delays for different sections, parallel compressors,  and of course different processing chains for the different sections. Often there's more buses than tracks!

It's just that the amount of detail in a modern commercial production is staggering - and the better produced they are, the less of the production is visible.. but it's still there.  That's the main difference with homebrew productions (and of course, bad commercial one where the "overproduction" is clearly hearable): the manic attention to detail by someone so skilled that it feels very natural.

If you always go for a very vintage sound and you are the artist so you decide what to throw away immediately you can get on with smaller track counts, but it's a bit of a special situation.


 

Edited December 2, 2020 by Cristiano Sadun

[Mark Cunningham]

On 11/29/2020 at 12:45 PM, John Vere said:

 

 

Edited May 4, 2022 by Mark Cunningham

[abacab]

So you registered a new account just to comment on a thread that was last active over 1+ year ago?

[John Vere]

Actually looks like he joined in 2019. Just glad I didn’t say anything dumb like is my habit sometimes. Specially when someone repost what you had said and now it’s in fixable 

[abacab]

40 minutes ago, John Vere said:

Actually looks like he joined in 2019. Just glad I didn’t say anything dumb like is my habit sometimes. Specially when someone repost what you had said and now it’s in fixable 

A lurker, LOL. Check the post dates please!

[Byron Dickens]

47 minutes ago, John Vere said:

Actually looks like he joined in 2019. Just glad I didn’t say anything dumb like is my habit sometimes. Specially when someone repost what you had said and now it’s in fixable 

This is his one and only post, however.

 

Or perhaps I should say non post since there is no content.

Edited May 4, 2022 by bdickens

[marcL]

13 hours ago, abacab said:

So you registered a new account just to comment on a thread that was last active over 1+ year ago?

The good thing is that this thread is very interesting and I enjoyed to read it (again?) as if it is present! ? (Jeepers, I also added some likes ?!)

[Doug Steinschneider]

We have a situation where we've setup some band members to be able to overdub in a copy of the project at their location and then send the finished track back to the studio. They all have different plugins so we have them "print" a track with the effects and also send the original unprocessed track.  We use bounce track to make the "print" track