Question about Channel Strips, Busses and Fx

[Stuart Smith]

Hi All,

Ive come across a problem i hope some one can help me with. Basically my system is running out of memory when doing a mix, this is due to alot of FX on the channel strips, i use roughly 20 strips  in a mix, half usually guitars.  it makes listening back to a mix once all the effects are on impossible as the audio engine crashes when you hit play.

i use guitar rig in the FX of the strip and this is hogging alot of the memory.

ive tried using a guitar bus and busing my guitars into that and only having 1 instance of guitar rig instead of 10. When i do this how ever i just get a mix of DI guitar and the Amp sim, and although i can get 100% of the amp sim come through i lose the ability to mix all the other instruments going into that bus.

is there something im missing when it comes to doing this right? at this stage my remaining option is to bounce out the guitars as separate wavs with just the amp sim on the channel strip and re import the new wav, this is time consuming.

any suggestions or advice apprecaited

Thanks!

[Promidi]

Are you using Windows Task Manager to determine what portion of your total ram is being used by Cakewalk?

Are you sure that, rather being a memory issue, that this is not a CPU power issue?

Memory is usually taken up by things like large sample libraries.

Giving us your PC specs would be a good start.

[Jacques Boileau]

You should look into freezing tracks. It is there exactly for that purpose and it has worked very well for me  in the same situation as you have: tons of guitar tracks with amp sims. If you were doing the bounce dance, then I assume you may not know about of the freeze function. It is this button that freezes a track.

You can always taw a track (un-freeze) if you need to tweak it and then freeze it again.

[Stuart Smith]

1 hour ago, Promidi said:

Are you using Windows Task Manager to determine what portion of your total ram is being used by Cakewalk?

Are you sure that, rather being a memory issue, that this is not a CPU power issue?

Memory is usually taken up by things like large sample libraries.

Giving us your PC specs would be a good start.

 

its sitting at  65% memory, 8% CPU i dont have any large sample libraries loaded.  the music distorts heavily and only plays 1 second before stopping, my ASIO buffer size is already maxed out too.

 

[Stuart Smith]

58 minutes ago, Jacques Boileau said:

You should look into freezing tracks. It is there exactly for that purpose and it has worked very well for me  in the same situation as you have: tons of guitar tracks with amp sims. If you were doing the bounce dance, then I assume you may not know about of the freeze function. It is this button that freezes a track.

You can always taw a track (un-freeze) if you need to tweak it and then freeze it again.

thanks for the suggestion ill look into this freezing business, to be honest i didnt even see that although i am vision impaired so thats not unusual.

thanks for the suggestion

 

[Promidi]

How much ram do you have?

What CPU do you have? 

What audio interface do you have. 

You say it's ASIO, but is that a true native driver or are you using a wrapper like ASIO4ALL?

[Stuart Smith]

2 hours ago, Promidi said:

How much ram do you have?

What CPU do you have? 

What audio interface do you have. 

You say it's ASIO, but is that a true native driver or are you using a wrapper like ASIO4ALL?

Attached are the system specs, i use the Focusrite Scarlett - native, no ASIO4ALL

[Promidi]

Those specs should be ok.

When you send the guitars to a single bus containing the Amp Sim (which is a good approach), are you sending the tracks output to the bus or are you using sends?

[Starship Krupa]

I suspect that it's CPU power, not memory, that is limiting you here.

As already suggested, use Task Manager to make sure that there are no unnecessary other programs running while you're working (browsers love to eat up resources).

Also, check Preferences/Audio/Playback and Recording/Plug-In Load Balancing. That can affect system performance under the load of multiple plug-ins. Usually enabled is better, but in some situations, performance will be better with it off.

A valuable resource for getting as much performance from your system as possible is Pete Brown's Windows Audio Workstation build and tweak guide.

[Stuart Smith]

2 hours ago, Promidi said:

Those specs should be ok.

When you send the guitars to a single bus containing the Amp Sim (which is a good approach), are you sending the tracks output to the bus or are you using sends?

ive been using the sends which is nearest the fx bin,  my output is set to the master bus.

 

[Stuart Smith]

21 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

I suspect that it's CPU power, not memory, that is limiting you here.

As already suggested, use Task Manager to make sure that there are no unnecessary other programs running while you're working (browsers love to eat up resources).

Also, check Preferences/Audio/Playback and Recording/Plug-In Load Balancing. That can affect system performance under the load of multiple plug-ins. Usually enabled is better, but in some situations, performance will be better with it off.

A valuable resource for getting as much performance from your system as possible is Pete Brown's Windows Audio Workstation build and tweak guide.

thank you for the suggestions, i will check those settings.

 

[John Vere]

Guitar sims are normally 100% wet so put in the effects bin. 
 

I wouldn’t think sharing a amp sim with more than 2 guitars would sound good. You most certainly don’t use real amps that way. 
 

A standard set up is to create a sub bus for each class of instruments Bass, Drums, keyboards, Guitars, Vocals and then a reverb and delay bus. 

These all go to the Master. 
 

The reverb and delay can be shared by all the tracks or buses. This is a better way to use them to reduce mud in the mix. 
 

The tracks get assigned to each sub bus which makes mixing more organized.

I sometimes have a Rhythm guitar and lead guitar bus. 
They get processed differently. 

Instead of tossing a zillion effects at every track see if that is actually needed? 
And do 12 guitar tracks make it to the listener? Probably only 2 or 3 are actually needed. 
 

Your system specs should handle a lot. You should be able to work at 256 or 512 buffer on 20 track projects with reasonable amount of plug ins. But even 1 thing like Izotope stuff on the master bus can kill your computer. So be choosy about plug ins 
 

 

Edited February 8 by John Vere

[Byron Dickens]

14 hours ago, Stuart Smith said:

, i use roughly 20 strips  in a mix, half usually guitars. 

 

14 hours ago, Stuart Smith said:

i use guitar rig in the FX of the strip and this is hogging alot of the memory.

There's most of the problem.

1) Do you really need 10 guitar tracks? 

2) If so, you need to start freezing tracks b/c things like Guitar Rig are hungry suckers.

3) To reiterate what John said, you should think more about what processing you can eliminate rather than what you can add. Your mix will thank you.

[Stuart Smith]

8 hours ago, Byron Dickens said:

 

There's most of the problem.

1) Do you really need 10 guitar tracks? 

2) If so, you need to start freezing tracks b/c things like Guitar Rig are hungry suckers.

3) To reiterate what John said, you should think more about what processing you can eliminate rather than what you can add. Your mix will thank you.

Thanks everyone for your advice and input, it seems like its more of a house keeping issue than a FX processing issue after reading through what everyone has added to this discussion.

when i track i usually do 2x guitars for verse 2x guitars for chourses and 2x for bridges then 3 - 4 for leads and layering,, this is so i dont have to use automation or a volume envelopes, its always sort of  been how i;ve done it.  reason being is legally blind in one eye and the other eye isnt so go so envelopes are hard to see, i dont need that frustration.

Never came up against this issue before though with this technique, sounds like freezing or bounce out and import back in with the processing done will be how i have to go, or suck it up and consolidate tracks and put up with enveloping.

i appreciate everyones time.

[John Vere]

You don’t actually need to use envelopes there’s alternatives. 
I can think of a few. Only thing to be aware of is automation is none destructive editing but the following is not. But we are working at 32 bit floating point so myself I don’t worry about degrading the audio. 
Normalize each section of the song. 
Example figure out what the  difference in level is between each of these parts. You can use the Gain knob to figure it out. 
Say it’s

Intro -8db 

Verse -12db

Chorus -10 db

Solo-8db. 
 

Now divide each guitar track using Split into those sections and use Process Normalize to set each section at that level. 
 

A none destructive method is using Clip Gain. I think you might have less trouble seeing that. 
You do the same dividing of the tracks but use clip gain to lower the volume of sections leaving the solos the loudest. 
 

Only drawback is the sudden change in levels between parts which is were your method is actually better because you can use clip fade in and out. 
 

There’s nothing really wrong with what you are doing but I would definitely use buses to eliminate the need for duplicate effects on each track That’s one of the main purposes of buses. 

Edited February 9 by John Vere

[Stuart Smith]

11 hours ago, John Vere said:

You don’t actually need to use envelopes there’s alternatives. 
I can think of a few. Only thing to be aware of is automation is none destructive editing but the following is not. But we are working at 32 bit floating point so myself I don’t worry about degrading the audio. 
Normalize each section of the song. 
Example figure out what the  difference in level is between each of these parts. You can use the Gain knob to figure it out. 
Say it’s

Intro -8db 

Verse -12db

Chorus -10 db

Solo-8db. 
 

Now divide each guitar track using Split into those sections and use Process Normalize to set each section at that level. 
 

A none destructive method is using Clip Gain. I think you might have less trouble seeing that. 
You do the same dividing of the tracks but use clip gain to lower the volume of sections leaving the solos the loudest. 
 

Only drawback is the sudden change in levels between parts which is were your method is actually better because you can use clip fade in and out. 
 

There’s nothing really wrong with what you are doing but I would definitely use buses to eliminate the need for duplicate effects on each track That’s one of the main purposes of buses. 

Thanks John, appreciate the help. will definitely try an implement the above.