Tracking out a beat

[Sacred One]

plz explain the proper way, I would really appreciate it

 

[Shonsteez]

Usually this is how it works:

You seperate every aspect of the beat possible ie.; Drums, Instruments, Etc....
Often if im tracking out a beat, I will track out every sound practically, ie.; Just the Kick, just the Snare, etc, every sound gets exported as its own track without anything else accompanying it. I do this in Wav Format at the highest Bit Rate and Sample Rate, then I also have a regular 16/44k folder for some systems that may not be equiped to handle such high rates. This is important if u take your work to a mixing engineer who may have to "Dither" your audio in order to interchange between two different kinds of systems with different bit rates. - This of course is a concern since the studio does charge by the hour and its not in peanuts, so its better to prepare yourself ahead of time.

Also; make sure to do the same thing twice. One version of everything "Dry", and another version of everything "effected".
*This makes for better flexibilty and safer non-destructive editing in the mixing process later.

So basically in the end u have this:

Folder One:

24bit/192k Tracked out beats.
2 Versions - One Dry, One Effected.
​

Folder Two:

16bit/44.1k Tracked out beats.
2 Versions - One Dry, One Effected.​

Hope that helps out a bit?

STEEZ

 

[Sacred One]

thanx man good lookin

 

[Daymo]

Duece - thanks a lot for that. That's really helpful as I will be tracking out 2 of my beats to take to the studio next month

Cheers
Daymo

 

[Shonsteez]

Sure guys, no prob. Just remember to keep your files as organized and flexible as possible. Also, this was advice if your heading to a "Mixing Engineer" to dial yer shit in if thats your initial goal. But if your feeling confident in yer mix then the scheme changes a little bit cuz yer obviously heading to the Mastering Engineer at this point instead.

 

[classic]

my tutorial....
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~jason12/cubase_tracking_lofi.WMV

 

[Sanova]

^ I'll check out that tut. class. probly some stuff i aint know

 

[Shonsteez]

Informative Vid class......

 

[Burna]

wrrd,, thanks

 

[Sacred One]

man good looks, that was great

oh btw, what version of cubase is that?

 

[Sanova]

I would guess any one from SX to SX3. they all look the same.

lol Class u sound like my boy Crypto.

 

[Hypnotist]

Folder One:

24bit/192k Tracked out beats.
2 Versions - One Dry, One Effected.
​

Folder Two:

16bit/44.1k Tracked out beats.
2 Versions - One Dry, One Effected.​

This would be good for sending it to a mix engineer at a capable studio that can handle your conversion to and from 192 kHz...

BUT

I wouldn't recommend exporting to 192 kHz to 90% of the people on this forum.

If you DO end up tracking out at 192, you should be sure that:

1) You recorded your session at 192 kHz, either vocals or from vinyl. But an MPC isn't 192 so your beat won't be 192 anyway if you're working with that.

2) If you're sampling anything from CD, it's 44.1 kHz all the way, and it's going to end up on a CD again at 44.1 kHz. I wouldn't bother going to 192 if this is the case.

3) The best engineers in the world say that 192 isn't much different sounding than 44.1 if it's going back on a CD. And when it DOES make a difference, they have extremely expensive converters that transfer it back down to analog tape, and that's where all the resolution lies. So I wouldn't do it unless I (or the studio I'm mixing at) have a 192 D/A converter.

"Bouncing to Disk" in pro tools doesn't make it that great. Remember that the quality of your recording is all dependent on the algorithms of your software, and there is some miscalculations when "downsampling" while using plug-ins that won't make it any better. Trust the numbers at least, and use sample rates that are compatible with 44.1 (88.2, 174.4) and avoid 48 and 96 and 192 when possible if you don't have the proper gear to convert with. It's arguable that when it's still in the digital domain, you don't need the best converters, or... converters at all, period. But if your process of "recording" is limited to the above mentioned steps, then you're just wasting disk space for nothing. (Every sample rate you double, you double your disk space) Anyway... when halving the frequencies perfectly, it's easier math for your processor and things sound better. And furthermore... if you can't tell the difference yet, then don't mess with it until your ears are developed, or you're going to world-class recording studios and making hits that will definitely be on the radio. Until then, you'll just be doing what most of us are doing, which is going by the bare minimum, and eventually converting to mp3 any damn way, so that people can download the shit on their ipods and listen to your mix in these little white ear buds that don't even represent the best of your production.

Now... if you do RECORD VOCALS in 192 over your beats, or you expect an artist to record at that sample rate, then by all means, export to 192 for that purpose. But I'll tell you right now that at this level (not talking about amateur level, I'm just talking pre-production level and showcasing your beats to potential clients) then you won't need it.

Sorry duece! Didn't mean to clash with anything you were saying, cuz that's the right way to go about it professionally... I just didn't want people to be wasting time where they don't need to be. Shit, I didn't mean to write that much, cuz now I want to talk about the actual TRACKING he he.


Here's some things that people forget:

1) Make sure everything is neat as possible. If you're exporting from FL or Reason or any other software, make sure you LABEL all your tracks properly!!! If you leave it alone and have all these files all over the place, then hmmmm... where'd I put that kick drum? Maybe it's um... kick.wav? Mix engineers will thank you for this, AND you'll save $$$ if you're spending $$$ on a mix at a studio.

2) If you want to get technical with order of your specific tracks (e.g. in Pro Tools) go by the standard for 99% of all mixes. That is: Kick, Snare, Hats, Rack Tom1, Rack Tom2, Floor Tom, Overhead L, Overhead R, (cymbals, rides), Room Mics, Bass, Guitars, Keys, Vocals. This is basic for a band, but it's a standard. Now in sampling, with hip hop, it could be something like this: Kick, Snare, Hats, (toms?), Shaker?, other percussion (woodblock, tamborine?), Bass, Sample1, Sample2, Sample3, Vocals. Trust me... your mix engineer will THANK you. I've been handed projects before that were all over the place and it makes a difference when it's in order ESPECIALLY if the soundfiles aren't labeled... But we covered that already

3) If you're in Pro Tools, consolidate all your regions!!! Don't have 1,000 regions in your region bin with pieces of files all over your tracks. Check your disk allocation to make sure everything is in ONE "audio files" folder!!! There are so many other things to do in Pro Tools that I would need to create my own post for, so I'll just leave them out for now and assume that most people aren't working in Pro Tools.

4) If you're going to a real studio to mix, then leave everything untouched. Only filter your samples if you ABSOLUTELY NEED TO. The purest form of what you have going through the right equipment makes an enormous difference in the sound quality. Say you filtered the bass out of the sample, and it sounded good on your monitors, but you bring it to the studio and there's all this low rumble, and you cut too much of the highs off the low-end to make the bass sound decent. Or you thinned the sample out too much and there's a vocal in the sample that you can't really hear now. Bring your notes to the studio during the mix and have the engineer run it through EQs and compressors to make it sound as true as possible.

5) Leave the reverb at home. Especially if you're in Pro Tools and only using Digidesign DVerb or something. Don't worry about how dry the snare sounds for now. If you made it sound good while messin around at home, then you can make it sound 100x better in the studio with a Lexicon 480L reverb unit.

6) If you've already imported your tracks into Pro Tools, don't be afraid to use the "comments" section on your tracks. Write down notes that may help the engineer. "Shure SM44 on vox" or "bass really needs to power the mix" or "filtered from sample" or "keep this barely audible in the mix" or "please add light reverb to snare", or any ideas you have that you may forget about a particular track.

That's it, I've already written a book, so I'm done. I could have covered more, but I wanted to focus on things that people tend to forget when handing me projects to mix. The main thing is Neatness, with a capital N.

-Hypno

 

[bigdmakintrax]

Hypno thats a good article, I have heard arguments that definitely are on your side but I also heard them on the other side too LOL ...I am not going to argue with you though only add to it I love these threads!!!!!... I have a tendency to agree with what you have posted......check this analogy, I have a 2 ounce glass of water but the only way I can drink it is pouring it into a 1 ounce glass I will never have the benefit of the other ounce.

best example is this.....and a lot of the hype on sampling at 24bits come from the analog world but the best way to take a picture of a rounded analog wave and to capture it at highest resolution is to use 24 bits so your squared off digitally stepped waveform will resemble that rounded analog info the closest....some say there is not a big difference between 16 and 24 but(I use the difference between 8 & 12 bit samplers compared to 16 there is a difference to your ears and you can tell also).....

take the example of sampling a kick in a studio.....

you sample a kick to an analog tape(remember that sound is instantly converted to digital through a digital converter even before it is record to the analog tape) that is at 24 bits/96khz or higher theoretically that is the highest resolution you could possibly get coming from that kick sound going to your mic to the recorder to the tape, so the sound signature of the kick is the closest to the original sound sampled at 24bits.....

you have a nice kick that sounds probably identical to how the engineer that sampled it heard it...

but once that 24 bit kick is resampled to 16 bits you have diminished the resolution and there fore the original "sound picture you took" even when dithered....sort of how 1 mega pixel compares to 5 mega pixels on a camera....

Sampling at home
now its at the point you mentioned that things come into play and start really making sense...for home studios and sound cards ask yourself this question;how good is that hardware that you are sampling with? ( if you have a cheap sound card you probably are not going to get a good representation) most cats at home are not sampling their kicks directly from a drum set but from the vinyl (or copping a set from modern beats or bangin beats and skipping sampling their drums completely and buying 16 bit drums)and into your soundcard thats where you notice the sound and its only going to be as good as the sound card(your converters)....but even a hardware akai mpc will sample at 16 bits....I tried putting a 24 bit sample in my mpc before....both the 3000 and my old 2000....not happening lOL it wants to sample and playback 16 bits only...I would have to buy a 4000 for that.....so basically unless you sample at 24 bits and leave it in protools or another high end software mix the wave down to 24 bits or your leave the track in your 4000 in your studio and replay it you will never hear a 24 bit track of your beat or sample played back period.....you will never theoretically have a 24 bit picture of that sound to play on cd either since the largest representation of that sound on a cd is 16bits.....

 

[Hypnotist]

Yea I always use 24bit when recording vocals. But bit depth is completely different from sample rate. You probably know this, but I'll clarify for those who don't:

Sample Rate:
This is how many "snapshots" you can take of an audio signal in one second. 44.1kHz means 44,100 snapshots, or samples in one second. This ensures that you get as many frequencies as you can into the digital domain, with the most clarity. The Nyquist Theorum states that you must have a sample rate of twice the highest frequency that you wish to record. So if you want to make sure that 10kHz comes in clear, you need to sample at 20kHz. I'll tell you why. For each sine wave at the frequency of 10kHz, your processor needs to redraw each wave with at least two points per actual wave to redraw it correctly. Now... the range of the human ear is 20Hz to 20kHz. Double 20kHz and it means you need at least 40kHz sample rate to correctly represent these higher frequencies. 44.1kHz gives you slightly more headroom to ensure that you're redrawing the top wave of 20kHz properly. Not to mention some of you who go to clubs all the time can't hear past 18kHz, let alone 20. Some can't even hear the TV when it's on mute, and the silver is resonating at 16kHz. (You know that high-pitched sound your TV makes when it's just on mute?) Anyway, 192kHz means you can sample the frequency 96kHz, but really... who the hell cares when 96kHz is WAAAY above our ability to hear? The argument is that your processor is making calculations on that level and the calculations are more precise, so it's as close to the real sound (that we can't hear anyway) as it can be. Then, when converted back down to 44.1kHz (CD quality) it's the best resolution possible. Like I said before, you don't need this type of resolution at this level.

Bit Depth:
Okay, we travelled on the x-axis of frequency already, but now lets look at the y-axis of the chart, or how your amplitude is affected. With bit depth, in one sample per second, it's the string of how many zeros and ones are there, or how many amplitude levels you have. Don't get this confused with how loud it is, but think of a volume knob with only 4 notches compared to a volume knob with 16 notches. Now when your sound signal goes from loud to quiet, it can be a rough calculation or a smooth one. At 16bit, there are 2^16 power possible amplitude levels (2 to the 16th power, or 65,536 possible amplitude levels... Don't ask me how I remember numbers from school!) With 24bit, you'd think it would be 1.5 times more resolution, but no... we're dealing with exponential values here. At 24 bit there are 2^24 possible amplitude values, which is well over 16.7 million, or 16,777,216 to be exact. Again, don't ask me about my photographic memory because my brain is only 8bit. Now... these amplitude values are really only good when it comes to something with a large dynamic range, like orchestral music, this would make a difference. In this type of music, the volume goes from low to high very often. In our pop/rock/hiphop world, everything is slammed with compression at the end, and the dynamic range is completely lost during mixdown. In the recent decades, producers have been competing for volume for radio play, and we're in an era of squashed signal.

So does it matter? Well, I didn't get into dithering your bit depth or the fact that at those high sample rates you can REALLY redraw 20kHz correctly, but like I said in my last post, it doesn't really matter. I record at 44.1kHz, 24bit, but that's because 24 bit gives you 6dB more of headroom if your signal gets low, and you have a better SNR (signal to noise ratio). I've recorded at 192 before, in the studio, with $5,000 microphones and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Everything went the right way, and I mixed it through converters back into Pro Tools at 192, then converted it to 44.1kHz, and got the same result as my 44.1kHz mix. (I didn't mix down to 1/2" analog tape though, so maybe that's the difference) I don't have as great of ears as the best producers in the world, but I did listen to them when they said it didn't matter too much, and when it actually mattered.

I hope this helped, and I hope it wasn't all gibberish.

-Hypno

 

[bigdmakintrax]

great explanation Hypno! I wanted to talk about those differences but I left it alone but its a very clear explanation on the two diffs!

 

[sYgMa]

all right guys, you know your stuff...

Those are the kind of threads I like to read. I wish there were more of those!


All right, quick lil question.

A friend of mine bought a MPC1000, but he doesn't know how to use it at all. Now, he lend it to me and it's really great for making drums, but I dont know how to transfer my beats on my PC... is that what you call tracking (separating the track into different tracks) and if so, I got, from what you said the I have to record the sound coming from the audio out of the MPC into my computer... is that the only way, or am I totally lost here...

 

[bigdmakintrax]

you have several choices....you can either hook the MPC up to your multitrack program via midi, use the midi clock to sync the mpc......

then starting with track one put the track in SOLO mode

from your stereo outs on the mpc you can plug them into your soundcard L/R

then monitor the input for each channel to make sure its at the proper level
adjust that with the volume on the mpc...once you have a proper monitor level for that track arm or put into record mode the channel in your multitrack program so you can prepare to record.....

since you have the simplest setup just plug the midi out from the pc to midi in....if you were utilizing the program to trigger sounds or edit the midi you need to also plug the midi in from the pc to the midi out on the mpc...but for just recording you do not need that...
make sure your multitrack program is setup to send midi Clock to the mpc ...or else it will not sync when you press the play button in your program...

when you press play on the Transport (the little box with play and record) in your program you should see the green play light come on on the mpc and the track that you have solo'd should play back and you should see the track being recorded in your multitrack program...

if you get this then just increment the track on the mpc to the next one then Solo it...and repeat the process until you have all your beats tracked...




Method 2 on the mpc 1000 (RESAMPLE each solo's track on the mpc and save each one)

you can solo each track.......and set the record on the mpc so that the source are the Main outputs...you will be resampling what is being played back, you can then move each track to your computer or a folder on your Compact Flash card you can then open up the waves you dumped into your audio editing program and then mix.....

 

[sYgMa]

^^^^^^Excellent, I'll try that as soon as I get home... thx

 

[Shonsteez]

This would be good for sending it to a mix engineer at a capable studio that can handle your conversion to and from 192 kHz...

BUT

I wouldn't recommend exporting to 192 kHz to 90% of the people on this forum.

Sorry duece! Didn't mean to clash with anything you were saying, cuz that's the right way to go about it professionally... I just didn't want people to be wasting time where they don't need to be. Shit, I didn't mean to write that much, cuz now I want to talk about the actual TRACKING he he.

Oh no worries, you didnt clash with anything, im glad u mentioned what u did....I know some of my suggestions were a little monotanous but i like to keep everything as flexible and neat as possible so i tend to go a tad overboard but to me its worth it in case i do decide to go 192 or whatever it is. THats just how ive done it in the past. I just wanted to say it so it was out there and i agree,. 192 really is hard to tell the difference, but if theres a higher rate and you already recorded at it to begin with and u have the ample space for the files, i figure why not!?.......But very true.
You broke down everything even better then i could and into more detail then i cared to bother - like the part about making sure to record at that rate or else its a waste...I totally forgot to mention that. Good info Hypno.

Method 2 on the mpc 1000 (RESAMPLE each solo's track on the mpc and save each one)

you can solo each track.......and set the record on the mpc so that the source are the Main outputs...you will be resampling what is being played back, you can then move each track to your computer or a folder on your Compact Flash card you can then open up the waves you dumped into your audio editing program and then mix.....

Thats a tight way to do it if you got the disk space, dam i wish i had a mpc sometimes!

 

[Hypnotist]

Thanks man.

Good points yourself.