reality check for a beginner

[Jinks67]

Just signed up for this forum today although I've been reading through here for a few months. Great community you guys got here, it's been a big help for me. I figured I'll reproduce a cover to see what's involved..... 6 months later I have a couple shitty sounding attempts The goal for me right is to learn, I know with what i got I'm not going to get studio quality, but I think I can get something halfway decent. I've gone from not even knowing what a DI was to where I'm at now so bear with me and be nice please!

Anyway where I'm at now is....

I'm using Cubase 5 as my DAW

For the guitar I'm using a les paul with blackout pickups (active ones) and a steinberg C1 DI. The gain on the device isn't maxed out too much, the dry? signal will max out around -.5db but probably averages closer to -1.5 while I'm playing full on.

I've got a midi drum and bass track that are ok, I'm using addictive drums that sound pretty good on their own. The bass sounds passable with the drums, pretty lame by itself but I think in a mix if it's kind of just complimentary to the low end of the rhythm guitars it won't sound that bad. Or I could stop being lazy and go borrow one... either way...

What I'm saying is I have the instruments sounding pretty decent and I'm going to try laying down all the tracks now. I want to save myself some headaches later as I already experimented with doing this a couple times and had a hell of a mess when I tried to mix it together

Specifically....

When I'm laying down the rhythm tracks I'm just using Amplitube 5150 sim with the gain not too high, and Boogex (with the EQ thingy flattened) with an impulse I like. I have no effects going on at all, my main focus is to keep the tracks tight and latency down while I'm recording. (it's pretty decent, 8ms or so lag). I will try recording a mic'd cab later when I have some more $ available. What I have is actually halfway ok.

Anyway what is the best kind of rhythm sample to work with at the mixing stage? I've got the "volume" on the tracks after the amp pretty loud and just barely clipping for a split second in any take. Should I put a limiter on there before export or turn the volume down so it doesn't clip at all? If I want any kind of compression or EQ later due to thumping out the bass or drums or to settle them down a bit can I do that when I try to mix them? I plan on using a little CurveEQ before export to tame some fizz I don't like. I also have the built in EQ doing the usual looking low and high cut while I'm playing. It's ok to do this before export if I'm making it sound the way I want while it's still alone?

Same idea for the lead parts, however I do have some effects on there like delay and compression on the solo part (I couldn't figure out any other way to make it sound "hot") I guess if I leave them on there in the mix down it kind of hinders me later? I don't want to be loading a bunch of guitar effects in the mixing stage do i? (i made my computer spew smoke last time i tried to load too much amp sim stuff at once)

The addictive drums sounds are really good the way i have it setup. I used the internal effects on there to get it to sound how i want but I also did eq'ing and some compression on the individual tracks outside of AD. Again should I leave them as is and do that at the mixing stage or is it ok to have some of that before hand? I want to export each drum and the room / overhead outputs individually and play with their volumes when I am mixing all the takes, this makes sense?

When I go to mix I'll have to learn the method behind all of these bus, chain, channels , kind of looking forward to it. But right now I'm just concerned with having half decent takes to work with. I'm really not up on my technical stuff. I've read a lot but I only understand what I understand so far. Am I on the right track here for a beginner? Any glaring errors in my thought process? thanks

 

[if6was9]

When tracking the DI's the raw di's shouldn't clip. They should be peaking around -3 at most. I usually track Di's a bit lower than this even as it sounds more normal when I reamp them through a real amp.

Since you're using sims on all the amps and everything else is programmed you can run whatever plugins you want when you track, you can strip them all off and start from scratch when you mix them then.

When you mix, none of the tracks should be clipping

 

[Jinks67]

I'll turn the dry down a little, it's not clipping at all but it gets close if i bang on it hard

I didn't think I could turn all those amp sims on in the mixing stage, at least I know my computer wont' handle more than 3-4 of those going at once without barfing badly. I wonder if I leave only the amp and cab sim on I can add anything else later? Might be a good workaround for me? Or is there a way to feed a few tracks through one sim?

And so I understand none of the takes should clip BEFORE i start trying to mix them or it's ok to fix that when mixing if some of them peak at .1 here and there?

 

[Loki Laufeyiarson]

The least amount of stuff you have to "fix in the mix" the better.

 

[if6was9]

You see when you're tracking using sims none of them are "printed" or permanantly placed on the tracks. They're totally changable so you can add, take away or change everything later. You need to render/export them for them to be permanant.

Whats important when recording the parts is that they don't clip "on the way in". This isn't reversable and doesn't sound good.

You can reset the buffers when mixing so that your computer can handle more plugins. Same thing you adjust to get the latency down but it doesn't matter if you have latency when mixing so you set it to the max. Any half decent computer is going to be able a ton at this stage. My pc is 3-4 years old now and can handle almost anything I throw at it until the end of projects where I might have 100+ tracks with all the processing going on.

 

[Jinks67]

right on, I get it, thanks for the tips!