keeping your stems clean?

[vvv]

Yeah, Cool Edit has that "freeze" option, called "lock". when I was onna slower computer, I used it all the time.

Another thing, don't put effects on individual tracks; use groups, busses, whatever the nomenclature is, and then "freeze".

(I note that I am again top o' the page but at least this time I didn't post a stoopid pun and waste anyone's time ... except, of course, those of all y'all reading this parenthetical. )

[digitaldrummer]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GONmFCkCGCc

[vvv]

I also wanna mention that everyone should always endeavor, as both a matter of best practice and good health, to keep their stems clean.

[gravitychapters]

Behold: Suki.

No idea what she is, but guessing hound+doberman. She's a rescue.

IMG_8588.jpeg (11.54 KiB) Viewed 1198 times

You guys are making perfect sense (and one of you has a dog in your avatar who looks IDENTICAL to mine, so that's cool), but I think I did a really bad job of asking my question.

Here's where I'm at, and I think I've solved my own problem at this point: I've printed my stems. They were printed through master bus processing, as I intended. So, all good there. I muted the original tracks that made up the stems, so all good there too.

Where I was getting hung up was when I wanted to continue working on the song but was running my stems through the master bus AGAIN, hence hearing them with double-processing. That sounded real bad.

My solution was to take all of my master-bus processing and move it to a new stereo audio track—which I'm now calling the mix bus. I'll now continue to do all of my non-stem work through this new mix bus, and I'll route my stems (which, again, were printed with all the processing) to the master bus, which now has zero plugins.

It's occurring to me just now that I could also have printed the damn stems without the master bus processing. That probably would have been a lot easier. Did I mention that routing is my achilles heel?

(btw, Apologies if I'm abusing the terms master bus and mix bus; entirely possible and/or likely that I'm not clear on their proper definitions!)

That all makes sense. That's essentially what I was getting at. No need to apologize. I've been on this forum since roughly 2002 or something, and I can attribute probably 70% of my knowledge to asking questions and reading through a million posts.

Also, that's Bruce, my treeing walker coon hound. He is the best. Never hesitate to post proof of good boy dogs in any and all threads.

[gravitychapters]

The fact that this didn't occur to me yesterday is just...embarrassing. I'm not as dumb as this suggests, I promise. I just have a serious mental deficiency about routing. It's f'ing weird.

Apologies in advance if this is redundant to an earlier point:

Why not render your stems with whatever you put on your mix bus, disabled? Then continue working your intermediate version with your mix bus mojo on, knowing that your stems are dry.

Or don't even put things on the mix bus until later in the process.

Or don't ever put things on the mix bus ever, ever.

[gravitychapters]

I've been doing lots of freezing. It's helpful, but when I get to a certain threshold (like 60ish tracks), no amount of freezing will save me.

That's when I start submixing. Or drinking.

I'm not an Ableton user either, but a quick search tells me that (at least recent versions of) Ableton has the ability to "Freeze" a track. That's what I do when I'm running out of CPU (or DSP on the UAD). If I want to make a change later, I can still unfreeze it, change it, and freeze again (or freeze something else). The latest Pro Tools (2020, but I think it was in earlier versions too) also has an ability to "commit" a track, which effectively means it renders it in place, and it gives you the option to disable the original track (in case you need it again) or really, truly commit and throw it away (that's for you tape users...).

anyway, if I was trying to save CPU in Ableton, I'd look into "freeze" and avoid the stems altogether. If your system is till choking on too many tracks, then that might be not enough RAM or a slow hard drive.

Mike

[digitaldrummer]

I've been doing lots of freezing. It's helpful, but when I get to a certain threshold (like 60ish tracks), no amount of freezing will save me.

That's when I start submixing. Or drinking.

so yeah, sounds like you are hitting a new bottleneck there - maybe disk or memory limited? By submixing (bouncing) you are reducing the active track count right?