Hello,

I need your help on deciding whether should I mix MIDI tracks or audio tracks. The majority of people on the web and YouTube recommend mixing the audio after converting each MIDI track into audio but I still can't know why. What is the cons of MIDI mixing?

Appreciate your response.

Regards,
A.M. (a.k.a HarmonyCo.)

 

The con is that you have to keep all your vsties (instruments) active, instead of freezing them and offloading them from your CPU.
If you mix only with stock FXS that are pretty low on your cpu then you should be okay, if you have a good cpu, audio device and not a lot of instruments, but if you use any heavy plugins (most emulations are, if you use oversampling even on non emulation plugs, reverbs are always a hit on your cpu, etc) then at some point your cpu will choke.
Normally you can unfreeze anyway, and come back to your midi tracks later on. Worst case scenario save your project in midi before rendering, then save under another name the rendered tracks so you can come back to your project in midi.

 

Thanks Talmi.
So it's a more performance issue than a sound quality issue. If I understand correctly, I assume you mean to freeze them so I can return back to them i case I need more editing if the audio is unsatisfactory.

Sorry I am completely new to DAW and mixing.

Regards,
A.M. (a.k.a HarmonyCo.)

 

sometimes i delete some vsti's and when i return to the project they are missing so i have to replace them. you mix midi the same as audio

 

Yeah that's it. Depending on daws there are several ways to render a midi track (aka midi notes that are sent to a virtual instrument) to simple audio informations (not linked to the virtual instrument, thus requiring virtualy no cpu power to be read). Several terms too. Usually when you render you cannot get back to your original midi track. It's converted and gone. That's option A.
Freezing on the other hand puts aside the track, disable its instrument (so no more used ressources) and the midi track, and give you the converted track to audio to do your things but giving you the option to enable again the original midi track, if you need to change something or whatever. That's option B
So with option A you have to back up your project first under a name and then save it under a different name after definitive rendering to be able to switch back just in case. It takes more space on your hd (two projects with the same content in different formats), and it's a pain to re-render everything if you want to just adjust one track of the original midi tracks.
Option B is less annoying.

 

Talmi, you said well enough.
Thank you man, appreciate it.

Regards,
A.M. (a.k.a HarmonyCo.)

 

No problem, A.M.

 

Not necessarily. Many instruments and effects have some deliberate randomness in their performance (round robins, LFOs, synth oscillators' free phase, random pitch, etc.), so every time an instrument plays its part chances are it sounds a little different from previous take. It is literally a new performance every time. While it can be subtle in some situations, it can also be annoying in some others. For instance, when a complex synth pad sounds significantly different every time at some important point of an arrangement you're working on. When you "print" a performance to a file, it becomes "a recording" in traditional sense and sounds identical every time.

Having said all that I, for one, am too lazy to mess with audio parts, as I like to change the arrangement here and there, and for me arranging isn't usually really separated from mixing. But regarding the aforementioned case with ever-changing pad – I sometimes would turn off any LFOs and program the changes manually via automation to make sure there's not such huge difference.

 

Last edited: Nov 30, 2019

The choice is very simple since it often depends on the stage in which you are:
MIDI if you are still in a creative process: you have not yet finalized your melodies / phrases and are not yet fixed on the choice of your instruments
AUDIO if you're done with editing and if you want to focus on the MIX
The quality remains the same if you have exported your MIDI to a good audio definition

 

There are technical reasons and a philosophical reason for committing MIDI to audio.

First you free up resources for plugins while mixing and it lets you clean up your session a bit. Second, for archival purposes, audio in your session is more resilient than MIDI specifically in regards to instrument plugin settings. Lastly, there are some editing tools that are only available as offline processes for example reversing.

Now the philosophical reason for why some like to commit to audio is just that, they're committing. By locking in the sound they can actually move on to the next phase of process (mixing) and get one step closer to a finished product versus being stuck in a creative loop.

I personally try to keep all my MIDI intact partially because I use Studio One which does a great job countering the points I made above. I commit only when something is taking up an extremely high amount of resources and even then thanks to Studio One the MIDI performance is still available and I can even restore the instrument if I need to. I also incorporate a lot of MIDI editing and tweaking of instrument settings as an alternative to eqing and compressing during mixing. I also don't suffer from obsessing over a song so I can move on through the rest of the processes. For archival purposes, once a song is finished I export stems.

 

what exactly do you mean by mixing MIDI?
you cant really mix MIDI in the same way you mix audio.
maybe you misunderstand the difference? or maybe i am missing something?

 

Probably. He's talking about mixing the realtime VSTi output (in the audio channels, ofc) vs the rendered/frozen audiotracks.