You've got so many useful information on this forum and yet you have no idea what to do with it. Music, like any other art, is using in it's greatest proportion the contrasts: between loud and soft and between clean and distorted. If all the sounds in a track are warm and saturated and wide, there is nothing to contrast to. Same, if all the sounds are digitally clean.
So you must have some tracks clean and some tracks processed. And really, the must have processor is the gain, not one but two: with one you do the trim control on the bus and the other one is for level automation. This way, the fader remains available for mixing.
But you won't feel these answers to your questions until you get to do several dozens of finished tracks.

Where's @foster911 ?

 

Whatever sounds good to you needs to be on the buss.

 

I mean it. titsowurliebeth plugin. use it. whenever you need vintage sound, it has soft, warm, retro French "Le Pétomane" saturation for you and your tracks. you want modern pump, no problem, it has British "Mr. Methane" soundgoodizing mode. it also has Red Army compressor lever, you push that lever, my friend, you are a star right away. quickly now, my man, go for your dream! don't waste another day!

 

Last edited: May 19, 2016

I always leave the big knob somewhere between the mammoth and the nuclear apocalypse setting,seems to add that secret character for pro top 10 chart sound.

 

Listen to this wise man, Faoki. That's exactly where the key to your success lies.

 

Dub Delay. Especially on the master.

 

Any trim tool/plugin to gainstage your levels such as Ableton's Utility!

 

I think the guys that are saying gain staging are actually not fk'ing with you.
Other than that, and before that: A descriptive name, and sometimes a nice color.

Workflow wise, it's seems to slow you down to start fk'ing with mixing as you are creating/producing, so you don't really need to think about processing/plugins until you want to get better than a ruff mix, like when your girl shaved but 3 days ago, and you didn't know, barely surviving your face scraped while you were trying to be nice (and inc your chances of throat cancer)...that ruff.

If you're on a laptop, your screwed any ways having to bounce down or mix down a group of tracks to wavs anyways because DAWs REALLY suck on CPU, wtf they don't use the PC's GPU, I have NO idea...they should. Try it, put on an eq-> compressor specific for that type of instrument/vox, and a "fixer" eq. on each track. Send all your tracks to your small/mid/large reverb FX busses/Tracks, and your delays send FX track(s) and see how long the CPU meter doesn't fill up, the machine makes a squealing sound, grabs it's chest and falls off your desk/lap. That's before the saturation and faux mastering chain on 1-3 busses feeding a master fader using expansion/limiters in series...

It's surprisingly a small amout of processing, if your doing orchestral/epic kinda stuff like I was. I'm fixated on wtf 808s are for the time being...

 

yo momma

 

LFO BY XFER RECORDS

 

I certeainly have more then a 100 beats where more then half of the channels only have the fader moved, NOTHING ELSE

Eqing is for pussy's, Chuck Norris told me that

 

The better the engine of a daw is coded,the better it handles the cpu.
Some of my projects are big 200-300 tracks,50+ groups,plugins,reverbs,delays,automation etc,without cubase id be cooked.
Also big league scoring projects can take 500+ tracks,hence why you may need extra computering power,trough either vsl pro,vst system link or other tools.

 

Ok, dude, what's the specs of the computers that run 500 tracks? I'm not being a dick or joking either. If I really have to turn on my workstation and just not care I live in a sauna, I'll bring in a box of rocks, a wood spoon and a jug of water and just use my workstation instead of busting my ass on my i7 laptop with half a brain (8gb RAM) nice gpu though.

 

PFM, plug in

 

They use multi cpu computers/workstations,several,with lots of RAM(several hundred GB),connected trough a chain,for power and fast work.
Many people here have two or more computers connected with vsl pro or vst system link or other ways.
People who just started shouldnt worry though,8b of ram may be enough,since you want to learn with small projects.
Also 500+ tracks is film scoring,otherwise its overkill.

 

If you put some vuvuzela on your tracks they will improve, not CPU intensive either. Give it a go, MOAR VUVU!

 

dblue glitch on every track with random presets as well on master xD....


jokes aside, rule no1...don't use too much processing... not every track needs treatment... it all depends on what you want to achieve but in general in my experience i always end up ruin the whole thing using more stuff... just keep it simple... use an eq only when frequencies battle for space in the mix and only on the track/bus that you consider less important or comes as second... compress with care... compressors act as eq's if you want... they tend to tame some peaks but ads gain on other parts and those parts could contain the same frequencies that you want to get rid of... less is more... these will help you focus on the main idea of the track...

 

I always record vocals with UAD Neve 88RS. I track drums with a UAD Pultec EQP-1A on every drum mic for analog flavor and occasionally a LA2A for shaping them a bit. My bass goes from my Hartke Bass Attack pre to a chain of UAD 1176 for peaks and then a UAD LA2A for tone. Synths and keyboards get the UAD Pultec treatment. I record all tracks wet.

When mixing, I alyways have Acon Equalizer, Manic Compressor, and HorNet VU meter. These three get 90% of the job done. I barely need saturation or tape emulation because my recorded tracks usually already have the flavor I need on the way in. On the mix bus I use either a UAD Fairchild or Slate VBC FG-Mu just slightly moving the meters and with the output matching the bypassed level, for glue and flavor. I usually limit with Slate's FG-X. Just as a limiter, not to smack the hell out of my mix.

 

If a woman needs to be telling everyone that she's a lady, then maybe she's not. Some things are not for one to say. The judge of one's talent is the listener.