Let say that I wanna do an huge musical project that will take many tracks and each track as usual plugins, the problem is that it will need a powerful PC. It'll be feasible to export each track separetely using the plugins that are with them and put their WAV together and mix them just with the bus plugins, so it will reduce the load on the CPU? Or that will result on a loss of quality, so it's always better to do everything at once?

 

This is the way a lot of people work. It will not cause any loss of quality at all. In Logic, this exact thing is done by using option Bounce and Replace All Tracks. Just remember you do not want to Normalize everything, but maybe your DAW will do Normalize with Overload Protection only. That is a common way for people to do this in Logic.

If working like this was going to have negative results, it wouldn't even be an option in Logic, at all. Any good DAW will do these workflow functions without any audio problem. As long as everything is setup right.

People often do this as a multitrack, which is everything separate. Or they bounce Stems, which can be different groups of any combined elements. Many people do both; because you do not need every tiny element of your project to have it's own render on it's own channel. They just leave the more important elements by themselves.

 

Last edited: Nov 29, 2023

The easiest way to do this and be able to experiment , is to save all your multi-tracked files to a seperate sub-folder ,
so when start making any changes to your "new" tracks , it will be ok to see what works for you this way. Also , save these
newer tracks to another sub-folder , but if you save ALL your main MASTER multi-tracks to a folder ; you'll be able to see
what works for you.

( my setup for drums / bass .... )
:>: i record a drummer doing sometimes up to 12 tracks , depending on his kit.
:> then I record at times , a DI track of a bass player , also his bass amp mic's , up to 4 tracks.
i then use sub and assign AUX , or sub channels to add the efx I know I need , then mix those tracks as i need them.
:> So now , Ive sved all my original multi-tracks , to a seperate sub folder untouched by efx.
:> now the new tracks can move forward with , guitars , keys , vocals , ect . But as each recording is done , I keep
saving them to the original sub folder , so i can use copied tracks to work with.

hope this helps a little bit for ya , I cut out a lot of details , but I think you'll get the idea ?

 

You will figure out a bunch of different ways to do this, and there are a million articles and videos also.

Here's one. I use a lot of Synth plugins, and they take up a ton of CPU compared to just an audio file. I will bounce them to an audio render, and then disable every plugin on the channel, including the synth plugin. I will move the newly created audio track underneath the software instrument track, and then I will Hide the channel with the synth/plugins on it. That way, if you want to change something about that synth part later on, you can just unhide it and re-enable all the plugins; then mute or delete the earlier render.

There are even more upsides to working this way. One is if you are going to hand off the project to someone else to work on it. Another one is for archival/storage. By having everything rendered to audio, you are not at the mercy of some plugin and DAW software if you want to work on it again some time down the road. The only real "con" to working this way, is the amount of hard disk space the rendered tracks take up. And it's extra work; but you also get to pile even more plugins on, if you want.

 

Last edited: Nov 29, 2023

I this the same as freeze track in Ableton?

 

No loss of quality, as long as you record everything at a reasonable resolution.
24bit is a must. imo
And the more tracks you record in the better it is to ramp up to 88.2 or 96k

 

Last edited: Nov 29, 2023

Freezing/Unfreezing goes back and forth on the same track between plugins and bounced audio.

 

Firstly, you need a powerful interface, otherwise the whole endeavour is obsolete.
But why would you want to record with active plugins? You can't undo this. Just record the audio and mix it afterwards like every other song.

 

Here's my two cents: tracking with anything on is valid only when one is trying to color the input with the sound of a specific piece of hardware. As far as digital domain goes, as No Avenger pointed anything else can be added later. You want the artist to put maximum effort and then take the sound further with processing, not the other way around. If you want to hear what you're doing, just turn up the fader in your DAW and turn it back to unity when you're done with recording.

 

you basically described freeze/bounce feature of DAWs,

it can result in loss of quality if it's done at different samplerate/bit depth than your project (but I doubt any recent DAW was that dumb),
also you loose convenience of adjusting plugin parameters on frozen/bounced track - that said some DAWs do offer partial (un)freeze where you specifically pick only certain first plugins in FX chain to be frozen

 

Well thank you guys, this was really informative, some of you even shared their workflow that's pretty kind.

My interface is an Antelope Zen Go, I think that's powerful enough. Also I use Bitwig.

I was asking because to track bass guitar for example the chain goes like this: corrective eq/amp/IR-cab/compressor/filter/eq for color, something similar goes on for guitar, that plus vocals, virtual instruments like drums, synths, and also the mix buss plugs, the pc (mac air m1) starts to reach it's limits, so if I where to make something bigger I would have to include workflows to ease CPU load. Thanks to you now i'm clear that's possible without lossing quality.

 

Also consider that the plugins you used may not work in the future or be unavailable. For that reason it's best to keep a rendered wav of a track and the original midi, also the plugin for as long as possible but realise that one day it may not work - but you will at least have the midi to use a different synth. It's also a good idea to save every plugin preset you use to your project folder including the name of the plugin in the file name.