Before finalizing your project, you might want to bounce to audio. This can yield many benefits. Let’s look into a few.
Reason 1
Bouncing tracks to audio cements your ideas and crystallizes your focus. It keeps you from drifting into that vicious cycle of changing things up repeatedly – only to end up with no direction and lost momentum.
Reason 2
It gives you further options for creative processing. Working with audio allows things like reversing, time-stretching, slicing up & rearranging, etc.
Reason 3
It makes arranging easier. It’s much quicker to try different arrange options when all you have to do is throw big blocks of audio around (instead of small chunks of MIDI note data and bits of automation).
Reason 4
It keeps the arrange page tidy and makes the structure easier to visualize.
Reason 5
When you bounce to audio, you can see the actual waveforms in the arrange instead of just midi notes. This provides a much more exact vision of what’s going on and allows for ultra-precise editing of the timing.
Reason 6
It’s often better to just swap audio files when collaborating. In fact even though Loxy and I both work in Logic, we rarely swap project files. We usually just send wavs. It really seems to help us finish things better and doing this has probably very much contributed in developing our own sound too.
Reason 7
You’ll have stems ready for future remixes/rework. Too many times I’ve tried to open an old Logic project of mine in order to do a remix, only to find out some of the files or plugins have been lost for ever.
Reason 8 (I lied)
It sucks having to think about CPU or memory limitations when mixing. If you bounce to audio before final mix you free up some of those critical resources.
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Good post as always Ilpo. I’ d be interested to hear a bit more on how your collabs work. Do you guys do much in the studio together or is it mostly online? And do you have any fixed approaches in terms of who does what (sound design / arrange / mixdowns etc)?
Cheers!
Thanks Ben. The work I do with Loxy, we work mainly online as obviously he’s in the UK and I’m in Finland. But it works really well for us. I quite like that way of working anyway and I’ve always been doing it. We often have a chat on when we work though where we bounce ideas off each other and send audio back and forth. So there is a live element to it. As for who does what – I usually do the final mix as I have a good studio over here, but other than that there is no set formula. Each tune is different. We both start tunes and then just bounce the stems back & forth and kind of see what happens. Sometimes he just sends me a MP3 clip and I do a few things on top of that and send those parts over to him to work with. No set formula really, we just go with what works for the situation.
Great to see stuff that I thought I should be doing in black and white.
I have one question about this and it is when? Where do you draw the line between composition and mixdown.
I’m always to scared I will want to change this and that, I don’t want to be fooling around with a compressor when I could just adjust and envelope for example. Then there is also the busses, do you make a rule that you won’t bus something until its commit to audio.
I know I need to commit but am unsure of what to commit too, this mostly leaves me with a bunch of soft synths open and a very warm MacBook.
It seems I need to rethink my whole work flow!
That’s a very good question. I think it boils down to the fact that at some point you just have to decide that the composition is ready. As for my own work – I just “know” when that point comes. I can’t think of a better way to explain it.
I might wanna change something later but as long as I have the original project saved, I can always go back to things if it comes to that.
Regarding the buses – I am not sure I entirely understand your question? I frequently use buses with MIDI. For my workflow it doesn’t really matter wether the stuff going into a bus originates from a MIDI or audio track. So bouncing tracks to audio doesn’t really change anything as far as working with buses goes.
What does it mean to bounce a track?
Simply the process of rendering the different tracks in your project into plain audio.
Of course some people work purely in audio to begin with, but even then I think there can be benefits in doing this!
I can’t even count how many times I’ve been burned by reason #7. I really like the freeze track feature in Ableton, it acts as a nice middleground between bouncing the track and keeping the raw data.
Ha, me too. Too many times.
Yup Logic has got freeze too but personally I don’t really like it. I often like to do little edits on the audio and freezing prevents that. Bouncing straight to audio is way more flexible and just works better for my workflow.
I do keep the original project saved under a different name in case I need to back though!
I’ve worked purely in audio but i know others bounced tracks. For a beginner learning is an everyday process.
Reason 7 is most like the reason why i’ll start bouncing.
Yup learning never ends! I’m learning every day too and that’s one reason why I do this website.
Hey man..!!!!! Thanks for your posts. They are helpful in deed!!!
Cheers Mike thanks for the feedback!
Good stuff, read a few articles, excellent and informative site mate !
LDP
That’s great, welcome aboard.
KRII! You’re alive!
Much love from Canada, time to hunt down some of your new music
-Aaron/Vexion/ilkae
Hey Aaron, yes very much alive
Hope you’re good.