Home Recording For Dummies, 6th Edition

Chapter 21

Making Your Mix

IN THIS CHAPTER

Submixing your tracks

Mixing digitally in-the-box

Mixing to an external recorder

The final step in mixing your music involves taking all your EQed, panned, processed, and automated tracks and recording them into a stereo pair of tracks. This is often called bouncing your mix. In the old analog days, bouncing meant sending all your tracks to two separate tracks on the same tape deck or to a different tape deck. Nowadays, with digital recording, you can create bounces several ways — all of which I cover in this chapter.

In this chapter, I lead you through making your mix either within your computer or device (in-the-box) or by sending your tracks to a digital or an analog two-track machine — usually a digital mastering recorder (such as the Tascam DA-3000) or (yes, even today) a reel-to-reel tape deck.

Submixing Tracks

Submixing is mixing some of your tracks down to one or two additional tracks within your session. When you record to tracks, the submixed material automatically shows up in your session. You can then turn off the voices of the tracks that you submixed and control the resulting track(s) from one (or two) fader(s). This is ...