I’m curious to hear your preferred methods of advancing from a Tracker-only jam session into a finished song involving a bunch of studio equipment. The Tracker is such an inspiration that lately I’m finishing quite a lot of songs, but I’m struggling to get them properly track-separated and mixed.
Currently, everything just goes into the mixer/recorder while playing the full arrangement from the Tracker’s song mode, meaning that every synth has its own dedicated mixer channel, and the effect boxes have their own channel returns - nothing special there. But the Tracker is both my main sampler (mostly for drum breaks) and an important sound source (from the synth engines), so everything coming out of the Tracker is just one single stereo channel, making it hard to properly mix.
You’d assume just sticking it in a DAW using audio over USB would be the solution, but much of the sound I’m looking for happens within the Tracker itself. Sidechaining, overdrive and saturation are good examples, these can be used onboard the Tracker in very creative ways, and have a very specific quality to them. I just don’t like the idea of having to recreate these characteristics in a DAW with the clean source material you’re getting over USB.
So yeah, what I’m currently doing once the arrangement is fully done, is just replay the song over and over, and record the Tracker stuff into the mixer one channel at a time, this way separating its output over multiple channels. It’s kind of a fun way to perform your song like this, but you can imagine how time consuming it is. And when at some point I want to make a change in the arrangement, I’ll have to do it all over again. On the other hand, things don’t always have to be easy, I suppose.
Back in the OG Tracker days .. i tended to export them one track at a time - just like you - into the DAW. Because sometimes i ran into issues with stem exports.
Nowadays i tend to connect the T+ or Mini to my iPad using AUM and multitrack all the channels to individual .wav’s for further processing.
Why not stem exporting? I don’t know. I just gotten used to this
Why iPad? Purely out of convenience. It’s the fastest for me to setup and multitrack. I then transfer the files to my computer to continue working with them in the DAW.
If i was working on a Mac i guess i would connect to the Mac directly for multitracking,
But i’m on Windows and i don’t want to bring out VB-Matrix and setup an aggregate device all the time.
If you like the master effects though.. yeah then you are out of luck and need to still export track by track manually
Thanks for replying! Curious to hear about what you’re referring to as “further processing” and “continue working in the DAW”, so up to what point do you continue using the Tracker, and what part of the process is done in a DAW? And do you intentionally not use some Tracker features, like the stereo widening or sidechaining, because you know you’ll be losing those further down the line?
I guess for me it’s a matter of deciding what I’d be willing to give up using the Tracker for, because it happens to complicate the mixing process. Inspiration strikes when using the Tracker, so if I’ll be spending more time in a DAW than on the Tracker, I might just prefer my current unhinged and time consuming method. But still I’m interested in further streamlining my work process, because time spent meticulously separating audio channels isn’t time spent making new songs.
This is one of these things that really depends from your workflow I can see different ways to go by, so I can mention what I do personally.
For starters there are things that never go to an integration with my DAW or hardware synths… Everything is born on the tracker and the product is a tracker file. This is something I carry over from my days using Octamed on the Amiga.
But there are times when I want to use the tracker as starting point for something, and in that case I use mainly midi to drive the external synths I have, and everything is connected to a mixer so I can record each track individually in my DAW (I use Cubase and Studio one on Windows, while on Mac I use mainly Logic pro and Ableton live).
At that point it depends from what I need to add or adjust, then everything goes in the pipeline for mixing and cleanup. The occasional filter or effect is added at the end to spice up things if I have to, otherwise I call the day and just master the finished result.
This is a simplified version for most part. You can use midi to drive hardware, or to send the work you did on the tracker, although I don’t really see a point in just using midi when you can get way more out of the tracker, with synths and samples, but some people like the workflow of the tracker itself, so I don’t see anything strange in using the tracker as canvas basically, and leave the sounds to VSTs or external synts.
Maybe it is easier to help if you say what you want to achieve; if you ask others what they do, you may get 10 different answers from 10 different people, and maybe none of these may align with what you have in mind
I can totally second the “everything born on the Tracker” approach, I even prefer to take it a step further in wanting to keep my finished songs within the boundaries of just a single Tracker project as much as possible. When the song is done, the whole thing would exist as just a Tracker project that can be loaded and played from the Tracker the exact same way each time without any DAW involvement, including all MIDI sent to external devices, and every sound from every device running into a hardware mixer. It’s similar to how I prefer to play these songs live, where I also don’t want to have a DAW involved. I’d prefer to only use a DAW once the creative process is fully done (resulting in a completed song as a Tracker file) and I move to the technical part of mixing and mastering, because I also want to be able to outsource this technical part to people who are more capable at it than I am.
I’m aware all of this is a very, very old school approach, that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. But I never regard the songs that I’m building on the Tracker as just blueprints that need to be further advanced in a DAW creatively.
The major downside is that all sound the Tracker makes exists as one single stereo channel on the mixer. The perfect solution to this would be for each track to be separately output, including the Tracker’s onboard sound processing, directly into the mixer. But since this is unattainable, the second best option I can come up with is painstakingly recording each track separately. But hey, if that’s the way I can best approach the sound I’m looking for, unnecessarily complicating the whole process, that’s on me right? It’s what you get when you don’t want to deal with using a DAW.
And maybe it’s just the mixer (which is a 1010 Bluebox) that’s to blame, and I should consider getting a mixer that accepts multitrack audio over USB from the Tracker without the need for a DAW. This would mean I would have to move some sound processing from the Tracker to the mixer, or maybe to external effects, but I’d still prefer that over using a DAW. If these mixers even exist.
But the reason I’m asking this as an open question is that at some point we all made a conscious decision to start using the Tracker where we could also be using a DAW. For me the distinction is clear: whenever inspiration or creativity (or live performance) is involved, I want to stay away from using a DAW, and this creative process ends when there’s a finished song on the Tracker that only needs to be mixed and mastered. If somewhere in the creative process the need for a DAW starts creeping in, then why don’t I just move everything else to the DAW as well? So that’s why I’m interested in hearing where this distinction falls for other Tracker users.
One way to avoid having to process stuff after would be to process before loading sounds to the tracker. prepare your soundset, then load to the tracker and create/arrange.
It really depends on my goals for a song or what i feel is missing. Sometimes i’m totally happy with how a track turns out just within the box / Tracker. And other times i want to do more with it.
So it can mean a couple things:
I want a track to be self-contained on the Tracker and just want to do some light mixing and/or mastering:
I record the entire track to DAW (in whatever way feels convenient at the time)
Go through some mastering and call it a day
If really necessary multi-track for better control over indidivual channels
I want to mix / master / enhance individual tracks from a tracker project:
I multi-track all channels to individual .wav files
Enhancements can be VSTs or outboard gear / processing (tape, overdrives, widening, etc)
I might even toss away the delay / reverb channels and use different ones entirely
Then mix / master all the tracks in the DAW
That brings us to the “continue working in the DAW” process:
This usually means that i want to add additional voices or parts, that are not from within the tracker.
I then tend to live record into the DAW (keyboards, guitar, eurorack) .. if it is not something that is MIDI sequenced by the Tracker.
As you can tell from the above… yeah - i might turn off widening or sidechaining. But when creating the song i don’t think about that and usually actively use all the features. This is something i decide after the fact.
First and foremost - the song has to sound good (to me atleast) from within the Tracker already .
The one thing that i found most important for myself, is that I don’t care about the time i spend creating / fine-tuning as long as i’m having fun.
The thing that i did spend some significant time on at one point, was optimizing my setup so it doesn’t take long to actually use whatever setup/idea i have in mind.
I tend to say i’m a hybrid when it comes to making music. I enjoy working with other gear and/or with VSTs from the computer. As long as i don’t have to “compose” in a DAW. I detest piano rolls .
That said - The Tracker is always at the center of it all.
That’s actually quite an interesting approach. I usually throw sounds into the Tracker and then process them further on device, but I sometimes run into EQ problems that can’t be solved by either the instrument filter or the master EQ. I wouldn’t mind using audio software or an online PTI editor to process sounds beforehand, as long as the stage of composing can happen continuously on the Tracker.
Operating outside the limitations of just a Tracker and some outboard gear is quite foreign to me, so it’s very interesting to learn about the mechanics of integrating a DAW within a Tracker setup. For me the separation between the Tracker and a DAW is more rigid out of choice, but also partly out of necessity (which might have forced the choice ), because I don’t own a computer that’s exclusively dedicated to music production. As a matter of fact, a computer isn’t usually anywhere near my music equipment. So whenever I want to enhance a recording, the song needs to be fully done, taken from the mixer and into a computer. To be honest, this is also the reason I never truly invested in learning how to work with a DAW or VSTs.
That’s solid advice that I also tend to live by. The time it used to take setting up all my gear compared to the time I spent actually making music was ridiculous. I don’t have a permanent studio space, but I invested quite some time setting up everything on two 12 x 24 inch pedal boards that are fully connected while idle, and can be set up anywhere running in just a couple minutes. Also, I can pull out any separate device quite easily, so on some inbetween moments during the week I’m spending time on the couch constructing beats on the Tracker, to later bring the Tracker back into the full setup and build those ideas into songs.
@all Thanks for the ideas, suggestions and insights!
.. i tended to export them one track at a time - just like you - into the DAW. Because sometimes i ran into issues with stem exports.
But still I’m interested in further streamlining my work process, because time spent meticulously separating audio channels isn’t time spent making new songs.
I can see different ways to go by, so I can mention what I do personally.
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