Experiences using the Tracker in a studio setup

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. :laughing:

Curious to hear your experiences!

Back in the OG Tracker days :old_man: .. 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 :laughing:

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 :hugs:

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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. :wink: 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 :slight_smile: 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

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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. :laughing: 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. :laughing:

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. :wink:

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.