Is bouncing midi to audio necessary when mixing?

[Tnevz]

Wuz up! I'm New to Gearslutz, kinda. I've found tons of great info on here and just never posted or needed to.
I'm fairly new to the production game (2-3 yrs.) and do alot of midi recording in LOGIC 8. I have a few questions all pertaining to good mixdown and bouncing practices.
I need to know what the general guideline is for bouncing midi to audio, and if its truly necessary if I'm just mixing at my home studio?

E.G. is there a sound quality difference/benefit besides less cpu load?

Should I be mixing down drums, Melody/harmonies, and vocals all separate and then mix the 3 for organizational and good practice purposes or just a better sound, or is this a no no?

should I, as a general rule of thumb, add effects and mix after bouncing to audio?

I pretty much do everything ITB

Thanks for the help. This site ROCKS!

[stevelindsay]

Maybe different approaches if you're using the onboard software instruments vs. outboard midi keyboards. For the former, you can keep them as midi and work/mix with plugs. There should not be a sound quality/difference between working with software instruments this way when it comes to the final bounce (although if you are applying lots of plugs to your software instruments your cpu may take a hit when bouncing - you can freeze tracks of course).

For external midi instruments, practically you would need to bounce your midi to audio for mixing so you can apply your plug-ins, although you could use the I/O plug as an alternative though it may have some latency issues, particularly with plugs applied. It's quick to render the midi as audio (then just hide the original midi track in case you want to go back and make edits). As a general rule, yes, add effects and mix after bouncing your midi to audio if using external midi instruments. If I'm just doing a quick balance mix to see how elements gel/work together I will often just work with the midi tracks while I fiddle the arrangement. When I'm happy with the part I render the midi to audio and start mixing with that.

Mixing down drums, guitars, keyboard, BVs etc into groups/stems is good technique - it helps to gel a mix together, and makes mixing easier if you are dealing with a lot of tracks. Usually you would keep bass and lead vocal on their own. Roey Izhaki's book "The Art of Mixing" is worth hunting down for a comprehensive overview of mixing techniques with a good focus on ITB mixing.

Lastly, I would recommend for archival purposes of your songs/projects that you do always render all midi tracks to audio (whether they are onboard software instruments or external midi hardware). Software changes/moves on/becomes obsolete and some years down the track your software instruments just may not exist/work anymore on new os systems/hardware etc. At least if you have an audio file of everything, you can resurrect your project safely well down the track.

[Mystr Tiger]

I prefer bouncing down MIDI to audio in case I upgrade and loose the instrument because it becomes incompatible.

I also like to bounce external effects in case the hardware breaks and I can't replace it. Some of what I have is pretty old and out of print.

I might also bounce plug-in effects for the same reason that upgrading might loose them, but I worry less about those since I can probably find a substitute for an EQ or delay.

I do not usually bounce multiply related tracks to make subs, but instead route them to aux tracks as subs.

[Tnevz]

Thanks for the info!
I've been lazy and have been mixing and adding effects with midi only. Then trying to bounce the whole song and be done with it. I've had very little latency/cpu bogdown issues. So I figured I'd save myself the trouble of going back and forth between midi and audio files.
Just being honest. I've only had so so results so far and I realize that could be for a number of reasons. From what I've read its a good practice to mixdown. But since I'm doing alot of hip hop and using just midi (minus the vocals of course), with usually a max of 20-30 tracks.... I wondered what I could get away with.

Any other opinions on this?

[theblue1]

Originally Posted by Tnevz

Wuz up! I'm New to Gearslutz, kinda. I've found tons of great info on here and just never posted or needed to.
I'm fairly new to the production game (2-3 yrs.) and do alot of midi recording in LOGIC 8. I have a few questions all pertaining to good mixdown and bouncing practices.
I need to know what the general guideline is for bouncing midi to audio, and if its truly necessary if I'm just mixing at my home studio?

E.G. is there a sound quality difference/benefit besides less cpu load?

Should I be mixing down drums, Melody/harmonies, and vocals all separate and then mix the 3 for organizational and good practice purposes or just a better sound, or is this a no no?

should I, as a general rule of thumb, add effects and mix after bouncing to audio?

I pretty much do everything ITB

Thanks for the help. This site ROCKS!

There are no simple answers there, no one size fits all...

But a couple of quick points. While there's a certain amount of overlap, in general:

• you bounce audio tracks within a project (sometimes combining multiple tracks into one and sometimes applying FX) to other audio track or tracks.
• you render MIDI to audio.

And, whether you render MIDI to audio beforehand as a dedicated step -- for instance you might want to perform some sort of edits that make more sense performed on audio than MIDI or perhaps apply some audio processing that can't be done in real time -- or whether you render the MIDI to audio as part of the final mix file output (sometimes called bounce-to-file), it's a process that must happen at some point, although it may be hidden from the user.

With regard to audio FX on virtual instruments -- different DAWs have different approaches and capabilities but it's become increasingly common for DAWs that have virtual instruments to allow you to use realtime (live) audio FX plug ins on their audio output channels, more or less as though it was a previously recorded audio track. However doing so may increase monitoring latency to a significant extent, depending on your rig and the CPU requirements of the plugs and virtual instruments.

[StringBean]

I've always used my plug-ins on the actual midi tracks themselves vs. rendering the midi to audio and then applying processing plug-ins. Do you guys notice any difference? I don't like to render to audio until I'm pretty much done mixing b/c I often end up making small changes to the midi tracks, and having doubles of every instrument seems inefficient. But if everyone does it I should too

[JoaT]

I am nitpicking here.

Midi in this context is control signals to the instruments. You can't apply audio processing to midi tracks themselves. You apply them to the output of the instruments the midi signal controls. Applying edits to midi tracks and applying edits to the instrument or it's output's processing are two different things. Once you render the instrument's output to audio you can no longer apply effects to the midi data controlling it or the instrument's settings. The resulting audio track can still be tweaked as any audiotrack.

I'm pretty certain the OP has an understanding of how this works. The reason I wrote this is that nowadays it seems to become less and less clear as what midi actually is. It seems to have become synonymous with VSTi:s to a lot of people. It also seldom makes no practical difference. But in this business it is good to know what you are talking about.

[Mystr Tiger]

Originally Posted by StringBean

I've always used my plug-ins on the actual midi tracks themselves vs. rendering the midi to audio and then applying processing plug-ins. Do you guys notice any difference? I don't like to render to audio until I'm pretty much done mixing b/c I often end up making small changes to the midi tracks, and having doubles of every instrument seems inefficient. But if everyone does it I should too

I can't imagine why there would be a difference in sound for plug-ins on the MIDI track vs on the rendered audio track, but I have not tried any comparisons. I think your approach seems very reasonable, especially if you are getting good results and it fits your preferred workflow. Of course, experimenting is also a good way to discover other approaches that you may find desirable.

What is nice about your approach of putting the effects on the MIDI (or, should I say, on the audio being output from the MIDI instrument as JoaT precisely points out) is that you end up with an audio track that does not require those plug-ins, thus keeping the CPU load down (which might not be all that important with the faster machines these days, but I can see a benefit for those of us with the older machines).

What I like to do in Pro Tools (and I'm guessing this can be done on other DAWs) is to make the instrument track with the VI and plug-ins inactive after I render it (and thanks to theBlue1 for pointing out that one "renders" a MIDI track - not "bounce"). Making the track inactive frees up resources (CPU and HD DSP) but still retains the instrument and plug-in settings so it's easy to re-active the track later in case I need to tweak it.