Hello all, I’m a long-time lurker and first time poster and was wondering if any advanced users here could help me out.
I spend a lot of time tracking guitars. Currently I track two takes at once – an amp signal for the song and a DI signal for possible reamping. Currently the only way to do that (that I’m aware of) is two route and arm two separate audio tracks and record them both at once. While this continues to work for me, it also becomes messy and cumbersome when working on large projects that demand 30 or more guitar tracks.
When Steinberg introduced Track Versions I was hoping there would be a way to ‘record two track versions at once’, that way my default layer and waveform would be the amp signal, and if I ever needed to access the DI, I could just flip over to the DI track layer underneath of it. I’ve never been able to find a way to get this to work. Imagine if underneath of all of my guitar takes was access to its DI file, rather than a whole separate track or folder taking up precious screen real estate and becoming more and more messy!
Does anyone out there know how this could be accomplished?
The closest I’ve come is to create a 2nd track layer underneath my amp signal track and dragging the DI track onto it, then deleting the empty DI track. This takes lots of extra time. Am I missing something?
If you’re doing this sort of thing regularly I’d suggest setting up a template.
Create 30 or more pairs of tracks and name them appropriately for DI and for amp. Route all the DI to a separate bus and mute it, or just mute all the tracks, or create a mute group, whatever (still in your template, not every time…)
Create two visibility setups, one with all the DI tracks hidden. Assign the full and half visibility setups to Key Commands.
Then, whenever you need the DI track for something, you just hit a key, listen to that track or copy it, then hit a key again to get them out of the way.
Just off the top of my head, there could be better solution still.
When I’m doing this then I record a multi-channel track. For your example, that would simply be stereo. Sometimes I record in quad channel: DI guitar, Post FX before amp, SM57, Room mic. The advantage of the multi-channel track is that you can edit very easily because its only one track on the arrange page. But, the disadvantage is that you have to fiddle about disconnecting the channels you don’t want to hear in the mix. I’m afraid I can’t quite remember what configuration I had for this but I was using the Mix6to2 plugin as an insert to isolate the channel I needed (usually the SM57) and also then feeding to a mono or stereo group from the quad channel so that I could set up some guitar FX (which only worked with stereo channels not the quad channel!). Well, it’s a bit complex but once done you can save a track preset for it and forever use that!
When I need a DI track and a track from my Kemper I record them separately and the put the DI part in a lane under the “amped” part. That way I only have one track and always know which DI belongs to which “amped” part. It’s not perfect but it works for me.
The OP could do essentially the same with Track Versions too. Record the DI & amped parts to separate tracks. Then create a new (not copied) Track Version of the amped track and drag the DI audio onto that version.