New SL user here. I decided to dive in on a large project – actually a small project but large files. I had a big band playing at a jazz club earlier this week. I always do some kind of audio recording on the stage. It isn’t for studio quality, but I want material for rehearsal study, and if the recording is good enough, I use it to replace the audio track on the video recording.
On this occasion, the program evolved into an extravaganza with 21 people on a rather small stage, so I decided to go with a minimal recording setup, just because there wasn’t room for much more. What I did was a single stereo mic (Rode NT4) mainly for the horns, and I put splitters on the two house vocal mics – so it was a total of 4-channel recording.
My game plan was to use SL to take the vocals out of the stereo pair, because I had the vocals on separate channels. But then I decided to let SL unmix guitar, piano, bass & drums as long as I was going down the unmix path.
This was a 2-set show. For the first set, I did all the unmixing with SL as a VST in Cubase. The unmix layers end up living inside the Cubase project file, which became enormous, and eventually Cubase became quite slow. Also, I really couldn’t find a good way to get SL removed from the project once I had the unmix done. I copied all the unmixed layers into new Cubase tracks, but this was still connected to SL. I did render-in-place on those tracks, which did disconnect them from SL, but I never really got SL disconnected from the original clips (which were each an hour long.)
That worked, but I don’t recommend it. For the second set, I copied my Cubase project to be the starting point, but deleted all the clips, which got SL out of the Cubase project. I did the unmix within the SL10 stand-alone app and exported all the unmix layers to WAV files. From that point, I simply dragged the WAV files into the Cubase project as if I had used separate mics for each of those WAV files.
That’s a simple workflow. However, it does take a long time to unmix an hour of music (basically the same time whether you use VST or stand-alone). My studio computer is about 8 years old. So far, it has been plenty fast for anything I do in Cubase or any other music software. But I might look at upgrading to do this big SL processing faster. As it was, I just let it run and watched a football game.
How did it work? A lot better than I expected. Without SL, the drums would have covered up everything. In the house, there were several area mics on the horns, so I think the house mix was decent, but on stage, the drums were loud. With this unmixed approach, I had drums-L and drums-R as separate tracks, and they were isolated almost flawlessly, so it was easy to turn the drums down.
Of course, it would be better to have had 20-track recording, but under the circumstances, I’d say this was a really good result. And now that I know it can work with a reasonable workflow (if you don’t mind an hour of unmix time per set), I will probably opt for other simplified recording setups in the future.
