I am editing a live show (30 songs long with dialog in between).
Vocals:
Lead
Bkrd Vox 1
Bkrd Vox 2
Rhythm Section:
5 Drum tracks
Bass
3 piano mics (1 audio channel per mic)
Guitar
Wind Player (sax/flute/clarinet)
Audience track
Since it’s a medium size club, and the band barely fits on stage (with a 6 ft grand being played by MD, no synths) with singers in front of musicians with amps/drums/piano, there’s plenty of bleed.
So I have found the best mixing strategy (in order to use VariAudio) to tune all the singers, and do some massaging the singers to tighten their rhythmic performance, is to:
- Utilize Spectralayers 12 with my Cubase 14 Pro to ‘unmix song’ on each vocal track
- Drag and drop the vocal isolated layer onto a fresh audio track for each vocal track
- Use VariAudio on each newly created dropped vocal layer
After some trial and error, it seems that Googles search via AI, I’m under the impression that I should do things in that order.
Then inside VariAudio after each song’s corrections to pitch (and some rhythm placements to tighten up the vocals) to select all variaudio in that part and use the function area on the inspector for variaudio to Flatten the audio there.
Follow that up by exiting the variaudio editing window back to the main edit area and bounce the vocal events per audio lane and save the song with the date and time in the title.
Have any of you found an improved way of doing this?
If I bounce without doing the prior flattening, I get lost work in the variaudio tuning work.
I wish there was a choose-able preference choice of getting bounce to do the flattening first as part of the bouncing command.
Perhaps a macro needs to be created, if possible. Has anyone done this?
In the above scenario with a 90 minute long continuous audio recorded show, is actually a better strategy to cut up the show into single songs with dialog prior to each song included with song (since they tend to introduce the song).
And create a new Cubase project per song?
keeping the mixing template the same in order to keep the consistency of the total mix levels.
I guess if I did that approach, I’d have to get a good mix (ignore the vocal intonation and grouped vocal timings for now) put in needed plug ins and when happy save that mix setup. Make a great marker track, then export Cubase 14 project per song to edit vocals per-song.
Perhaps export each song’s final mix to a new mix/mastering session as stems?
The more I think about it the more complicated I seem to make it. lol
I was wondering if any professionals out there have done this a lot and come up with a more efficient strategy??
Thanks for you consideration and thoughts on this. As a senior citizen mixing in the box since the Atari days I don’t get to mix like this that often (sometimes months between projects, then suddenly I’m here with a large task at hand).
My earlier days were more writing with midi, audio, samples, virtual orchestras, etc.
Now a big multitrack audio by real people is fun, but fixing is necessary and time consuming. lol
best,
el professor