Here’s a song I’d like to start with!
I get it, I only have eight tracks to work with. Let me try and lay this out for you guys:
I want the beginnings and endings of songs to ebb and flow more. So that tom part that’s happening? I maybe want to hear that tom part looping over and over again for the beginning, and I play with sounds and whatever while that’s going on. Maybe the guitar, too. So does this mean I should take a, say, two-bar chunk of the tom/guitar and tell it to loop? Or should I bounce down the whole tom part as a stem, but then just tell the first two bars to loop that way via the Octatrack?
Since I have no intention of elongating any verses or choruses, do you think it’s in my best interest to just stem out the tracks from front to finish? Not even bother with arranger/song mode or anything like that?
As for stemming out things, should I just group things into buses that make sense to me (I’m using Studio One) and then bounce out the buses? I’m thinking this:
Guitar
Tom
Backing vocals
Strings
Bass stuff (low piano, bass clarinet)
Flutes/String Synth
Cymbal/Clap
Birds
Okay…So now here’s my big issue: Other than the beginning/end of songs that I want to extend, I basically want everything to just play all the way through all at once without me having to turn them on/off–but I still want some sort of control over these individual elements I’ve laid out (i.e. mix, effects, general sound design via octatrack). Maybe this is where song mode comes in? I tell song mode to play and it just does a one shot trig of all of these samples at once? So let’s say hypothetically I have a stem of a string part that doesn’t come in until bar 9, I would still want it 100% synced up so that it does in fact come in on bar 9 with the rest of the song, and then goes away, and then comes back in on bar 17 or whatever. Makes sense?
I’m worried about things staying in time, but I assume I should just put the BPM of the project into every file name, right?
I have a feeling this is one of things I can only figure out by myself from experimenting a bit but I’d like your guys opinions. Thanks dudes!