Singer/Songwriter Sessions

[mnkorte]

Hi all.

Long time Tascam user and first time poster here. I had a PD-24SD back in 2015 and it never really got a love of love, so I sold it. I regretted it for a long time and finally broke down and picked a Tascam DP-24 (midi) this month. As a DBA and system admin, I am really looking forward to taking my eyes off a computer in my spare time and get back to making music with my ears.

I have 4-5 acoustic singer/songwriter tunes I am looking to record, but I really want to plan out the process this time around and use more of a "Pro mix" mentality that I would typically do when working in a DAW. The songs will be fairly sparse: light drums with brushes, a few guitars and vocals. Here is my plan so far:

Tracks

1: Kick​

2: Overhead L
3: Overhead R
4: Bass
5: Guitar L
6: Guitar R
7: Guitar solo
8: Vox Lead
9: Vox harm low
10: Vox harm high
11: Piano (on some tunes)
12: Misc
13-14: Rhythm Bus (drums/bass)
15-16: Guitar Bus
17-18: Vox Bus
19-20: Misc Bus
21-22: - open -
23-24: reference track for mixing (Stripping Cane by Jeffery Foucault or something similar)

Tracking:​

External pres (Tascam M35 mixer), EQ and light compression on the way in. Get all tracks sounding as good as possible on the way in before mixing.

Mixing:​

External reverb: I would really like to use the internal reverb, but I like to roll off lows on my reverb buss (anything under 225-250hz) when working in a DAW and I haven’t found good way to do this without setting all of the sends to pre, dropping the faders and bouncing to a stereo bus. Then bringing the faders back up. Repeat each time I want to change the reverb. If you guys know of a better way let me know!

Delay (optional): a little slapback on the vocals using internal effects and setting the ms to match tempo. Something like 1/32 or 1/16 depending on the tune. Since I am doing sparse tracks, I might leave the delay out altogether and just have room reverb.

Buses: Once I finish the overall mix, my plan is to send each group of tracks to a stereo bus by going out of the Tascam hitting a compressor and then coming back in to glue each group together. I will do this for all groups to avoid the DAC latency. Doing four passes of this seems like it will be a bit time consuming, but I won’t really know until I dive in.

The caveat here is if I use an external reverb, the external sends will already be in use and will need a bounce to a stereo track before sending to a compressor to print the reverb. Is it worth it?

Final Mixdown:​

Bring all faders down except the Busses and record the final mixdown.

I might automate the mix by capturing the MMC code in Reaper so I can save my movements for later recall. I have done this a bit in Multitrack mode and it works great, but never in Mixdown mode so not sure if that's an option. Either way, its only four buses, so not a big deal if I forego this.

Mastering​

I may “cheat” and bring these into the DAW at this point. The goal is to have a cohesive sound on all songs. The 2 bus will likely have plugins like EQ, SSL bus compressor and some gentle tape saturation.

Has anyone tried mixing to busses like this in the DP-24/32? I would love to see how all of you have tackled this and if the juice is worth the squeeze I see lots of bounces in my future lol.

Thanks for reading this long post!

Marc
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