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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[Mark Richards]

@mnkorte, Welcome to the forum. Looks like you've put a lot of effort/thought into planning your board setup.

Re the internal reverb, I'd just bounce the 100% wet signal to a separate track (or tracks) and EQ the wet track. How to do that, and other ways to be creative without needing to go outside the portastudio environment are available in the "Production Tips" sticky thread at the top of this forum.

You'll also find some interesting and creative production ideas in the "Rock and Roll/Recording 101" section of this site and the two sticky threads there (Mixing and Mastering).

When you have a finished product, be sure to share it in the "Song Writers and Engineers/Song Mixes: Tracks for review and critique" area of this site.

Have lots of fun using your ears instead of your eyes.