ABSTRACT
My favored way of doing this is to prepare a set of unprocessed raw audio files, one for each track in your arrangement, much as you’d do if you were having your music mixed by someone else. Make sure to bounce down the output of any live-running MIDI instruments as audio too. This reduces CPU load (allowing you more power for mix plug-ins), discourages endless tinkering with synth settings during mixing (although you can still rebounce an altered version of the part later if you really need to), and also avoids an insidious problem with some MIDI instruments where they respond slightly differently with every play-through-there are more than enough mind games to deal with at mixdown without this kind of thing going on. “I never run anything live, from a sequencer,” affirms Tom Lord-Alge. “I don’t want to have to worry about synchronization or issues of sound level.”10 Splitting out the individual sounds from virtual drum instruments and multitimbral samplers is a good idea too, because it gives you maximum mixing flexibility.
