When it comes to audio recording, the first thing you have to do is to add some audio tracks in your project. Correct! That’s where some problems begin! What do I want to say by that? As you already know your DAW gives you the option to choose what kind of audio track you want to add to ypur project for your audio recording. There are two types of audio tracks ,mono and stereo. And here is the issue ,that sometimes we don’t what type of track we should use. This may seems like a detail to you , but as you know if you have good recordings, you have better mixes.
Let’s say ,for example you want to record an electric guitar straight to your audio interface using only a cable jack ¼ .So ,this guitar must be recorded in mono and not stereo . I have seen it and the reason why they recorded stereo? Because they wanted to add more width to the guitar. That’s wrong my friend. Another example: you want to record an acoustic guitar with only one microphone,a large condenser microphone! What does that mean? That you’re going to record in mono. You are using only one microphone. Does that make sense to you? So,whenever we want to record an acoustic instrument, percussion, vocals we use mono audio tracks.
There are some exceptions on this rule and this happens ,when we want to record an acoustic guitar,for example, stereo,using two microphones. We’ll talk about it in another blog post and reference video.
When do we use stereo audio track? This is when we record a pad from a keyboard or a string ensemble.We also record in stereo the overheads of a drum kit and the cymbals.All the other parts are recorded in mono. Kick, snare, hi hats, toms always in mono. You will have better results in your mix later.
Now let’s see the group channels or tracks. In case you don’t know them ,or you do know them but you never used them before,I suggest you should reconsider.
The group track works as a group channel for instruments of the same team.What do I mean by that? I have recorded in my project 4-5 guitar tracks.These tracks can be “connected”,they can be routed to a group channel,and from this track we can manage this entire group of instruments.We can edit each instrument individually ,but we can also edit the whole group from the group channel . If we have balanced and mixed the guitars but we have to turn the volume down ,we can do this from the group channel. How can we link an instrument to a group track? Very simple! We add some group channels to our project. To the mixer of your DAW you route the output of this instrument to the specific group channel instead of the master output. You can rename the group channels ,so you can have better view and control of your mix template later.
I will post a reference video in the near future according this subject.
Please comment below and let me know if you use group channels and how do you use them.