Technique Tips and Tricks: Bouncing Audio

[Artimeus]

Good day all. Today, I shall share with you a nifty trick you should consider using in your future productions, if you have not already done so.

Now, some of you may be wondering, what is 'bouncing'? Perhaps you have heard the term in a tutorial, or from another musician. Simply put, bouncing a track to audio is the process of converting a MIDI loop, drum pattern, or other track into a separate audio file, with some or all effects on a track's bus being recorded with it. Think of it as saving your sound into a .WAV file (or format of your choice) rather than being rendered in real time within your DAW. This is very similar to the process of 'sampling'. I have come to learn that it is very, very common practice in the audio engineering world, both among professionals and amateurs alike.

So, what are the advantages of doing this?

For one, you save yourself quite a bit of CPU power and RAM, especially for resource-intensive synthesizers and the various plugins you are using to effect that instrument. This will come in handy if you are rendering a project with an older computer, or a project with dozens of synths and effects running at the same time. You also remove the possibility of underruns and excessive delay, which can also occur on less than optimal systems.

Another advantage is ability to edit your audio more precisely. For example, those of you who use Pro Tools will know that you can edit the waveform of a sound to remove distortion by hand without having to deal with oddles of patches or effect parameters. You can fade in, fade out, and crossfade individual loops and samples, or remove an unwanted tail end of some delay or reverb effect. This is very handy when mixing and mastering, or even live DJing while triggering audio!

Yet another advantage is the fact that you've saved your riff, melody or drum loop for future use! You can put all of these files in an archive of sorts, or even create your own loop and sample pack to share with the world. Not to mention you remove the possibility of any quirks or errors or other crazy things that software sometimes throws into your proverbial mix.

That's all I have for today; I look forward to sharing more tips and tricks as I discover them!

[Raddons]

Are you supposed to bounce everything at the same level and mix it louder/quieter in a separate project?

[Artimeus]

Are you supposed to bounce everything at the same level and mix it louder/quieter in a separate project?

In some instances, yes. I believe it's up to personal tastes and needs; I typically mix everything at the same level if I intend to bounce it, and then mix them in a separate project. I do like to normalize them beforehand though, unless I decide to use 32-bit floating point .WAV, at which point it doesn't matter what level I had set during the bounce, as I know have unlimited headroom (it'll still clip if it's mixed in too loud, but the audio saved in the actual file does not clip).

[digital_brony]

The problem is that you can't change it later. I often end up editing things close to the end, so this won't work for me.

That's why some DAWs let you freeze tracks (Logic and Garageband for example). You can unfreeze and edit them later. This is very useful. In fact, does FL have this feature?

[Artimeus]

The problem is that you can't change it later. I often end up editing things close to the end, so this won't work for me.

That's why some DAWs let you freeze tracks (Logic and Garageband for example). You can unfreeze and edit them later. This is very useful. In fact, does FL have this feature?

FL does indeed have a way to freeze a track, but there is no one-button solution to do this, like a background render in Ableton Live.

The workaround that I have found would be to simply route the instrument to a blank mixer track and render the audio files without any mixer effects or level/pan adjustments. Then, route the audio files to the mixer track that the instrument was originally linked to. This will freeze the instrument plugin, but the automation and effects settings will remain intact and tweakable. I think there are other ways to do it, but I haven't looked into it as of yet.

It is true that you cannot change the sound you have rendered later, but some people prefer that. For example, you just recorded a live guitar session or an awesome vocal take, and you want to ensure you save that file as is, unmodified. Or, once you have nailed down a MIDI riff you played on your controller, without quantization to give it a 'human' feel.