How many tracks?

Freebird

andy_k said:

There are plenty of multi-track stems floating around, stuff from Rockband and other games. usually they are between 5 and 12 tracks, some of them are real and some are re done for the games.
It is a revelation to hear the Van Halen ones, 5 stereo tracks that individually sound quite messy, but when summed-they work fantastic.
I realise, these are stems-ie, the drums are all on one stereo track, but you can hear the bleed of the guitar.
In both the guitar and bass tracks you can hear the drum bleed, basic track was recorded live.
Guitar is usually 2 tracks panned hard left and right-main in one side and reverb in other.
Solos, if overdubbed, are punched in  and sometimes on the vocal track.
I know these have been mixed to work inside the game, and do not necessarily relate to real recordings, but they give a good idea as to how a well structured song can work with a minimum track count.
If you look really hard, you can find stems from original Led Zep recordings-which are either 8-16-or 24 tracks, and there is even the complete Chinese Democracy album, in stem form out there. 
It is all good fun.

I've got a few of these, the stems are sub-mixed. They are useful for analysis to see how they put the songs together, especially when you solo different parts of the mix.

guitarfishbay

You can get full multi tracks to a lot of songs these days.

I think this is incredible personally. I like the song too, whether or not you like it is personal taste but the arrangement and production are just amazing.

Multitrack walkthrough 

https://youtu.be/00h6Sdbcg7Q

Mixed song

https://youtu.be/5Oc0ja19_GU

Danny1969

One easy way to get a huge amount of multitracks is to download the MOGG files used in Guitar Hero and Rockband. You can open this in Audacity and solo individual tracks ...  and export as Wav if you want to use them in your normal DAW

Sometimes when I've seen huge sessions it's been because whoever was doing the session was using more tracks for takes rather than using the playlist and expecting the mixer to choose one .. .so 7 tracks of the same guitar solo for example. I've never done a song myself over 60 tracks but a another guy in the studio was working on a 96 track project once using PT9 native on our ancient 2006 Mac pro and I've loaded up HD sessions from the US with 90 odd tracks 

I don't know whether more tracks is a good thing of not but personally I think the best sounding records are older ones done meticulously well on tape .... stuff like the Wall, Crowded House, Bowie, there's a sense of 3D depth and roundness I don't hear on digital, even though I know digital is technically better.

Freebird

Danny1969 said:

One easy way to get a huge amount of multitracks is to download the MOGG files used in Guitar Hero and Rockband. You can open this in Audacity and solo individual tracks ...  and export as Wav if you want to use them in your normal DAW

Reaper does this automatically. If you drag a MOGG file into an empty project, it will automatically split them into separate tracks.

Danny1969

Freebird said:

Danny1969 said:

One easy way to get a huge amount of multitracks is to download the MOGG files used in Guitar Hero and Rockband. You can open this in Audacity and solo individual tracks ...  and export as Wav if you want to use them in your normal DAW

Reaper does this automatically. If you drag a MOGG file into an empty project, it will automatically split them into separate tracks.

That's good to know, originally Audacity was the only thing that would open them 10 years ago

Cirrus

octatonic said:

I come from a time when a mix was a performance, done by the engineer, producer, tea boy and most of the band- all hands on faders.
One wrong move and you have to do it all over again.
I don't miss those days.

And then you get producers like Daniel Lanois, who seem to positively revel in the performance aspect of an "all hands on deck" live mix - to the point that his live shows the last few years have basically been a racked studio rig, with him mixing and sampling in real time.

Emotionally I'm quite drawn to that method, because I do think that once manning a console becomes second nature, there's a flow to a live mix that seems to result in a shorter path between your creative/ emotional side, and the resulting mixed track.

When you can make any change you want and save it as an alternative mix, it seems to remove recklessness and serendipity from the process and make it a much more "left brain" endeavour. I constantly fight my inclination to think about the sound instead of just listening and reacting to it.

I mean, don't get me wrong. I mix in a DAW same as everyone else. It's just, the times I have had a console to work at... things happen quicker.

PolarityMan

I'm pretty sure the guitar hero stuff is it 5 tracks because that's how many they use in the game..they will likely be submixes....vintage stuff possibly not withstanding

Freebird

PolarityMan said:

I'm pretty sure the guitar hero stuff is it 5 tracks because that's how many they use in the game..they will likely be submixes....vintage stuff possibly not withstanding

They are also split right & left.

Danny1969

PolarityMan said:

I'm pretty sure the guitar hero stuff is it 5 tracks because that's how many they use in the game..they will likely be submixes....vintage stuff possibly not withstanding

Most are  2 x overs, kick, snare, bass, guitar stem , Keys stem, vocals stem, Effects and EQ are printed.  I have a huge collection of them. I learnt a lot listening through them and it changed the way I mixed reverb and delay on vocals ... 

PolarityMan

Danny1969 said:

PolarityMan said:

I'm pretty sure the guitar hero stuff is it 5 tracks because that's how many they use in the game..they will likely be submixes....vintage stuff possibly not withstanding

Most are  2 x overs, kick, snare, bass, guitar stem , Keys stem, vocals stem, Effects and EQ are printed.  I have a huge collection of them. I learnt a lot listening through them and it changed the way I mixed reverb and delay on vocals ... 

I can relate. I listened to a bunch of the pearl jam and alice in chains ones and totally changed my approach to delay too. Surprising how loud the slapback is on some of those tracks.

Also ...those vocal performances!

Stuckfast

octatonic said:

What all this technology shows us is it is easier to make a nicer sounding 'thing' but just as hard to write a good song.
When people say 'music was better in the old days' they are almost always talking about the songwriting.
That is a completely different argument.

There is no defensible position that says that production quality has gone down since, say, the sixties.
What is certainly easier is to now make bad music sound pretty.

Many years ago I was lucky enough to visit the home of Tim de Paravicini, who designs incredibly high end valve-based studio and hi-fi kit. He was playing records on his own prototype system, which is the best-sounding setup I've ever heard.

On a system that good, the records that really held up were the ones that were simply recorded using a handful of mics and tracks. Modern productions with millions of overdubs just sounded like a mess.

thegummy

andy_k said:

There are plenty of multi-track stems floating around, stuff from Rockband and other games. usually they are between 5 and 12 tracks, some of them are real and some are re done for the games.
It is a revelation to hear the Van Halen ones, 5 stereo tracks that individually sound quite messy, but when summed-they work fantastic.
I realise, these are stems-ie, the drums are all on one stereo track, but you can hear the bleed of the guitar.
In both the guitar and bass tracks you can hear the drum bleed, basic track was recorded live.
Guitar is usually 2 tracks panned hard left and right-main in one side and reverb in other.
Solos, if overdubbed, are punched in  and sometimes on the vocal track.
I know these have been mixed to work inside the game, and do not necessarily relate to real recordings, but they give a good idea as to how a well structured song can work with a minimum track count.
If you look really hard, you can find stems from original Led Zep recordings-which are either 8-16-or 24 tracks, and there is even the complete Chinese Democracy album, in stem form out there. 
It is all good fun.

Love these things so much. I sit for hours listening to as many as I can find in order to study the arrangements of different records. I do the same with normal music but sometimes there are background parts that are barely audible in the mix but can be heard perfectly when the drums are muted etc.

Only thing I find annoying about them is that, say there is rhythm guitar all through the song then a solo comes in on top - the game stems will have the main guitar track suddenly change to the solo and it will move the rhythm part to a new track. It would make more sense to have the rhythm part all the way through on one part and the solo on another track. That way it's obvious that the guitar part doesn't suddenly change, it's a extra guitar part comes in on top.

Something I've found very interesting is that some songs do stop the rhythm guitar when the guitar solo plays (a la a power trio with one guitarist) while others have both at the same time, either over dubbed or a band with 2 guitar players. And to me, both sound great in their own way. The former lets the solo be heard more clearly and the lovely minimal sound of solo guitar and bass whereas the latter has more harmonic complexity.

Freebird

thegummy said:
Love these things so much. I sit for hours listening to as many as I can find in order to study the arrangements of different records. I do the same with normal music but sometimes there are background parts that are barely audible in the mix but can be heard perfectly when the drums are muted etc.

It's probably a good time to give this fella a plug..

soundcloud.com/theklossessions/tracks

The Bruce Springsteen one is good, wonderful guitars, and those vocals!

p90fool

A good friend of mine mixed this last summer and it was over a hundred tracks. I was fixing his motorcycle in his garden while he was doing it and there was a fair bit of exasperated communication between the US and mid Wales as to which were to be used and where. 

IMC1980

p90fool said:

A good friend of mine mixed this last summer and it was over a hundred tracks. I was fixing his motorcycle in his garden while he was doing it and there was a fair bit of exasperated communication between the US and mid Wales as to which were to be used and where. 

How many guitar layers were there? It doesn't sound very "dense"....

p90fool

@IMC1980 no there weren't in the end, but it involved a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. 

Tchad is pretty well known for bold, upfront mixes with nowhere to hide rather than dense layering, it would seem odd to hire him then override his tastes, though I think there are other tracks on the album with a lot of keyboard and guitar layers. 

andy_k

that particular track does sound a bit overproduced to my ears (other ears might hear different)
but considering their previous stuff was done ( and is highly regarded ) by CLA, there was something to live up to.
I have seen a few things with CLA, and he condenses mixes down to 48 tracks for his desk, it makes perfect sense, and then he gets his sound through a lot of tried and tested analogue outboard gear.
Just the vocals on that track have had a lot of attention to get the '50s' sound of a single overdriven valve mic, without the bleed from a single mic recording.
there was a good thing on the beeb the other night--the american sessions--i think it was called , with Jack White recording groups in a studio, one mic, direct to vinyl----which made it all look so easy, there was obviously some other sound recording done there-I'm not sure we heard the ACTUAL recording, but there was a lot of variety captured via a few versions of a single microphone.
if it sounds good, it is good, but that is always going to be personal.
more tracks does not guarantee anything--except more work, so therefore, if there is a budget-it will be used.
We dont have a standard for listening, so how can we have a standard for recording?

paulmapp8306

I come from the opinion if you cant replicate it live with the band alone (no sequence tracks etc) then the recording is cheating.

How can a band with 1 keys player play a song with 20 synth parts.... how can one singer sing 4 harmony parts etc.

But I record and mix for fun an no other reason.

octatonic

paulmapp8306 said:

I come from the opinion if you cant replicate it live with the band alone (no sequence tracks etc) then the recording is cheating.

How can a band with 1 keys player play a song with 20 synth parts.... how can one singer sing 4 harmony parts etc.

But I record and mix for fun an no other reason.

What about multitracked guitars?
You could argue that anything other than a single microphone and a single take is somehow cheating (although I don't agree with this).

I just think of them as tools you use to make art.

fields5069

Freebird said:

I keep on reading articles where producers manage to use 60 to 80 music tracks for a 3-minute song.

I think I might be doing something wrong 

I quite like the way Fine Young Cannibals used to do it. Record shitloads of tracks, then remove them one by one until such point that you have the minimum you need for the track to sound good

Probably reached it's zenith on I'm Not The Man I Used To Be, one of my favourite songs of the late 80s.