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The
Making Of An Album
Page 9
- Final Mixing and Mixdown -
by Michael Tyler
Computer Music Products
There were two main tasks left to be done before creating ("burning") the first audio CD. First, I had to make final adjustments of the volume levels between the MIDI and audio tracks (mixing). Second, I had to convert all the MIDI tracks to digital audio (creating a WAV file) so I could make final level adjustments from song to song (mastering mixdown).
The final mixing was very straightforward. I simply listened to each song again, making volume adjustments here and there to assure a good balance between the vocals and instruments. Most of the balance adjustments had already been made up to this point, so this step went rather quickly.
Next, I had to convert the MIDI tracks to a single pair of stereo audio tracks before I could proceed with the mastering mixdown. The way I did it for each song was to mute all the existing audio tracks, leaving only the MIDI tracks playable. Then, I armed two blank tracks for Left and Right stereo audio recording. Next, I routed the Left and Right audio outputs from the Mackie mixer directly into the Left and Right inputs of the AudioWerk 8 card. (As you may recall, I didn't use this card for recording the vocals, however, it worked just fine for re-recording the MIDI tracks as digital audio.) This gave a direct connection from my two Roland MIDI sound modules into the AudioWerk. Then it was simply a matter of starting the MIDI playback in Cakewalk, while recording the MIDI tracks as digital audio. Once this was done for each song, I deleted all the original MIDI tracks, leaving me with all the vocals and instrumentals as strictly pure digital audio. Of course, I resaved each song in another directory, keeping the originals intact!
At this point, I combined the vocal tracks into one stereo pair of tracks, and the instrumental tracks into another pair of stereo tracks. I now had 4 tracks of audio for each song -a stereo pair each for vocals and instruments. This gave me one final opportunity to make any last minute balance adjustments between vocals and instrumentals (turned out I didn't need to). I then used Cakewalk's "Export Audio To Wave" feature to make a single stereo WAV file for each of the ten songs. I saved these WAV files in a directory I called "DONE".
Next Page (pg. 10) Burning The Audio CD
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