getting there.

i'm going to try a different approach in the mix. i spent years and years working in cool edit. not audition. and not the multitrack version. just basic, audacity style cool edit. what i'd do is i'd just paste tracks on top of each other. it's a subtle difference in algorithm between "mixing" and "synthesizing". it's this production trick that makes some of my ambient pieces sound so thick and lush through a set of good headphones.

the reality is just that it was a function of what i had available. i couldn't run multitrack software well with the hardware i had, and my four-track tape recorder was just too noisy for me. so, if i wanted 8 or 16 or more tracks, that was the only way to really do it.

when i finally pried myself away from this and forced myself to figure out a modern recording interface, i kind of lost the open intuition of the wave editor. when you use the recording studio as a creative tool, the linear nature of recording into a wave editor v building tracks up in the normal way affects the construction process. there's this absolute free reign in overdubs, because you're zooming in to a specific time coordinate and pasting it over, rather than dealing with this structure broken into bars and notes. and, if an idea extends beyond it's bounds, the bounds merely extend the idea; that's how six minute tracks became half hour ones.

i'll probably never break with that entirely. if you listen to the segues in the first movement of the proverbs symphony, you can hear that they're cut up and fucked with. i'm likely to get more freaky with this, not less freaky with it.

the drawback of working in linear editors is that it's mostly destructive, in the sense that it's difficult to go back to a previous point in time unless you take very close notes and are sort of neurotic about putting everything aside, incrementally. that's the reason i forced myself to get out of it.

so, i don't really want to go back to that, but i do want to implement some open editing strategies into the standard multitrack recording approach. all the time i spent listening to the old stuff over the last few months has me remembering how useful it can be in getting certain raw sounds and effects across.

so, i'm going to start taking some of the sounds out, warping them in editors, and pasting them back in where they were. that will allow me to utilize some of those synthesis techniques without losing the flexibility of cubase.

i just hope it actually sounds the way i expect it to. if not, the good old wave editor could get a bit of a return to heavier and more central usage.

that being said, i'm not dealing with 8s or 16s or even 32s anymore. i just passed 70 tracks. it'll be over 100 when i'm done, i'm sure. that's on a piece under ten minutes and is about average over the last little while.

and it's not hard to understand why it takes so long, when i explain it like that i guess. that's not five people doing 100 tracks in parallel, it's one person slowly building up 100 tracks over ten minutes. and, in a longer piece of 20-30 minutes, that's pushing more like 300.

the older editor-based stuff would rarely get over 100 tracks on a half hour piece, although i'd bet a few got close to it. i had real limitations on hard drive space. remember when 20 gb was a big hard drive? it didn't seem so big, not even then. but, now there's really no limits...and i'm not about to impose artificial ones.