the absolute best tonal combination possible would have to be chamber music for cracked out tuba and fuzz box cello.

*filed away for the future.

with guitar, of course. that goes without saying...

so, it turns out turning the latency down corrects the problem between the render and the playback on the device. this only makes sense if the render is occurring at a lower latency level than the playback. what it means is that i was rendering without full use of the plugins. but, oddly, the plugins sound better that way on playback, too. i'm kind of left to conclude that the plugins must have been engineered to work at a lower latency level, and the logic i was using (more cpu power = better quality plugins) is not correct. rather, i seem to have been sort of overloading them, asking them to calculate more accurately than they were meant to and getting a weird result out of it.

realizing this makes the process a lot easier, although i'm going to have to deal with the odd crackle and pop when i'm mixing that will go away on the render.

well, i just passed 100 tracks for this song, which isn't even seven minutes long, yet. yet because i'm going to add a little section to the end that'll take it past 7, and plausibly take the track count past 150.

so, you can imagine mixing it is time consuming. there's still a ton to do, but getting past 100 components is a good place to pause and post a temp mix, so there'll be something up before bed time.

fwiw, the vast majority is guitars, but there's also what is becoming close to a full orchestra notated out along side them all.