James Lee Stanley

Had an interesting problem in a session the other day.   I am using a wonderful program called Reaper (www.cockos.com) that my pal, Kenny Lyon turned me on to.   It’s been great and completely bug free.

In any event, after recording for ten hours, we went to make mixes (all within the computer).   The process is called rendering in Reaper, but it is simply the mix down, that we all know.

We listened and decided that everything was right.  We did the mix down.

Then as is my habit, we listened to the entire stereo mix down tracks and discovered that the vocal was so loud you could barely hear the track.  

Every other track was performing exactly as I had mixed it, but the lead vocal track was simply ignoring everything I had programmed it to do.

I went back to the multitrack and listened.  Everything was fine.   Then I tried mixing down again and had the same effect.   Then I foolishly began to try to second guess what the outcome would be by making the vocal too low for playback in the multitrack format, in the hopes that it would be fine in the mixdown.   A waste of time.

After fuming inside and being calm on the outside for about thirty more minutes of trying whatever else I could think of, I came up with the solution.

I took all the data that was on that track and then printed all the effects that were being applied to that track.   Then with this new track with printed effects, I moved it to a new blank track and muted the original problem track.    It worked like a charm.

And I realized that I had circumnavigated the problem by asking my favorite question:   What do I want to have happen here?

Rather than wrestle with the program and keep everyone waiting, I simply figured out another way to make it do what I wanted in the minimum of time.

Don’t fight the programs.  Just because they say they are supposed to do a certain function in a certain way does not mean that there aren’t other ways of doing it.

Just remember the question, what do I want to have happen here?   And whatever it takes to make that happen, is the solution.

Don’t get mad because the program isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do.  It’s a computer program.  Don’t fight the program.  Make it work for you.