Total Recall / Scene Settings?

Ideas & suggestions
1

i don’t know if anyone else would find this useful, but one of the things i get a bit OCB about when mixing digitally is messing with something that sounds great to me as it is, and not really wanting to lose what i’ve got

so often, if i’ve got a drum track all set up with levels, routings, plug-in settings, and i want to try something a bit different, i’ll save a copy and branch off, work on that for a bit, usually load the old version up at some point and decide it was better

so how about being able to save a scene as it is (all track levels, send levels, plug-in and ideally third-party plug-in settings) - maybe somewhere in mixer view: 1 2 3 4 5 6 (right-click save, left-click recall) - and be able to go crazy rearranging things, but know i can quickly cross-reference and get back to how things were before

you’d be able to save a number of alternate mixes within a track - would make comparing different mixdowns really easy - and there’d maybe also be scope for automatable scene changes -> morphing from one scene to another smoothely, perhaps as a tracker effect (might be a bit messy, but something like SCXY : S = Scene change function; C = scene to change to; XY = speed (0 instant to FF 255 measures))

so, say you had a clean vocal section where the music faded out; rather than automating loads of parameters seperately, you could get the mix right for the main body of the tune, then change things, even master bus compression and reverb levels, EQ settings, and get that right for the vocal section; slide into that mix with an S205 (or something), then slide back when the instruments want to come back in with an S105… or for more experimental music, you might want to program all sorts of crazy scene changes, going from punchy, bright drums, to distorted, nightmare drums, to filtered, reverbed drums… switching and morphing between them; could introduce a new element to tracker programming

basically, just like on a big mixing desk! (now’s usually the time when i find out this feature’s been right under my nose all along)

2

sounds interesting, especially the morphing part…

though what happens when different scenes contain different plugins? (for example: you’ve added some reverb plugs in a certain channel in scene 2 while scene 1 was already saved). Maybe you’ve also loaded extra samples/vsti…will every time you change scenes, these additions be loaded/unloaded…then you could just maintain your current system of loading different song versions.

Then maybe some ‘last loaded’ song list, in the file tab, would be enough for switching through the versions.

I agree though that some kind of global vst parameters/mixer settings callback(?) would be nice to have. Right now you have to instantiate gazillion parameters in each plug in the automation editor to make sure the sound won’t change after a stoned tracking session.

3

If you’re totally happy with a certain sound, why not record as sample?
You won’t need the dsp chain and you have all the freedom to explore
further, without losing what you already have. Well, it works for me!

4

I like saving things as samples sometimes, but if it’s something really intricate, like a load of drum tracks all routed to a Send with a load more settings, especially you might want things bussed with other things and sent through compressors or saturators to gel things together, you might want to keep control over individual elements

Right now I’ve got this crazy drums setup, which splits a break up and sends it all over the place to different Sends and recombines it with a chain of compressors and distortion plug-ins… But I want to run two breakbeats through it; with one break it needs a load of low-end cut out of the snare channel, with the other, it doesn’t… So right now I’m manually switching plug-ins on and off, while I’m still mixing the rest of the track and need control over individual levels.

I could give the other break, or just the snare, its own channel(/s) with most of the settings and plug-ins copied across manually, and that would be one solution, but what I’m doing at the moment’s already quite messy, and I might want to bring in a third or fourth break, so it would definetly be tidier for me to save this Scene and just move on, keep things tidy with 1 snare channel, 1 bass drum channel, etc.

Plus, you might mix a whole tune two different ways, and not be able to choose which one you prefer; you could actually set up a slow Scene change to hear it morph from one mix to another, and find somewhere in the middle where it sounds perfect

If you stopped at THAT point, you could just right-click on Scene 3 and store a hybrid mix… but basically I just love the idea of morphing between breakbeats and basslines and things, with a hundred plug-in settings all morphing fluidly… (actually, makes me think you might need some kind of control rate/interpolation setting - I assume moving literally 100 plug-in/mixer parameters at once could take a chunk out of the CPU)

I was thinking if you delete a plug-in, it’s just gone; if you add one after storing (say) Scene 1, it’ll just retain its current settings unless the Scene you’re switching to has specifically different settings stored for it already

So I suppose you’ve got your 6 Scenes saved, you add a plug-in Limiter to the master bus, and changing Scenes will simply leave it unaffected because there’s no data stored for it to do anything different… You delete a plug-ins stored in Scene 1, and its settings are lost… You want it to do something different with the Master bus Limiter only on Scene 2; you’d have to recall and resave each Scene with it as it is, then recall Scene 2, alter the limiter settings, then resave… I think it would be very intuitive

5

To much hash to get your explanation here lol, no sounds logical.

…but besides looking like a practical workflow enhancement, this also looks a little tricky to me.
Could be a compositional trap , more versions to choose from, when will it finish aaaarrggh :wink: