Phil O wrote: ↑Sun Jul 02, 2023 11:57 am
Personally I don't see the advantage to tracking vocals with compression. It made sense in the old days with dynamic range issues, but now with 24 bit conversion I prefer to record the unaltered raw vocal and do all processing in post.
With DP, patching in outboard stuff is a piece of cake and you can change your mind at any time. I know, I know, the whole "commit" argument, but why commit when you can have the best of both worlds. Plenty of headroom to go around these days! YMMV.
Your friendly neighborhood Phil
Yeah... interesting viewpoint and there are always different schools of thought on that. I may experiment with doing it both ways and see what I like the best. I get the impression sometimes the hardware insert functionality in DP is a bit wonky and I've had inconsistent results with it. One reason I might do it that way is just for perhaps a bit more inspiration and hearing it sound a bit more polished in headphones during tracking... similar to why I pipe in "confidence reverb/delay." Granted, the latter is not being committed to the track. No sure if I could do something similar with outboard compressors? Maybe? Of course, another reason is just to impart some of the character/warmth of analog outboard, but yes you can also do that after the fact.
Again, that *may* be the way I choose to use it after some experimentation. Back to subject of insert functionality... I think I did one experiment when I first got my WA-2A and rather than use MOTU's hardware insert plugin, I chose to send (mono) track to a specific analog
output on my 828es and then manually patch with patch cables through the effects I wanted and then patch it back into an analog
input on the 828es and recording it to a new track. I wish I could remember why, but that seemed to work better for me that using a hardware insert plugin and freezing.
Speaking of freezing... in one of the videos I posted earlier in the thread, there's a very cool feature in Pro Tools that I wish DP had that lets you freeze or commit (not sure of the difference) a track
up to a particular insert. Say for example you have 4 plugins on a track. You can right-click on the 2nd insert and choose to freeze/commit and it renders audio incorporating just the first two-plug ins... leaving you flexibility to further adjust the two after that. Here's the video cued up to that point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVzixCbtR14&t=264s
You can see in the menu it shows "Freeze up to this insert" and "Commit up to this insert." Be very cool if DP had this.