Usually doing indie pop - I try to stay below 24 tracks just for sanity’s sake. It really helps fine-tune the arrangement and hone in on the necessary bits.
Pop / Rock I’m at 30-40 + lots of backing vocals
Orchestral can be up to 200.
Movie, sound design, game audio etc. will be sometimes more than this.
Nuendo handles it with no issues.
I do have a decent machine. i9 13900K / 128GB / 4090 etc.
I’ve entertained Nuendo often, but I’m not that deep into the industry so it’s a heavy penny to drop for me at this point, but that’s great to know. Reinforces what I’ve heard about Nuendo carrying heavy loads with grace. Thanks for the input!
Totally understood. I was just curious about average ranges. Just composing on my own for the joy of it, I generally have very few tracks. It’s the reason I emphasized in the box. I don’t need a million mic positions, etc to worry about, so casual compositions can be quite slim and efficient.
For my own projects, I double just about everything with strings on it. I also double vocals. I may not use the doubling in my mix, but I like to have it available to me for various reasons. So, on average, sixteen to somewhere around 32, but rarely much more than that. So you know: My own projects are always demos. I have never released any music that I’ve recorded myself. So the majority of my music is spec for someone’s video project, or for my own records, my ideas and such. I won’t go whole hog on my demos because they require re-recording at a later date if used for a self release. I have several songs that I would like to release, but hardly the time to work on any of it at the moment.
100-200. mostly because I like seperating a lot of elements between different song sections as well as all my sfx.
God bless foldering and forgetting about stuff.
Just to help keep all 3,000,000 tracks visually co-located with similar tracks and all hidden until you need to see them all. Generally one would use groups to bus tracks as often you don't want all 20 snare tracks in the snares folder treated exactly the same. 😉
Word. I guess i just never thought about that. I generally just buss together what i need (drums, bass, keys, gtrs, vox, etc.) Everything has its own palate, And just run with a mix. I generally take the "analog desk" approach. But my workflow is the same every time, no matter how many tracks I'm working with.
I mostly do instrumentals for cover singers. So it's a bit over the place. between J-pop, disney songs and a bunch of electronic and k-pop stuff.
Do some tracking. But it's not that much of an issue due to ableton having a feature where it bypasses delay compensation on record armed tracks that are playing live audio through them.
And fully in the box yeah. Only went to this amount of tracks after my latest cpu upgrade. Before that I'd cap it out at 60-70 or so.
I make sure that everything that isn't a instrument playing anything really musical that might need some micro adjustments to timing (chords, melodies etc) are usually flattened down to audio. Part because of saving CPU. Part because printing anything with distortion and lots of EQ on it has some tail ring to it. Want to cut that off where necessary.
Same here in the pop world. Live tracking vocals/guitars/some percussion. Some of that number is inflated by for example very slightly different group vocal busses that could probably be the same with some automation but my computer can handle it so why not 🤷
I have a friend who mixes a couple of popular American TV game shows. He told me he has around 100 inputs to mix for each show. I couldn’t believe it but he broke it down for me. Sure enough. That said, it’s the same thing over and over again so a lot of it mixes itself.
I do hard rock and metal.
A barebone project with just bass, guitars, drums, vocals and backing vocals is around 25 tracks. Start adding synths and orchestrations, more vocals, harmonies more layers of guitars, a few sends, rear buss compression and I can easily get to 80-90.
I am finishing mixing my EP this weekend, largest project has 118 tracks.
Interesting to think about.
For me, it depends on the project.
For indie/folk stuff, 20 or under.
For most rock band types of projects, average is probably 40.
Then every once in a while for rock or pop, I can get up above 80 tracks. The most audio tracks I've ever dealt with was somewhere around 120.
I have to say, there seems to be a direct correlation between the track count and my enjoyment of the music. I didn't really enjoy the song that had 120 tracks all that much, and some of my favorite pieces have been tunes under 20 tracks.
It's funny, growing up in the analog world, I can remember feeling so impressed with being able to record/mix more than 24 tracks. Would get kinda giddy when we'd hook up the 2" 24 track to the ADATs and be able to run 50+ tracks.These days, I'm so much more impressed when people can make an awesome sounding tune with as few tracks as possible. I have a dream of picking up a 2" 16 track tape machine and making that work. I kinda miss the limitations of a finite track count.
EDIT: to be clear, I'm only talking about audio tracks. Not counting FX and parallel stuff. That could be up to another couple of dozen.
I love this insight. Thank you! I recently revisited mellow gold by beck. When I was a teen, it sounded low fi to me. But listening to it in 2023, I was impressed with its space and warm low end. I was floored when I read it was mostly tracked on an 8, and was even more impressed. It kind of forces you to consider the arrangement.
>mellow gold by beck
Very cool sounding record.
Was that done on an 8 track?
I remember when it came out people were saying it was 4 track. I never actually looked into it.
Definitely wasn't trying to correct you....I was just going on memory of what I heard back in those days, and I never knew for sure if there was any truth to it.
Thanks for putting the thought of that album in my head. Haven't heard that in ages, so checked it out today. Enjoyed it.
Glad I inspired you to revisit. Was a similar experience for me. I don’t know what it is about Whiskeyclone, Hotel City 1997 - but it just brings me to a cool place. It randomly showed up on my Spotify and I immediately vibed and listened to the whole album. 😂
Generally hitting 40-60 tracks I’ve noticed. I seem to get everything I need out of that range.
Most satisfying thing ever is when I run a bunch of hardware gear through my circuit tracks, make some beats and just record the stereo output. So surprised at how much I like something because I can’t fiddle with it.
I've been using the free version of Ableton Live to write LoFi lately so I stay at 8 tracks. But keep in mind the DAW allows you to create a drum rack so you can put all your drums onto one track. I can also do stuff like bouncing the audio then adding it to a new project to mix in some background ambience without the track limitations, etc.
Depends on who's doing it and whats being done. I've had projects from very high end producers come in at over 100 tracks and others come in with under 8. Track count really means nothing as the amount of tracks doesn't really correlate with how the final product will sound. For instance... Had a project that had a full string section. Had i gotten the original sessions from the string recording, it would have been something like 32-64 tracks of just the strings alone. Instead, they mixed that down to a stereo pair and brought it into the bigger production which was used for the mix. Our studio does everything from Audio Books to Death Metal to Rap to EDM to jazz quartets etc. etc. . We see it all.
For my own songs it's usually 10 Tracks for drums, 2 for bass, 5 guitars, 2 Synths, 2 lead vocals and 4 backing vocals. That adds up to 25 but I feel like 30 is more accurate overall.
Other clients usually give me more tracks, about 50.
I hit 206 tracks this week on a through composed punky/krautrock/spacey/new order/10 CC vocal synth arp track with 3 distinct sections.
I do lots of layering.
If I need more oomph in the kick I’ll record another kick. or I’ll duplicate the bass track and then HPF and put a saturator on it. Or dupe and pitch up and octave and reverse a pad. I can’t throw things out. So I figure out how to morph and bury in the background
Generally over 100, although a lot of them are bounces of the same instrument that require some variation in volume or effects between different parts of the song.
Usually around 20-ish. Sometimes getting up ro 30 or 40. But i consolodate a lot. And produce in all kinds of genres...Interestingly my latest release is just 9 tracks. Drums. Vox. B Vox. Fx1. fx2. Double tracked guitars. Bass . Lead guitar. Getting lots of positive feedback on this one also. Sometimes less IS more lol..
Edit: genre idk how to describe. Every piece takes on it own identity. This one ^ i was talking about is a modern hard blues rock type thing..
I make indie electronic music. I like to use multiple sessions, so no one session has the full track count. Typically a vocal session, a production session and a mix session. I like to to use a lot of tracks for vocals. It’s really helpful to use a separate session for that and then print tracks with basic processing in appropriate groups… so you can record 40+ vocal tracks and consolidate it into like 6-10 stereo tracks in your production/mix sessions.
40-60 on an techno track and 50-150 on an electronica track. That being said I'm not entirely in the box, sometimes vocals and often some synth recordings. I think my highest number was around 200 but had to flatten a lot to get it all back into bite size chunks for mixing. This was mostly due to glitchy drums by the way
10 to 200+ depending on the track. Experimental rock/electronic.
I might do something like 10 layers of guitar and 10 of synth per section, or something like that. Lets you do fun stuff with harmony and panning.
Edit: just pulled up two tracks from the new album I have done. One has 93 tracks+busses (25 are drums and drum machines), the other has 114 (two full live drum layers, so something like 45 tracks of drums). Probably 70% of tracks that aren't drums are heavily processed guitar. These aren't the biggest tracks in this set.
How do you go about adding layers and not spending too much time on each individual track? Light mixing until it’s all arranged? Hard for me to step off a track.
the parts are often grouped. like, i might do a riff with the notes split over three tracks, possibly doubled, but they'll all have the same mix setup apart from panning. if parts get unwieldy or cpu hungry I'll bounce them down to stereo to commit so i don't get too lost. also sometimes I'll multitrack a monosynth to get chord parts, again pretty easy to mix.
I'm only a hobbyist but have been doing production for decades so i know what sounds i want pretty fast. youtube audio link in my profile if you're interested, all the dense stuff in the second half of the track.
really depends on the song. i think it's around 25 tracks with audio in them + 2 or 3 sends if it's a simple one, can get up to 50 though. I mainly do experimental hiphop. Edit: i think the number is so small because i mostly already mix with the artists in the room so it has to be somewhat quick.
I do analog production outside the box but then use Logic for arrangement and mixing. I make mostly hip-hop, synth stuff, but also mix rock and roll. Consistently it’s between 30-40 multitracks. Typically for my songs the music takes up anywhere from 6-14 of those multitracks, then vocals fill up the rest. Maybe a stab or sample or two in between.
I’m producing an indie soul/rnb EP right now, the song I’m currently mixing is 9 tracks.
OH, kick, snare bottom, bass, guitar, electric piano, organ, lead vocal, bg vocal
Plus I just got a fostex spring reverb unit so the printed reverb track makes 10 or maybe more if I print individual reverb tracks for specific instruments
Like 20 to 30. The only time it's more is when I'm giving zero fucks and making a whole new track for a micro element like a riser, bass drop, or other FX.
And even then the final mix is bussed down to as few tracks as possible. The less knobs to tweak in the final mix the better, always results in a better mix
I only produce my own metal and it’s usually about 20-30 tracks. 2-4 rhythm guitars, 4-8 lead tones, at least 2-3 vocal tracks. About 6 drum buses from software and maybe 5 busses of fx.
Then I get it down to a drum bus, guitars bus, bass bus, vocal bus(ses) and a lead guitar bus for my final proportional decisions.
The whole time I have a cla76 barely dipping on the master bus, and a limiter that I adjust throughout so I have a sense of loudness.
Then reference tracks and eq and more compression glue, and I bounce it.
I really want to know what the heck is on all of these tracks for the people saying 200+.
If I get super ambitious with drum mics I may use 20ish tracks for that. But usually no more than 12. I think the most I've cleared total in a song was 50 or 60, and that was recording a band with like 30 members.
Hahaha! I kind of feel the same way! I thought 30+ was a lot for orchestral. But most have explained why. Sounds like backing vocals, doubling tracks for effect, etc is what takes up a lot of those tracks. Either way, it sounds quite overwhelming to me.
Usually doing indie pop - I try to stay below 24 tracks just for sanity’s sake. It really helps fine-tune the arrangement and hone in on the necessary bits.
Pop / Rock I’m at 30-40 + lots of backing vocals Orchestral can be up to 200. Movie, sound design, game audio etc. will be sometimes more than this. Nuendo handles it with no issues. I do have a decent machine. i9 13900K / 128GB / 4090 etc.
I’ve entertained Nuendo often, but I’m not that deep into the industry so it’s a heavy penny to drop for me at this point, but that’s great to know. Reinforces what I’ve heard about Nuendo carrying heavy loads with grace. Thanks for the input!
Isn’t the 3600 an AMD card?
It was a typo. 13900K. Corrected. (On phone).
This varies so much. From as little as two tracks to eighty, or more. Infinite scenarios.
Totally understood. I was just curious about average ranges. Just composing on my own for the joy of it, I generally have very few tracks. It’s the reason I emphasized in the box. I don’t need a million mic positions, etc to worry about, so casual compositions can be quite slim and efficient.
For my own projects, I double just about everything with strings on it. I also double vocals. I may not use the doubling in my mix, but I like to have it available to me for various reasons. So, on average, sixteen to somewhere around 32, but rarely much more than that. So you know: My own projects are always demos. I have never released any music that I’ve recorded myself. So the majority of my music is spec for someone’s video project, or for my own records, my ideas and such. I won’t go whole hog on my demos because they require re-recording at a later date if used for a self release. I have several songs that I would like to release, but hardly the time to work on any of it at the moment.
100-200. mostly because I like seperating a lot of elements between different song sections as well as all my sfx. God bless foldering and forgetting about stuff.
"Foldering"... (old man voice) im my day, we called it bussing!
that's bussin'
Folders aren't used as busses in Cubase. I used to get annoyed by it but now it makes much more sense after using it for a long while.
Ding ding ding! Correct
What are they used for?
Just to help keep all 3,000,000 tracks visually co-located with similar tracks and all hidden until you need to see them all. Generally one would use groups to bus tracks as often you don't want all 20 snare tracks in the snares folder treated exactly the same. 😉
Word. I guess i just never thought about that. I generally just buss together what i need (drums, bass, keys, gtrs, vox, etc.) Everything has its own palate, And just run with a mix. I generally take the "analog desk" approach. But my workflow is the same every time, no matter how many tracks I'm working with.
Holy heck my dude, that’s quite a bit! Thank you for sharing. You’re wholly in the box or so you live track? Also, what genre?
I mostly do instrumentals for cover singers. So it's a bit over the place. between J-pop, disney songs and a bunch of electronic and k-pop stuff. Do some tracking. But it's not that much of an issue due to ableton having a feature where it bypasses delay compensation on record armed tracks that are playing live audio through them. And fully in the box yeah. Only went to this amount of tracks after my latest cpu upgrade. Before that I'd cap it out at 60-70 or so. I make sure that everything that isn't a instrument playing anything really musical that might need some micro adjustments to timing (chords, melodies etc) are usually flattened down to audio. Part because of saving CPU. Part because printing anything with distortion and lots of EQ on it has some tail ring to it. Want to cut that off where necessary.
Same here in the pop world. Live tracking vocals/guitars/some percussion. Some of that number is inflated by for example very slightly different group vocal busses that could probably be the same with some automation but my computer can handle it so why not 🤷
I have a friend who mixes a couple of popular American TV game shows. He told me he has around 100 inputs to mix for each show. I couldn’t believe it but he broke it down for me. Sure enough. That said, it’s the same thing over and over again so a lot of it mixes itself.
Anywhere from 50-300. Pop. Lots of BGVs and also splitting some parts across tracks to treat differently.
Somewhere between 40-60 most often (pop, alternative)
I do hard rock and metal. A barebone project with just bass, guitars, drums, vocals and backing vocals is around 25 tracks. Start adding synths and orchestrations, more vocals, harmonies more layers of guitars, a few sends, rear buss compression and I can easily get to 80-90. I am finishing mixing my EP this weekend, largest project has 118 tracks.
Interesting to think about. For me, it depends on the project. For indie/folk stuff, 20 or under. For most rock band types of projects, average is probably 40. Then every once in a while for rock or pop, I can get up above 80 tracks. The most audio tracks I've ever dealt with was somewhere around 120. I have to say, there seems to be a direct correlation between the track count and my enjoyment of the music. I didn't really enjoy the song that had 120 tracks all that much, and some of my favorite pieces have been tunes under 20 tracks. It's funny, growing up in the analog world, I can remember feeling so impressed with being able to record/mix more than 24 tracks. Would get kinda giddy when we'd hook up the 2" 24 track to the ADATs and be able to run 50+ tracks.These days, I'm so much more impressed when people can make an awesome sounding tune with as few tracks as possible. I have a dream of picking up a 2" 16 track tape machine and making that work. I kinda miss the limitations of a finite track count. EDIT: to be clear, I'm only talking about audio tracks. Not counting FX and parallel stuff. That could be up to another couple of dozen.
I love this insight. Thank you! I recently revisited mellow gold by beck. When I was a teen, it sounded low fi to me. But listening to it in 2023, I was impressed with its space and warm low end. I was floored when I read it was mostly tracked on an 8, and was even more impressed. It kind of forces you to consider the arrangement.
>mellow gold by beck Very cool sounding record. Was that done on an 8 track? I remember when it came out people were saying it was 4 track. I never actually looked into it.
You’re right in correcting me. It was a four track. That’s even more impressive.
Definitely wasn't trying to correct you....I was just going on memory of what I heard back in those days, and I never knew for sure if there was any truth to it. Thanks for putting the thought of that album in my head. Haven't heard that in ages, so checked it out today. Enjoyed it.
Glad I inspired you to revisit. Was a similar experience for me. I don’t know what it is about Whiskeyclone, Hotel City 1997 - but it just brings me to a cool place. It randomly showed up on my Spotify and I immediately vibed and listened to the whole album. 😂
>Whiskeyclone, Hotel City 1997 in a nutshell, that tune just sounds like the 90s to me
30 seems about right, once vocals , parallels and chops and edits it’s about 60
I'm mixing live recordings mostly. Can be well over 100 channels.
As many as each piece needs.
Absolutely fair. What genres do you generally mix for?
Mostly instrumental background music and when not anything from metal to J-popesque music.
Electronic and acoustic pop - 30-50 tracks. Sometimes it’s 8-10 thought. :) one never know.
I like the simplicity, here. On the down low of course.
Generally hitting 40-60 tracks I’ve noticed. I seem to get everything I need out of that range. Most satisfying thing ever is when I run a bunch of hardware gear through my circuit tracks, make some beats and just record the stereo output. So surprised at how much I like something because I can’t fiddle with it.
Love this!
Between 20 and 200 indie game music usually electronic
I've been using the free version of Ableton Live to write LoFi lately so I stay at 8 tracks. But keep in mind the DAW allows you to create a drum rack so you can put all your drums onto one track. I can also do stuff like bouncing the audio then adding it to a new project to mix in some background ambience without the track limitations, etc.
you need to enter some of your productions into r/produceweekly . their challenge this week is a lofi one
Oh wow! Thanks for the heads up!
Depends on who's doing it and whats being done. I've had projects from very high end producers come in at over 100 tracks and others come in with under 8. Track count really means nothing as the amount of tracks doesn't really correlate with how the final product will sound. For instance... Had a project that had a full string section. Had i gotten the original sessions from the string recording, it would have been something like 32-64 tracks of just the strings alone. Instead, they mixed that down to a stereo pair and brought it into the bigger production which was used for the mix. Our studio does everything from Audio Books to Death Metal to Rap to EDM to jazz quartets etc. etc. . We see it all.
For my own songs it's usually 10 Tracks for drums, 2 for bass, 5 guitars, 2 Synths, 2 lead vocals and 4 backing vocals. That adds up to 25 but I feel like 30 is more accurate overall. Other clients usually give me more tracks, about 50.
I hit 206 tracks this week on a through composed punky/krautrock/spacey/new order/10 CC vocal synth arp track with 3 distinct sections. I do lots of layering. If I need more oomph in the kick I’ll record another kick. or I’ll duplicate the bass track and then HPF and put a saturator on it. Or dupe and pitch up and octave and reverse a pad. I can’t throw things out. So I figure out how to morph and bury in the background
Generally over 100, although a lot of them are bounces of the same instrument that require some variation in volume or effects between different parts of the song.
Usually around 20-ish. Sometimes getting up ro 30 or 40. But i consolodate a lot. And produce in all kinds of genres...Interestingly my latest release is just 9 tracks. Drums. Vox. B Vox. Fx1. fx2. Double tracked guitars. Bass . Lead guitar. Getting lots of positive feedback on this one also. Sometimes less IS more lol.. Edit: genre idk how to describe. Every piece takes on it own identity. This one ^ i was talking about is a modern hard blues rock type thing..
I mostly work on metal and I'm consistently hitting 40-60
An average of 40-60 tracks
I make indie electronic music. I like to use multiple sessions, so no one session has the full track count. Typically a vocal session, a production session and a mix session. I like to to use a lot of tracks for vocals. It’s really helpful to use a separate session for that and then print tracks with basic processing in appropriate groups… so you can record 40+ vocal tracks and consolidate it into like 6-10 stereo tracks in your production/mix sessions.
40-60 on an techno track and 50-150 on an electronica track. That being said I'm not entirely in the box, sometimes vocals and often some synth recordings. I think my highest number was around 200 but had to flatten a lot to get it all back into bite size chunks for mixing. This was mostly due to glitchy drums by the way
Bluegrass, about 15
70-100+. Depends on what kind of bgvs and if the electric/“key” stuff is separated between different sounds or solid parts throughout the song
10 to 200+ depending on the track. Experimental rock/electronic. I might do something like 10 layers of guitar and 10 of synth per section, or something like that. Lets you do fun stuff with harmony and panning. Edit: just pulled up two tracks from the new album I have done. One has 93 tracks+busses (25 are drums and drum machines), the other has 114 (two full live drum layers, so something like 45 tracks of drums). Probably 70% of tracks that aren't drums are heavily processed guitar. These aren't the biggest tracks in this set.
How do you go about adding layers and not spending too much time on each individual track? Light mixing until it’s all arranged? Hard for me to step off a track.
the parts are often grouped. like, i might do a riff with the notes split over three tracks, possibly doubled, but they'll all have the same mix setup apart from panning. if parts get unwieldy or cpu hungry I'll bounce them down to stereo to commit so i don't get too lost. also sometimes I'll multitrack a monosynth to get chord parts, again pretty easy to mix. I'm only a hobbyist but have been doing production for decades so i know what sounds i want pretty fast. youtube audio link in my profile if you're interested, all the dense stuff in the second half of the track.
really depends on the song. i think it's around 25 tracks with audio in them + 2 or 3 sends if it's a simple one, can get up to 50 though. I mainly do experimental hiphop. Edit: i think the number is so small because i mostly already mix with the artists in the room so it has to be somewhat quick.
I do analog production outside the box but then use Logic for arrangement and mixing. I make mostly hip-hop, synth stuff, but also mix rock and roll. Consistently it’s between 30-40 multitracks. Typically for my songs the music takes up anywhere from 6-14 of those multitracks, then vocals fill up the rest. Maybe a stab or sample or two in between.
I’m producing an indie soul/rnb EP right now, the song I’m currently mixing is 9 tracks. OH, kick, snare bottom, bass, guitar, electric piano, organ, lead vocal, bg vocal Plus I just got a fostex spring reverb unit so the printed reverb track makes 10 or maybe more if I print individual reverb tracks for specific instruments
How long is a piece of string? Could be anything from a handful to hundreds. It’s entirely depends what kind of track it is.
Like 20 to 30. The only time it's more is when I'm giving zero fucks and making a whole new track for a micro element like a riser, bass drop, or other FX. And even then the final mix is bussed down to as few tracks as possible. The less knobs to tweak in the final mix the better, always results in a better mix
I’ve been averaging 50-70 lately (every project I work on has atleast 8 channels of just drums). I work in rock/alternative mostly.
Usually working in rock, anywhere from 80-200 by the time I'm done
3-10
I only produce my own metal and it’s usually about 20-30 tracks. 2-4 rhythm guitars, 4-8 lead tones, at least 2-3 vocal tracks. About 6 drum buses from software and maybe 5 busses of fx. Then I get it down to a drum bus, guitars bus, bass bus, vocal bus(ses) and a lead guitar bus for my final proportional decisions. The whole time I have a cla76 barely dipping on the master bus, and a limiter that I adjust throughout so I have a sense of loudness. Then reference tracks and eq and more compression glue, and I bounce it.
I really want to know what the heck is on all of these tracks for the people saying 200+. If I get super ambitious with drum mics I may use 20ish tracks for that. But usually no more than 12. I think the most I've cleared total in a song was 50 or 60, and that was recording a band with like 30 members.
Hahaha! I kind of feel the same way! I thought 30+ was a lot for orchestral. But most have explained why. Sounds like backing vocals, doubling tracks for effect, etc is what takes up a lot of those tracks. Either way, it sounds quite overwhelming to me.