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TwitterKeeping Your Composition Moving Forward With Freeze and Flatten
Have you ever run into overcomplexity while arranging your latest piece of music?
It happens to me all the time. It’s that phase of composition where you’ve got all kinds of automation going on, sweeping a filter here and increasing an effect trail there.
In addition to automation data, you may have a dizzying array of chopped and rearranged clips of audio and MIDI.
While this isn’t much of an issue when you’re fleshing out an idea that’s merely an 8 bar skeleton of a track, the waters get muddier when you start adding more detail. At some point it all becomes a bit overwhelming to look at, perhaps even hindering your progress as you perpetually second-guess your previous decisions. “Just one more tweak here, I swear!” is a familiar refrain in my studio.
If all of this detail is stifling your progress, try bouncing each track down to audio.
Of course, you’ll want to save a copy with all the automation and other tweaks intact in case you absolutely need to come back and change something. This process gives a sense of finality to the choices you previously made, etching them in stone and (hopefully) making it easier move forward.
As an added bonus, all those effects and bits of automation will be printed to audio so your processor will thank you. Another huge benefit is that clicking around the arrangement interface will become much easier after you get rid of those tiny slices of data that like to get in the way of your cursor!
Using Ableton Live as an example, I achieve these bounces by simply “freezing” and “flattening” them.
Freezing is a temporary function which creates an audio file in the background and plays it in place of the original track.
Once a track is frozen, I then flatten it: This process destructively replaces the entire track and its contents with an audio track containing a clip.
These operations can be carried out in both the Session and Arrange views, so the program is pretty flexible in that respect.
6 Responses to “Keeping Your Composition Moving Forward With Freeze and Flatten”
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Definitely a good tip. When I get a tune to a point where the sounds are pretty much how I want (give or take some processing here or there) I usually make sure I save that as a new version, do a Save and Collect then do a render of all the tracks (in the export there is the option there to render out all the tracks separately) and then you really have a solid version – just incase Live wants not open your project again or that plug in you were using is no longer on the system when you load it up again… Aside from that, you then have your tracks as audio, you can then load these back in and have yourself a proper mixing session away from all those little details/automation. Sometimes this approach I find is quicker than individually freezing and flattening, and also bypass the situation where a freeze can’t happen when your tracks rely too much on another (such as side chaining). Not only good for solidifying the decisions, it also keeps the creation and the mixing/polish separate and also backs up your track totally for future proofing.
Anyhow, good tips Nick. Keep them coming.
Thanks for the substantive comment, James!
Cubase also has a freeze feature. I like it because you can bounce tracks as mentioned above, but bring them back easily without having to go back into previous versions of the project.
You can do this in Live on a frozen track – just right click on the track and “unfreeze.” Even when the track is frozen you can see all your devices, the only difference being that there’s a blue tint over everything and you can’t edit any device settings. “Flatten,” on the other hand, is a destructive operation which totally gets rid of the devices from the track and replaces everything with an audio clip.
I am recording alot more of my Synths now. Other wise I can tweak forever. When I find somthing good, save the patch and then record it and load it into simpler. I find I get things done faster and it uses less cpu – win win.
Another good reason to freeze and flatten is it Makes sharing sets alot more easy for remixing purposes and by doing so, allows you to zip your song up into an Ableton Live Set (als file)and send it off to your mates who can then either remix or polish up the song for you. In this, they aren’t required to have the exact same softsynths and plugs as your system and it makes for some great collaborations!