I know that more isn't always better, clearly and that if you try to fill a track up too much it can become cluttered and sloppy, space is important right? But something that's always bugged me is that when people mention how many channels/tracks they used in a particular tune they never go into specifics. Does this include individual drum hits or are their drums grouped together in a single drum sampler track? Are they counting sends and stuff as seperate channels too? Most of my songs have between 17-25 channels on them, but that normally includes 2 drum samplers that open up into about 10 channels for the first and maybe 5 on the second. I also sometimes parallel EQ synths coming from reason into ableton so they take up more than one track.
Basically what I'm getting at here is i've often wondered how many different instruments people use compared to how many channels. Not counting sends etc, I'm talking about the actual instruments. What I wanna get from this information is whether people tend to make tracks with only a few melodic ideas happening but many different instances of each sound working together to create a much fuller sound or if people tend to only resample/layer really major sounds in the track and leave other things as one instance.
I dunno if I've made myself clear but I hope so...It's not something I've been able to gather just from listening to tracks, I find it very hard to analyse 3rd person so to speak. So yeah I just want people to maybe list how many channels they *tend* to use in a track of their standard style with the sends not counted and any individual drum hits treated as separate channels even if they are in a sampler as long as they are all eq'd etc differently as well as how many actual separate instruments you can hear in their tracks and whether the majority of their channels are taken up by main instruments or almost unnoticeable incidental/background noises.
If it was perhaps missed in all that nonsense I just wrote the purpose of this thread is for me (and others?) to understand how other people go about constructing a track and how they go about their mixdowns.
I'll go first XD so I use about 20-40 (average of 25 probs) channels per track with a good 10-25 of those being individual drum hits (I tend to layer my kicks and snares at the start of building a track, then add compression and resample and load them up as one hit each, to save space) I also generally have one track of 'atmosphere' so white noise or a strange recording of wind, rain etc that runs through part of the song and maybe 1 or 2 incidental tracks. The rest are all various different synths and melodies, rarely playing the same thing as each other unless a large bassline type sound which I don't do often. Have recently started doubling up my pads though to try and give them more character.
I'd say my songs often either feel empty or too cluttered. That mysterious and glorious 'space' people like Eskmo, Mala and Benga get in their tracks (in very different ways) still eludes me
[sorry for epic post]
