What is bouncing?

Bouncing is the process of combining several tracks' worth of audio into a lesser number of tracks, often to free up some tracks for new musical parts. For example, you may want to record a nice thick backing vocal part, and double track three separate harmony lines. This will take up 6 tracks, leaving only another six for the rest of your parts. If however we bounce those six vocal lines into two stereo tracks, the same backing vocal part only uses two tracks and leaves you more tracks to play with - and as the DPS12 uses the virtual track concept, you don't have to lose the original vocal tracks, so you can go back and do the bounce again later if necessary.

So how do we do it?

Like a lot of things in the DPS12, there is more than one way to perform a track bounce. We'll start off with the most flexible and commonly used approach, and touch on the others later.

So let's use the example above, and go step by step through the process of bouncing those six vocal tracks into a stereo backing vocal. For this, I'm assuming we have the following tracks set up on the DPS12 (to assign tracks, use the ASSIGN-->VTRK screen). (For this example, I'm also going to assume we are using Vtracks 1 to 12 assigned to physical tracks 1 to 12 - it just makes it easier to show the fundamentals).

1: Music Mix L
2: Music Mix R
3: empty
4: empty
5: Low harmony vocal 1
6: Low harmony vocal 2
7: Mid harmony vocal 1
8: Mid harmony vocal 2
9: High harmony vocal 1
10: High harmony vocal 2
11: empty
12: empty

So tracks 1 and 2 contain a stereo mix of the music, and tracks 5 to 10 are our backing vocal tracks.

Now what we are going to do is bounce tracks 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 onto 11 and 12, which are currently empty.

The first thing to do is enable the extra bus, if it isn't already. The extra bus was introducing in version 1.1 of the DPS12 and makes bouncing dead easy. Press MIXER to get into the mixer screen, and scroll down/right until you get to the MIXER SETUP screen. There's a parameter there that lets you turn the extra bus ON or OFF (you can switch it off as this frees up some processor resources and lets you (for example) have more EQs' at your disposal. For this excercise, turn it ON.

The Plan

What we are going to do is send all the backing vocal tracks as a stereo mix to the extra bus, and then use that as the record source for our destination tracks, 11 and 12.

Scroll up/left one page until you get to the EXTRA BUS ON/OFF page - this page only appears when the extra bus has been turned on. Now you can assign any track or combination of tracks, and even the inputs, to the extra bus on this page. Press TRACK (underneath the meters) to make sure we're looking at the 12 track channels, and assign tracks 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 to the extra bus - their little squares should be filled black. Make sure the other tracks are not assigned to the extra bus, so their squares should be empty/white. Press THRU (underneath the meters) to access the input mixer, and again, make sure all 8 inputs have empty/white squares, as we don't want to include these in our backing vocal mix (not for now, anyway).

Press TRACK to get back to the track mixer, and then the MAIN button to get back to the main screen. Now, when you press play, you won't hear anything different, but your six backing vocal tracks are being sent to the extra bus. It's important to note now that the tracks will be sent to the extra bus exactly as you set them up, so whatever levels and pans you set will be intact. If a track is panned fully left, this is where it will be on the extra bus. This means you can set up your bounce mix exactly as it should sound easily.

Now is the time to mix you backing vocals into a pleasing blend and panorama. For this example, pan according to the following (or whatever sounds good to you):

5: Low harmony vocal 1 - Pan 11 o'clock
6: Low harmony vocal 2 - Pan 1 o'clock
7: Mid harmony vocal 1 - Pan 10 o'clock
8: Mid harmony vocal 2 - Pan 2 o'clock
9: High harmony vocal 1 - Pan 9 o'clock
10: High harmony vocal 2 - Pan 3 o'clock

You'll also need to set the levels to get a pleasing blend, but bear in mind you also want to get the highest level as you can to preserve the best sound quality - don't worry about mixing the backing vocals so they sound about the right volume in relation to our main music mix on tracks 1 and 2 - this comes later. Get the right blend of vocals and get them at the highest level you can without clipping.

Onto the Recording

Ok, the backing vocals are nice and thick and blended. Now we need to get them onto tracks 11 and 12. Press ASSIGN-->SOURCE, and scroll down so you can see tracks 11 and 12. These should be set to BUS L and BUS R respectively, so that the extra bus is feeding tracks 11 and 12. (If the display shows "bus-l" or "bus-r" instead, then the extra bus is still turned off. Check out the instructions at the beginning to turn it on.)

Okay, press MAIN to go back to the main screen, and record enable tracks 11 and 12, and keep the faders for 11 and 12 fully down (we can already hear the source tracks, so if we just turn these up you add the same audio signal again, which is unnecessary). We are nearly ready: press the CONTROL PANEL softkey and scroll right until you reach the PLAY MONITOR screen, and set Monitor In Play to "REC SOURCE" and not "PLAYBACK" - this lets us monitor the record levels in play mode. Exit to the main screen again.

Now, still with tracks 11 and 12 record enabled, press play. When any of the original backing vocal tracks play, you should also see the level meters responding for tracks 11 and 12. Double check that the levels for tracks 11 and 12 are not clipping (if they do, turn down all the faders from 5 thru 10 a small amount, so you still keep the same relative levels but just make the mix a little quieter, until it doesn't clip).

Ok, now press record and play before the backing vocal part comes in, and stop just after it, and do this for all the times the backing vocal parts come into the song. (You can just keep the Deeps in record throughout the whole song, but this takes longer and uses up more disk space - tip: use the TRACK VIEW screen to see where the backing vocals come in during the song).

When you're done, record mute tracks 11 and 12 so their record lights don't flash, drop the faders of tracks 5 to 10 right down, and turn up the faders for tracks 11 and 12, and pan them fully left and right respectively. You should now hear exactly what you heard before, only we only use two tracks instead of six!

You can now assign different vtracks to tracks 5 to 10 and use them for different parts!

In Part 2...

Advanced track bouncing, bouncing using auxes, bouncing using the masters, and bouncing with FX.