Mixdown and mastering, Starting out with your dp-01 – Teac DP-01 Series Owners Manual User Manual

Page 23

Starting out with your DP-01

TASCAM DP-01

Owner’s Manual

Mixdown and mastering

This is the last stage in making a song, allowing you to create a file which you
can play back into a stereo recorder, and export to a WAV file for further pro-
cessing, archiving, recording, etc. on a personal computer (“Exporting the mas-
tered stereo tracks” on page 45).

Mixdown

This is the art of balancing the different tracks you have recorded

earlier so that the whole song sounds “right”—everything sounds at the right
volume, and the song sounds like one piece of music.

The most impor-
tant pieces of

equipment for a mixdown are on
either side of your head!

There are no real rules to mixing, except that if you like the mix, and other
people like it, it’s a probably good mix.

You don’t have to
keep levels the

same through the whole of your
song (try raising the level of a
guitar during solos, for example).

…

Use the eight track faders to adjust the relative volume of the tracks
and the red

MASTER

fader to adjust the overall level, and watch the

and

meters at the right of the display to make sure that the mix is not

too loud (if it’s too loud, it will distort, and sound bad).

…

Use the

EQ HIGH

and

EQ LOW

(tone) controls to add or take away bass

and treble from the individual tracks.

On the DP-01FX
only, you can use

the internal reverb unit instead of
an external effect processor
(“Reverb” on page 64).

…

If you have an external effect processor attached through the

SEND

and

RETURN

loop, adjust the

EFFECT SEND

levels for each track. This is

the amount of signal sent from each track to the effect. You can use
this to add effects only to certain tracks. Use the

EFFECT RETURN

con-

trol to adjust the amount of the effect returned to the mix.

…

Use the

PAN

controls to adjust the left-right position of each track in

the stereo mix.

If you have two
tracks with differ-

ent versions of the same part, you
can use the mute function to
make easy comparisons between
the two.

…

To cut out the sound of a track, use the

SHIFT

key and the track’s

REC

key to mute (the orange

MUTE

indicator lights for muted tracks) and

un-mute the track.

The track meters
show the level of

the signal recorded on the track,
not the level sent from the track.