Bounce down tracks for slimmer song projects
Learning how to ‘mix down’ your project tracks is an important technique for music production
• App credit: Apple Inc
Garage Band
Developer Apple Inc
Difficulty
Time needed
12-30
During the recording and mastering process ‘bounce’ refers to a common technique for working with tracks. In the analogue tape era, studios could add tracks by mixing down. So eight-track recordings would layer on more instruments by combining two or more together. You recorded them down singularly to free up tracks and go again. Today, GarageBand lets you mix a maximum of 255 independent tracks – so we should have enough! However, more tracks each with multiple plugins makes a project slower to load and could compromise quality when mastering. Learning how to mix down tracks is useful then.