Reference Track Routing in Wavelab Pro

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Reference Track Routing in Wavelab Pro

hello everybody andrew blake from thedigitalaudiomanual.com today let's talk about reference tracks in wavelab pro but before we start i want to remind you that there's a link below to the free content navigation guide which is an easy to navigate webpage with links to all the content on this channel and besides that in the near future i'm going to begin adding tips and other bits of information that will only be available there you know things like simple steps that will get you started and up and running quick things that are in the videos but are written down in simple steps that serve as quick reminders when you need information down the road if you're working with programs like wavelab or cubase plug-ins or the cable guys shaperbox2 and many many other projects that are in the works then i know you're going to find just like i have that this is an invaluable study aid and the other thing i want to make sure you understand is that this is not a simple pdf this is a constantly updated page that has any information that is new or anytime videos are changed really anything updated and once you have it you will always have the latest information constantly updated so if you haven't gotten it already go to the link below click on it and save it to your favorites it's my gift to you and it's absolutely free okay so let's get started reference tracks do you use them big question a lot of opinions around it some will tell you don't even start something without a reference track but either way love them or hate them wave lab has its own dedicated reference track features built in and really what are reference tracks you know for most people i would say it's the idea of taking your song that you've been working on or are working on and at some point bringing in a completed finished more than likely commercial released song to compare your song with and then start you know making changes as necessary to get your song to sound like it's the reference material that could include changing eq settings on your song or compression settings or the stereo mix or any number of things that you hear in your reference material but is a reference always a commercially released song not necessarily there are lots of valuable ways to use the idea of a reference track beyond that i mean you could for example just compare your finished work with where you started you could put a reference track in put your song in the way you had it where you began before you started adding compression and eq and all the things you you wound up doing to it and then be able to reference that against your finished song and then be able to honestly ask yourself and answer did you really improve it you know what did you do to it and what are the effects some people like to set up complex hardware routing to reference tracks and then be able to listen to various versions depending on the hardware that the reference track is being routed out to wavelab allows you to do all of these things the question that comes up when trying to do reference tracks in most situations is the routing in general because what you want with your reference material is to usually have it to be a straight unaltered shot to your speakers whatever they are so that when you hear the song that you're working on with all these changes compression whatever you don't want your reference track to be affected by all of that stuff you want to be able to do a true what they call a b comparison so that you can hear the reference material as it is and your stuff as a as you've affected it the key concept to be aware of in wavelab is that they designed the reference tracks for comparison purposes they did not design them for editing so when you bring a reference track into your session you want to understand that you're bringing it in as a comparison source you won't be doing much if any editing to it you won't be for example uh if you do the meta normalizer when you run the metanormalizer on your other tracks and changing the volume it won't have any effect on your reference track now there are ways around that and i do it all the time and i'll show you but for example other things if you're building a cd and you run the cd wizard on your eight tracks in your montage it will affect those eight tracks in the montage but it will look at the reference track like it doesn't even exist so many of the editing features are designed to omit or ignore the reference tracks so you want to keep that in mind as you're using them so first of all let's look at a reference track so we understand what we're talking about so what we have here i have my one song my stereo mix getting ready to be altered in whatever way i want but i want to bring a reference track in so i go over to my track inspector go up to the little plus sign at the top hit it i get the option to add a track in this case there's one called reference track so i click on that guy and there i have a reference track and there's a tiny little r down on the left to let me know it's a reference track now this track kind of you know runs its own way different from my stereo track but i can still drag songs into it you know all the normal ways so let's go ahead and get some material in the reference track so i'll just drag a little piece down here so now i have my original song which is up in a stereo track and i have a reference track and the reference tracks generally the way you will use them is they will turn on there's a little ear here and when you hit that little ear it lights up and then you hear the reference track and when you hit that little ear again it turns off the reference track and then you hear your original material making it easy to you know go back and forth let's do that i'm going to play a little snippet of it here here's the original song playing here's the reference track okay original reference so if there was you know any extreme difference in the eq or any any number of things it would be very obvious switching back one to the other what needs to be addressed but wavelab doesn't stop there as usual they give you room for not just one reference track you can add up to three reference tracks so let's go ahead and do that i'm going to add two more reference tracks in so now i have two extra reference racks they both also have little r's down in the lower left i'm gonna throw in a couple of songs okay so now i have my original material here and i have three rubber stacks let's just bounce through those real quick this is the original song here's a reference here's another reference here's another reference so there you go i can jump jump between three different reference tracks you know to see the difference and then i can just turn off any one of the last ears and it goes back to my original material trick number one with all these at different volume levels they're gonna be very hard to reference right you know i mean it's very hard to make a comparison between this first song playing at that level and then this other song that's hardly audible you know how do i make some kind of comparison right so let's bring in the metanormalizer that's the key to this go up to the process tab hit that guy turn on the metanormalizer everything at let's turn everything at the spotify level of negative 14 right so i hit my first apply with the metanormalizer and it adjusted my original song to negative 14 no problem but it did nothing to the reference tracks so you know i can sit here and try to drag the volume of these reference tracks and guess my way through it but really all i have to do is enable each reference track so i hit the ear on this guy go ahead and hit the metanormalizer again run the same test and now that track is negative 14. nothing to it go to the next one hit the little ear bottom line is whichever one has the ear on or you know the monitor enabled that's the one that will get the metanormalizer so we'll bring him up to negative 14. let's do our last guy go down to him hit the little ear hit the meta normalizer and now we have an accurate loudness matched reference between all of our songs so let's start from the beginning let's hear the next one that one because they're identical you can't hear any difference the next one okay next one and there you go now you can begin making some intelligent changes and if something is slightly different like i would say even at the same so-called computer addressed negative 14 this last song sounds you know less loud to me no big deal i can just grab the volume and make a slight adjustment and away i go let's talk about the shortcuts that they have put in place here when you've got reference tracks like this where i've got three different reference tracks they have the shortcuts that come from the factory and again all these can be changed however you want but the ones that are already set from the factory is hit the number one two or three whichever one you want and then hit the letter n after that and it will play that reference so i'm going to play the song i'm going to hit the number 2 hit the letter n and now i'm hearing the reference number 2. i'm going to hit the number 3 hit the letter n i'm hearing reference number three i'm gonna hit the number one hit the letter n i'm hearing reference one simple as can be all right and then besides that if you hit the letter o you can toggle between whatever reference you've got and the original so i play the song i'm listening to my reference let's go get this reference instead i'm listening to the reference i hit the letter o now i'm hearing my original again and now i'm hearing the reference letter o original letter o reference and the reference has to be uh selected so whatever reference i've got selected that's the one that's going to be adjusted so as we said there's lots of routing options for the reference tracks depending on what you want to achieve some of them you may never use some of them you may but let's explore these so the first option here let's look at the routing let's go over to this first reference track in the track area here and hit this routing button and you can see there's an area here that says output bus listen and there's a couple options one says the main playback bus and one says master section it's on this main playback bus that's the basically i guess it would say standard option and when it's set that way when i hit this listen button it kind of bypasses everything and goes right out to the very you know end speakers let's go back to this routing option and i picked this option that says the master section playback processing if you look over here on the master section as you go way down to the bottom there's an area that says playback processing in this case i turned on this encoder checker so if i wanted my reference track to pass through something like that if i turn this option on that's where it would go in my system i can experience a little bit of latency when i start doing these kind of things and there is that possibility so again if you want to keep your references at low zero latency you don't want to you want to keep them just on that that main playback bus some people want to send their references out through external hardware if that's something you want to do you would go up to where it says but near the left here where it says file hit the file go down to your preferences and then go over to audio connections click on that guy and then go over into the playback section right now mine says the main playback bus and it shows my sound cards are assigned left and right on that but if i wanted to set up an external uh bus for hardware i would hit this little plus sign which now in this case it calls it bus two i could rename that if i wanted but now when i click on the bus to now i can hit these options over here where the speakers are and pick you know whatever outputs i have available to me once i've assigned those outputs the way i want if i go up here it says bus category and i can choose reference tracks now when i go back into my track list if i go down to my reference track and i hit the routing again i now have an extra bus out says right here bus two in this case this reference track out to that particular hardware so there it is the reference tracks and some of the routing options and there are quite a few and i've seen various people do it various ways whatever suits you but either way the reference track is a great option as always if you haven't picked up your navigation guide be sure to grab that before you go links to all the content on the channel ever growing and free to use there to study with and there to review with the reference track another great feature in wavelab pro as always great to have you guys here we'll see on the next video