Track limits as freedom or . . . ?

[Shane Sanders]

For producers and composers: do you feel like 64 tracks is realistically enough for most serious productions, or do you often find yourself needing more? Could you live well if you only had 16 stereo tracks to work with? Wax philosophical for me, as I want to encounter many perspectives.

I know The Beatles made world-changing records under technical limitations that would seem almost absurd now, so I’m not pretending more tracks automatically equal better music. At the same time, many would argue that there’s no problem with wanting options, especially when modern arrangements, layering, sound design, routing, and mixing can get complex if you drop in a lot of incidental sounds and fancy timbral coloration.

[pough]

... not. At least, freedom isn't the word that I would choose. I would choose words like constraint, focus, or pressure. Some musicians need a straight jacket; some just need a sock.

[Vortifex]

64 tracks is enough for me. I make electronic music with fairly simple arrangements. 16 tracks would be limiting though. I tend to use around 8-10 tracks for percussion but it varies a lot. With just 16 tracks I'd have to make a lot of compromises with sound design and bussing/routing.

I was just listening to Kraftwerk's Man Machine and I think I counted 12 unique sound sources in total, so you really don't need much. Some of the greatest techno and dance tracks ever made have quite sparse arrangements. But it depends a lot on genre.

[eLawnMust]

I use trackers with 16 stereo tracks all the time... For the most part since any track can have shared instruments if one ain't playing at the time no problem... I like the challenge & the constraint provides that....

But in reality tracks don't have near the impact as knowledge of music composition does...

This guy doin' better with 4 tracks back then vs most desktop dabblers nowadays-



And on an amiga to boot...

The beatles were a promoted band, otherwise they woulda still been playing in clubs & bars for however long... Their 'secret' was Phil Spector's studio which was designed by a sound engineer who was also a psychic... Experiments were done in the early days by having psychics concentrating on the recording head whilst recording was proceeding... one of the first tests was obtaining a phone ## that had never been used before, then the psychic was told to 'imprint' that while the recording was commencing... Then when the record was released bigger than shit people started calling the number in sizeable numbers... So you can only guess what is imprinted from there on... evidently the engineer went onto work on the Star Wars project where he stated that Lucas always had 2 psychics concentrating on the recording head when filming...

But I never saw the beatles as fantastic, I think Three Dog Night, Steely Dan & others were far better....