Re: S6 Workflow
A few thoughts.
Let's talk about precedence. When laying out your mix templates, it might be beneficial to consider the following building blocks and their relative precedence:
Locked Channels: The highest level, critical session elements you always need immediate access to.
Track Layouts: The most predictable way to create containers for all of your essential session elements including VCA Masters, Chains and FX Returns.
VCA Masters: An essential organizational and gain balancing tool which can be used to wrangle all of your food groups into a single logical hierarchy. VCA Masters can be used to control and manage any of the following:
(1) Individual units of any flavor
(2) Groups of unit groups for nested control. For example: All FX -> Group A FX -> Group A Mono FX...
(3) FX Returns
(4) Gain Crisis - or the All VCA - Once VCA to rule them all.
(5) Cue Masters. Master Faders and any Submix Aux's for talent mixes.
(6) Stems or Print Tracks
VCA Masters work harmoniously with your Track Layouts as a way to access large numbers of individual unit tracks accessible immediately from a hierarchical structure. Let's look at the layers of precedence between these different types on the surface.
Master Track Layout 1 Recalled. For this example, let's assume this initial layout consists of 24 tracks for a 24 channel S6 configuration. Simple 1:1. Here's an example of one possible way to organize the channels:
VCA Masters on strips 1-8:
vAll, vDX, vMX, vFOL, vFX, vBG, vPFX, vPrint
(Depending on the workflow and scale of the production, these VCA could be contained within 1 or multiple workstations connected to the S6 and populated within this layout.)
vAll = Locked. This would represent top level precedence where this channel will be glued to this location regardless of the view, including application switching between different applications like Pro Tools and DADman.
Any of the VCA Master channels can be spilled in place or into preallocated Left or Right Spill Zones. It's very likely that vFX, when spilled, reveals a whole structure of additional nested FX VCAs, let's say a-j. Additional spills of vFX•f would get me access to those unit tracks. Successive pressing of the MENU switch, when dived into the f•FX unit channels, will do the following:
(1) Return back to the view of all FX VCA's
(2) Return back to the master VCA's
(3) Finally return back to the top level of the master Layout.
Regardless of where you chose to spill any of those elements, your locked Gain Crisis fader would still be accessible from any view (it will obscure one channel).
Chain Submasters on strips 9-16
These might be all of the stereo or multichannel group masters that require processing collectively for each food group.
FX Returns on strips 17-24
These might be all of your essential reverbs, delays, harmonic and sub generating processing which might also be associated with any of the different food groups. I could choose to locally (within this 8 fader bucket) access expand knobs and Expand Faders for a given processor - let's say an Exponential Stratus Reverb that I want to control for some of my music tracks. Meanwhile, I could spill the MX tracks into a Left Spill Zone which won't collide with the bucket housing the music reverb controls. Assuming the Left Spill Zone was assigned to the first 8 faders, I would still be able to access any of the attributes of the Music Chain (faders 9-16) , for harmonic, dynamics or spectral tweaking in context.
Obviously there are a million different ways to organize your templates and optimize your track layouts. Understanding the layers of surface elements can help in creating the ideal structure for your workflow.
best,
Jeff
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