The mixer on the Ren sucks

First off, I'd like to apologize for the numerous amounts of threads I've posted in the past couple of days. Anyway, I searched for this problem on the Ren forum, and couldn't find anything. Hopefully someone else knows what I'm talking about here...

Example: I'm working on a new song, and I get to track 5 on Sequence 1. I realize the drums on track 5 are extremely loud after adding compression, and I want to turn them down. So, here I go into the track mixer, only to find there's no activity on that channel, and the fader movements do absolutely nothing.

Anyway, I look at the program mixer of track 5 to see where everything is, and I've got one of the kicks and one of the snares going into Submix 1, and I've got two empty channels (A11, A12) going into the Track Mix. But the track mix on my Kick and Snare is greyed out. This is really annoying, and it's only adding on top of the things I hate about the Renaissance. Does anyone have anyway of fixing this?

you may want to put your kick and snare on two separate tracks. then apply compression at the track level instead of pad level. that will keep the drum program routed to the track mixer instead of a submix.

Yup! I have complained about this several times. It's a terrible design. The problem is any time you put a plugin on an actual pad, that pad is forced to route out a submix. Akai says it's impossible to route out of the track mixer when using a pad insert. Only way to "fix" it is to remove your pad insert, turn off the insert, and reroute it to the track mixer and use track inserts instead! But now you have to deal with duplicate inserts when you copy sequences.

Can't wait til 1.3!

son of man wrote:you may want to put your kick and snare on two separate tracks. then apply compression at the track level instead of pad level. that will keep the drum program routed to the track mixer instead of a submix.

It's a good idea, but it's not worth all of that work just to get extra drums in a song.

DJ Hellfire wrote:Yup! I have complained about this several times. It's a terrible design. The problem is any time you put a plugin on an actual pad, that pad is forced to route out a submix. Akai says it's impossible to route out of the track mixer when using a pad insert. Only way to "fix" it is to remove your pad insert, turn off the insert, and reroute it to the track mixer and use track inserts instead! But now you have to deal with duplicate inserts when you copy sequences.

Can't wait til 1.3!

But why are track inserts not forcing it to a submix if the pad inserts do? I realize it's already in the mixer, but shouldn't a pad insert be linked to the track that set of pads are in? There's no reason for it. I really hope this is fixed in 1.3 among the many other issues...

bearhead wrote:I really hope this is fixed in 1.3 ...

It's not!

bearhead wrote:

son of man wrote:you may want to put your kick and snare on two separate tracks. then apply compression at the track level instead of pad level. that will keep the drum program routed to the track mixer instead of a submix.

It's a good idea, but it's not worth all of that work just to get extra drums in a song.

unless they redesign the whole mixer, you're going to have to rethink the way you insert effects. if you track out everything into a DAW, it's really not a problem the way it is now. however, it's only when you decide to export separate tracks that it becomes an issue.

the only other way around it is if you resample your pads with effects. but then you have to deal with limited resampling options.

DJ Hellfire wrote:It's not!

Of course it isn't.

son of man wrote:unless they redesign the whole mixer, you're going to have to rethink the way you insert effects. if you track out everything into a DAW, it's really not a problem the way it is now. however, it's only when you decide to export separate tracks that it becomes an issue.

the only other way around it is if you resample your pads with effects. but then you have to deal with limited resampling options.

I've tried using it with Logic, and that was nothing but headaches.

With that aside, I really hope Akai does something about this on a future update.

i hope they 'fix' it too. but Jah made a pretty good point when you think about it... it's really not THAT bad, if you consider the limited EFX routing of most stock hardware samplers. coming from a hardware background myself, i can appreciate the mixer the way it is in regard to flexibility. but once you compare it to other software mixers, it obviously falls short. so whether the glass is half empty or half full all depends on how you view it.

they do need to add some better metering at the very least though.

while pad with inserts not routing to tracks is not ideal, it's a compromise. If you route pads with inserts directly to the track, you can run into following problem:

you have a sample on pad 1, you trigger it from track 1 and track 2. Each pad trigger gets routed to it's respective track. So far so good...
now you add an insert to pad 1. If you trigger pad 1 from the 2 tracks, they have to get mixed together because there's only one insert (and we don't want add an insert per voice ). Now that they're shared, it's ambiguous where the mixed signal should go to, so we route them to the sub mixes.
I hope that makes sense.

It might take some workflow adjustment, it hasn't been an issue for me. As mentioned before, I just use separate tracks for pads that I want to apply inserts.

son of man wrote:...but once you compare it to other software mixers, it obviously falls short.

EXACTLY! Can't keep comparing it to old MPC's or as being better than what we've all come from on hardware MPC's. Not everyone using the Ren is coming from a hardware MPC. And hardware MPC's aren't the Ren's competition. So to really be fair, it should only be compared to the other software products that are Ren's actual competition!

peteblues wrote:you have a sample on pad 1, you trigger it from track 1 and track 2. Each pad trigger gets routed to it's respective track. So far so good...
now you add an insert to pad 1. If you trigger pad 1 from the 2 tracks, they have to get mixed together because there's only one insert (and we don't want add an insert per voice ). Now that they're shared, it's ambiguous where the mixed signal should go to, so we route them to the sub mixes.
I hope that makes sense.

The mixed signal should just go to both tracks! If someone doesn't want these signals mixed, one should simply just assign the same sample to a different pad if they want to use it on a different track. I honestly never use a single sound on multiple tracks in a sequence. Forcing the user to simply assign a duplicate pad to use on a different track is much better of an idea than forcing them to use a submix. It's just more practical.

If anything, at least put standard faders and gain meters on the submixes until something better can be figured out!

This is the first MPC I've ever owned. I've been using Reason for about 3 years before I ever got my hands on an MPC. I'll admit that I have a lot more fun with this thing that I ever did with Reason, but Reason is so much more flexible as far as automation and processing goes. I just really hope to see some big improvements on the software, and soon. After all, it IS software. This is NOT a hardware MPC, like DJ Hellfire said.

Well, the good thing is now with 1.3, they have solve the issue with duplicate plugins when copying sequences. So now, if it works like I hope, you can just use track inserts and it will apply to that track for all sequences. But the only thing is that they've only shown how instrument plugins are handled in 1.3. I haven't seen any discussion on how effects plugins are handled, as far as duplication goes when copying a sequence!

DJ Hellfire wrote:The mixed signal should just go to both tracks!

if we did that, there would be all sorts of complaints of pad signals leaking onto other tracks. (e.g. if you have an 8th HH on track 1 and 16th HH on track 2, you'd then see 16th HH on both tracks).

DJ Hellfire wrote:Well, the good thing is now with 1.3, they have solve the issue with duplicate plugins when copying sequences. So now, if it works like I hope, you can just use track inserts and it will apply to that track for all sequences. But the only thing is that they've only shown how instrument plugins are handled in 1.3. I haven't seen any discussion on how effects plugins are handled, as far as duplication goes when copying a sequence!

if the inserts are on tracks, those will get duplicated IIRC (since you can have different inserts on the same track in different sequences)
if the inserts are on the plugin program, those won't get duplicated.