Bouncing a mix seems like such an odd term to use. We explain the history of the term and how it made it into the modern audio production vernacular.

A Little Audio History

In the early days of recording when tape was the only available medium for recording it had a limitation, it had very few tracks to work with. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, so when producers like the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson was trying to construct the iconic Pet Sounds he had to find a way to squeeze a lot of instruments and a ton of vocals on a few tracks. He recorded the backing on a four track recorder, he then copied (or bounced) them over to an eight track recorder so he could overdub the vocals.

The term, also sometimes called ping-pong recording, was employed by other notable artists. Acts known to have used it include Herb Alpert, needing to layer up multiple horn parts. The Carpenters, who used the technique to create large chorus vocal effects. ELO founder Jeff Lynne, also used the technique on his home machines to build up epic Electric Light Orchestra tracks. And of course, The Beatles used four track machines linked together in the studio for similar results.

The Portastudio Generation

When Tascam released the first cassette based 4 track Portastudio, in fact the TEAC 144, the home recording revolution began. As we’ve highlighted in other articles, there were limitations with much of the equipment we had available in the early 80s. Therefore the same techniques used in the early days of recording were employed by 4 track cassette based users. However, the technology allowed for tracks to be bounced internally. Soon users found, that with some pre-production planning, they could get an entire band with vocals onto just 4 tracks of a Portastudio.

As instruments were moving around different tracks, in effect bouncing or ping-ponging around the machine like a ball, that’s why the term became popular.

This technique continued to be used by those with larger machines such as the early Fostex and Tascam 8 and 16 track recorders. However, this required some routing through the mixer to achieve the bounce, or ping-ponging of tracks. Another popular trick was to bounce a group of tracks to a stereo device and then re-record them on two of the four tracks available. This helped maintain stereo position of tracks, otherwise, much of the production would end up with mono tracks in the mix.

It’s worth noting, that because this process was taking place on analogue machines using tape, the audio quality degraded each time a bounce took place. The width and speed of the tape had a bearing on the quality too, so bouncing on standard compact cassette tape meant a balance between how many tracks you wanted to record and the quality of the final master. Given these limitations, those working in this way performed audio miracles with these limitations.

So Why Do DAWs ‘Bounce’ A Mix?

It’s hard to imagine this in 2022, but DAWs like Pro Tools have been around since 1989, at least in its earlier incarnation as Sound Tools. Yep, Pro Tools is older than quite a lot of people who use it, 33 years old! Read more about the history of Pro Tools here.

In effect, mixing down in a DAW uses the same principle, albeit in a different way technologically as bouncing in the earlier tape machines. It takes a large group of tracks and combines them down to fewer tracks. As the term bounce was already a common phrase used in the recording industry at the time for the process, it’s likely the team at DigiDesign thought that the term bounce was the best way to name the term for copying a group of tracks to disk as a final mix.

One could argue that when stems are created within a DAW we are ‘bouncing’ the audio, as this is exactly what happened in the early days of tape.

Fast forward to modern DAWs where we have almost limitless tracks and the idea of bouncing tracks to free up space seems odd, it’s highly unlikely anyone would do this. Now our resource boundaries are CPU power, to counter this DAW developers created track freezing. It’s possible that in the next few years as CPU power is less of an issue, people will be asking the same question about the term freeze.

Summary

There’s lots of phrases we use in modern music production that have their origins in the early days of recording, such as cutting audio, or bussing tracks.

Some DAWs still use the term bouncing, Pro Tools and Logic Pro, for example. Whereas DAWs like Studio One and REAPER have abandoned the term for more modern ones such as Mixdown or Render.

Is bouncing to disk still an appropriate term for the process of mixing audio and saving it to disk? Perhaps not, but it’s so deeply ingrained as part of the language of modern audio production that it’s unlikely to go away anytime soon.