Do you build drum racks or sampler instruments out of FM8 bounces, or keep the synth live through to the final mix?
I never build drum racks because with drums I always work in audio.
I like to see visually exactly what is happening in terms of the transients and tails of my drum hits so that everything is extremely tight and I can suss out any issues in the mix much quicker.
So when I synthesize drum sounds it is always a separate session from when I’m songwriting and I just save everything I do as samples. If I want to change the timbre of a drum hit while songwriting I typically just layer multiple samples to get the specific sound I want and EQ each layer as needed.
Occasionally I will do resampling when using FM8 for creating leads and mid basses but typically I prefer to keep a majority of my synth sounds live until I get to the final mixdown stage, where I will often bounce everything to audio.
The reason for this is that I like to keep everything open and available to tweak for these types of sounds until I feel the song is truly done – because I often like to evolve leads and mid bass sounds as professional tools in the song or often will need to make adjustments to sounds that no longer fit when I take the song in a different direction.
But once I feel the song is finished, I like to bounce everything to audio so that I stop making minor changes and just focus purely on the mixdown process.