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Getting Ready To Mix

Recently I’ve been working on some songs that were recorded by another engineer. I’ve been hired to mix the songs but before I can mix I need to spend some time getting the songs ready to mix.

Mixing is a creative process, but there are any aspects of a multi-track recording that are more technical in nature and it can be very difficult to jump back and forth between technical editing and creative mixing actions.

A song that is ready to mix will have much of the technical concerns already taken care of, there’s nothing worse than having to stop mixing to tighten up percussion parts or line up backing vocals.

Some of these technical things would be: correcting the timing of instruments, trimming the audio, vocal comping and tuning, removing extra tracks and unused takes, organizing the session, and creating buses and groups.
Before you start, make a copy of the session and name it “songname_mix_prep”

Correcting Timing– Ideally this is all done way before you start thinking of mixing. The drum performance should be made as tight as required before adding any additional instruments. If you’re not quantizing the performance completely, at least make sure the start of each section has all the instruments hitting at the same time. I like beat detective for correcting drums, and elastic audio for everything else.

Trimming The Audio – This is a really simple editing task that makes a big difference. Go through all the tracks and chop out all the bits of the regions where the instrument isn’t played and put in fades in and out.

Vocal Comping And Tuning – Vocal comping is going through all the vocal takes and choosing the best parts to combine into a best of the best composite vocal. Ryan talked about Vocal Comping a few weeks ago on The Home Recording Show # 52. Key Of Grey and Home Studio Corner both recently posted about Vocal Comping so check those out for more on that topic. Vocal tuning should be done next and ideally the vocal comp and tuning should be done before you record any other backing vocals. In any case, this stuff shouldn’t be left for mixing.

Removing Extra Tracks And Unused Takes – I think that’s pretty self explanatory, if it’s not meant to be in the final mix, get rid of it.

Organizing The Session – The bigger the mix the more important organizing it is. Organizing consists of Naming all the tracks, arranging the order of the tracks in a way that makes sense to you, and coloring the regions and tracks so you can quickly find whatever you need when you have 40 or more tracks in the session this is really important. The last part of organizing is to put in labelled markers for each section of the song.

Creating Buses And Groups – Usually you have a general idea of what you need for buses and automation groups. For buses I usually have stereo sub-mixes for vocals, drums, and guitars. A stereo reverb for instruments and another for vocals. I might also have a bus for chorus and delay depending on the song. I’ll have another bus for parallel compression on the drums. I’ll create those buses, name them and route the tracks as necessary. For automation groups I know I’ll need one for vocals, guitars, and drums at the very least. Setting up these things ahead of time means I can just open the session later and start mixing.

Now that the session is ready to mix, save this session as a copy called “songname_mix”

In professional studios all these things are taken care of behind the scenes by the assistants. I wish I had an assistant to do all this boring stuff.

I guess the point I’m trying to make with this would be: Take the time get your song ready to mix, it’s totally worth it.

Part 2 is here