Chapter 1 Excerpt

“Mix Preparation”

Setup Prep

This is the “housecleaning” stage where you get everything in the session nice and tidy before you actually commit to the actual process of mixing. The idea is to make everything easy to locate during the mix.

Make A Copy

As before, it’s best to make a copy of the session that’s designated as the “mix” (“songtitle mix”) so it’s easy to see and locate at a later time, and also keeps your previous session safe if you ever have to go back to it.

Delete Empty Tracks

Empty, unused tracks take up space in your edit and mix windows and aren’t doing anything useful. It’s OK to have empty tracks that you’re saving for an instrument when you track or overdub, but if you’ve gotten this far without using them, you don’t need them now. Eliminate them.

Deactivate And Hide Unused Tracks

If there are tracks that are copies or ones that you know you won’t be using, deactivate them and hide them so they don’t get in the way. Just hiding them isn’t enough in that they’ll still soak up system resources that might be needed later, especially if you use a lot of plug-ins. Make sure you deactivate them.

Arrange The Track Order

Although the track order isn’t critical, it will help you move the mix along faster if like instruments are grouped together. This means all the guitars are next to each other, drums and percussion next to one another, and the vocals are together.

Color-Code The Tracks

If your DAW app allows it, color-coding your tracks also makes things a bit easier to find. This means that all the drums would be one color, guitars another, the vocals another and so on.

Insert Section Markers

Section markers are one of the big time savers in any DAW. Insert a marker just before each new section (usually a bar or two before works well) as well as any other points in the song that you might want to quickly find during mixing, like drum fills, accents or even the half-way point in a section.

Label The Tracks

Many workstations automatically assign a name to new tracks that have just been recorded, but they hardly ever relate to track. So you don’t mistake one track for another and adjust the parameters of the wrong track during the mix, clearly label all the tracks. If the track’s name currently is something like “gt012”, label it something easy to read like “guitar” or “gtr.” You’ll be happy you did later.

Set Up Groups

Groups are often overlooked but they’re extremely useful during mixing for a number of reasons (see figure 1.4). First of all, groups allow you to separate elements of the mix in order to make the mix easier to adjust later. Secondly, many times it’s a lot easier and better sounding to compress or put an effect on an entire group rather than each individual instrument (although sometimes both works pretty well).

Typical groups would pertain to any element that has more than one instrument or track, like Drums, Guitars (if there’s more than one or they’re in stereo), Lead Vocals (if there’s a double), Background Vocals, Horns, Strings And Synths.

By setting the groups up ahead of time and assigning the particular channels to them, your mix will be both faster and smoother.

Set Up Effects

Most mixers have a standard effects starting point for mixing. One that I’ve seen that works well even for tracking and overdubs is:

1. •For drums - a reverb using a dark room set to about 1.5 seconds of decay with a pre-delay of 20 milliseconds
   

2. 
   

3. •For all other instruments - a plate with about 1.8 seconds of decay and a pre-delay of 20 milliseconds
   

4. 
   

5. •For Vocals - a delay of about 220 milliseconds
   

It's amazing how well these settings work without any tweaking, but to make everything fit better, you can time the delay and pre-delays to the song, but keep the parameter close to the settings above. For instance, if the only delay in the 220 ms region is a 232 ms quarter-note-triplet, that's the one to use. The decay is set so that a snare drum hit just about fades out by the time the next one comes around.

Another common setup is two reverbs and two delays, set like:

1. •Short Reverb - a room program with the decay set from .5 to 1.5 seconds of decay with a short pre-delay timed to the track
   

2. 
   

3. •Long Reverb - a plate or hall program with a decay set from 1.5 to 4 seconds of decay and a pre-delay of as little as 0 or as much as 150ms timed to the track (depends on your taste and what’s right for the song)
   

4. 
   

5. •Short Delay - a delay of about 50 to 200 milliseconds
   

6. 
   

7. •Long Delay - a delay from about 200 to 400 or milliseconds
   

Of course, this is only a starting point. You might find your own particular starting point uses a lot more effects, or you may prefer to add effects as the need arises during the mix. Regardless, if you have at least some effects set up before you start the mix, you won’t have to break your concentration to set them up later.

Assign The Channels - There are some tracks that you know ahead of time will be assigned to a certain effect (like the drums or snare to a short reverb) so you might as well set that up now as well. Don’t forget the panning.

Set Up Compressors And Limiters

Once again, there are some channels that you pretty much know ahead of time that will need a compressor inserted like the kick, snare, bass and vocal. Best to insert it into the signal chain of the channel now, but leave it bypassed until you decide you need it.

if you’re a proponent of mixing from the beginning with a stereo buss limiter, now’s the time to insert that as well. We’ll cover stereo buss compression by itself in chapter 5.