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 . . . [read]
