Mix Prep Workflow for BETTER Mixes

are you looking to create better quality mixes well by the end of this video you're going to understand part of the reason why you're not and it's in your mix prep let's get started hello everybody my name is Dylan Pines here with another mixing tutorial for you today we're gonna be talking about mix prep in my opinion maybe the most important stage of the entire mix outside of the volume balance this is something that gets so overlooked in so many mixes people who will sort of just get their tracks and just get started you know they'll just run with it honestly that's going to hurt you more than help you if you can do the proper mix prep you know to prep your tracks to actually get started with mixing you know and that's organization that's editing that's a lot of different things you are going to have a much much better mix and also a much faster mix so it's a little boring now but faster mixes better mixes it's kind of like that Abraham Lincoln quote give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe right now all we're doing axe sharpening so a quick disclaimer before I get into my personal process for mix prep this is a lot I'm not gonna have time to explain everything because a lot of the stuff I'm going to be covering is going into a concept that I just simply don't have time to discuss in this video so I'm including videos in the description on all of these different topics that I'm just sort of breezing through without actually discussing you'll see a little note up on screen if a video is available on that subject so that said let's just dive right in so mix prep is really four different phases okay phase one organization phase two editing phase three balancing and enhancing and phase four final prep so let's dive straight into phase one so the first part of phase one honestly you should be getting done with a template and that's coloring your tracks creating your markers getting your routing correct creating your track stacks doing all that kind of stuff all stuff I have up on screen now this is something that you can just create a template to do you don't have to do it every single time during a mix so let's assume you've already got that stuff done we're going to start at the very beginning first off you gotta save and name the track so I'm going to really quickly save this track I'm gonna be using a track called tired friend by the band Adventureland it's out right now and I'm gonna just call this prep next thing we're gonna do is set the tempo the key and the time signature so you can see I've actually already done this before the video cuz I had to call the guys make sure I knew it's 127 BPM in 4/4 it's an E major so you don't really need the key that's really more just for your reference if you need to do any kind of tuning anything like that it's there for you next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make sure that I have a zero measure added into my session and that's because this song might have some pickup notes so I want to make sure that it has some kind of buffer going in to measure one so that I'm not cutting off any of those pickup notes and all I'm talking about is really just dragging this back so that you're able to have this extra little measure so the next thing you're gonna want to do is go up to your preferences you're gonna want to make sure that your buffer size is as high as possible now the reason for that is it basically just allows your computer to handle as much data as possible and you're gonna have a lot of data going on once you start adding all these plugins for your mixing so set that as high as you can you don't be good to go okay so now we're gonna import our audio files this is super simple you're just gonna bring up a folder with all the audio files already in it you're just gonna drag them in nice and easy okay so we've got our audio files all ready to go now so now the next thing we're gonna want to do is to drag them on to their actual tracks the way my template is set up is I have all these tracks already set so I'm really just going to grab and drag so I'm gonna grab all my drums I'm gonna move those down I'm gonna deal with the actual organization in a bit grab my bass I'll just go drag everything together why not okay now I'm going to grab my electric guitars okay moving on to my vocals okay so now we've got all of our different audio files dragged on to the correct tracks so the next thing I'm gonna want to do is to color these audio files to make sure that they match the rest of the coloring so I'm gonna do so I'm just going to select everything and every dog does this differently in logic I'm gonna go up here and I'm gonna click color regions my track color nice and easy simple as that okay next I'm going to gain stage the files so the way I do this is I actually will normalize all of the files to negative 6 DBS just to make sure that they're never clipping I don't want them ever to clip at any point of the song and I'm going to use a vu meter to quickly move them roughly into the right spot okay so I'm gonna go up here and we're going to select normalize region gain I'm gonna select individual regions and a select peak I'm gonna select negative 6 DBS you can see all of them changed now all the gain is set to where it's all peaking at negative 6 decibels perfect now I'm going to really quickly I'm over here I'm gonna go to my output and I've got a vu meter I'm gonna really quickly make sure that all of these are sitting around 0 DB vu okay so now that we've gained staged everything now it's time to do a super quick two minute volume balance this is just for us while we're editing it doesn't have to be perfect at all so I'm gonna do that real quick okay that's sounding pretty good to my ears again doesn't need to really be perfect at all it's just to make sure that I can do my editing okay so the final thing I'm gonna do during phase one is to reorganize all of these markers into the actual song sections I want to be able to make sure that I can quickly move from session to section without having to search and find the intro or the verses of the courses or anything like that so I'm gonna quickly listen through and rename these okay cool so I've gotten that done you can see I've got each of my sections nice clearly labeled clearly colored it's gonna be nice and easy to actually get to where I need to go during the mix so now we're gonna be moving on to Phase two of our mix prep and that is editing now some people don't actually consider this to be mix prep you know I definitely do I am preparing for the best mix I possibly can get so I'm gonna be going in and editing and making sure all these audio tracks sound as good as I can get them so there's a few steps inside of the editing phase and we're gonna be going through each one in order so step one is fixing the phase so you're gonna be looking for stereo track two instruments you're gonna be checking their waveforms and you can see if you can nudge things together to make them feel more full and that's just because when stuff is tracked not everything really sounds all that good in phase the phase might have gotten messed up so all you're gonna do is you're going to go into the tracks you're going to make them super big you're gonna zoom in and you're gonna listen and you're just going to see if there's any parts of any tracks that feel like they are off of each other you want to make sure that you are lining up the peaks and the valleys as close you can because then you're gonna be getting the most accurate sound possible and you're not gonna be getting any phase cancellation so for example I just aligned this part let's listen to what it sounds like now that I've done the phase work [Music] unless it doesn't know what it sounded like before [Music] here's after again [Music] now of course there's still a little bit of phase eNOS in there but it's not nearly as bad as it was earlier and you can even see most of these are quite a bit more lined up than they were before so you're gonna want to make sure that you do that for the entire mix anything that's been stereo tracked so I'm gonna go through and do that right now okay so now that step one is done we're gonna move on to step two which is comping if you don't know what comping is is it's basically just creating the best track out of multiple performances of the same part usually it's used for vocals like if you have seven or eight different vocal takes you're gonna want to listen to each one of them and see if you can cut the best phrases from each so that you have one fantastic vocal now unfortunately for me for this one I have a single vocal track that's all I have I don't actually have any doubles or anything that I can use to create a comp so for this particular song we're not gonna have any copying that we can do but if you recorded your own song at home you probably are gonna have a lot of comps to create that contract so what we're gonna do after this is step three which is cleaning first off we're gonna be doing what's known as strip silence we are trying to get rid of all of the silence in these tracks because a lot of times just noise lives in there maybe the background air-conditioning or maybe it's the sing or making lip smacks and humming their lines stuff like that we just don't really want it in there so all I'm gonna do is go through and get rid of the silence so I'm gonna go over here I'm gonna go to remove silence and I'm going to strip silence from all of these tracks cool so now you can see I've gone through and I've done all my cleaning you can see all the space has been removed all that silence is gone but now there's gonna be a lot of weird chops and clips so first off I'm gonna do some fades just where I know crossfades are not necessary because there's just one region and none of the regions are touching okay so I'm gonna select out and I'm also going to have a fade in as well super short okay and now I'm going to select the ones that I know we're going to need some cross fading because they're touching each other which honestly in this ticular mix is not that many I'm probably gonna do it for my vocals as well great so that's just going to keep all of these different files from clipping there at the end now for these ones that have fade outs I might honestly add a little bit of a longer fade to the end of them just to make sure there's not any weird noise going on cool that all looks good to me so now the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add noise gates on my drums and electric guitars now I was listening through I don't actually think that this particular mix is going to need any sort of electric guitar gating but the drums definitely will because I'm gonna want to get a drier sound on the kicks the snares and the toms so I'm gonna go and do that real quick okay very cool I've got my drums gated so now I'm gonna want to move on and transfer my vocal breaths onto a new track and I do that just because I want to more easily be able to control the volume of my breaths while I'm mixing and I've got a pretty creative way of doing this I've got a video on it it's in the description right now that uses waves deep breath so I'm gonna get this done real quick alright so now I have my track that's only breaths and I've got my track that is no breaths which I will be doing a bounce in place on this in a little bit but I don't want to do it quite yet so now that I've done that I'm gonna do my final step of cleaning I'm gonna D s my vocals and my background vocals but it are pretty subtly cuz sometimes I like to add de-essing later on in the mix as well this is just a massage the S is in the right direction so I'm gonna go down here I'm gonna add my de-esser and I'm gonna go to town hello friend okay so that's all of the de-essing I want to do I've got some subtle de-essing on the lead vocals on the background vocals that's all of my cleaning so now let's move on to step four which is gain automation now all this means is we're gonna be making sure that the gain like the relative level of different sections of different instruments is staying around the same spot it's gonna help us to get much much better compression levels so for example right here probably gonna want to cut this and just overall turn it up a little bit right here we're gonna go in turn that up a little bit just so it's a little bit closer right here I'm probably gonna want to turn this up a little bit probably want to turn these down just a little bit so that they're matching relatively with this one and with the lead vocals I'm probably going to want to go in and change up the gain so that each little phrase is around the same level like I would definitely recommend doing this with some meters particularly like a loudness meter or a vu meter to make sure that they're getting relatively close but for the sake of this video I'm just going to I'm just gonna eyeball it I'm just gonna look at the waveforms you get the waveforms to be around the same level this is just gonna make my compression a lot smoother what I tend to do is I tend to just eyeball it and then I'll go in with meters to make sure that it's all sitting around the same area but for now I'd say that this is looking pretty good and luckily I've already done the fades for this but I'll probably go in and I will set up some more phases to make sure that we're not having any issues here this probably don't want some of these to be crossfades instead of just regular fade-ins and fade-outs cool so that's gain automation there's not really a lot that we have to do for this particular song sometimes there are certain sections that are really quiet you want to make sure you're turning up just so that they are getting caught by the compressor as accurately as possible and then turning them down later on with volume automation but this is a fairly consistent song so we're not really gonna need to do that too much so next up is step 5 in the Edit process and that is rhythmic editing so that's gonna be us going in pocketing our drums making any rhythmic edit fixes any timing fixes and just sort of tightening the the doubles and the harmony so that they sound good with the overall vocals so I'm gonna do this real quick and I'll see you on the other side okay now that we've done our rhythmic timing now we're gonna go on and do our tuning that's step six this is gonna be the last step in the editing process now obviously you can use your das tuning plug-in if it has one there's also third-party tuning plugins like melody noir auto-tune I'm a big fan of Melodyne myself so I'm gonna grab Melodyne and get to work okay great so now that we've finished up our editing phase we're gonna be moving on to Phase three of the mix prep and that is balancing and enhancing and a lot of people don't necessarily do this during the mix prep phase but I'm a big proponent of it now what balancing and enhancing is is it's going in and you know doing a little bit of fixing it or getting rid of some problematic frequencies but it's also going in and adding stuff and like rebalancing the tones of certain instruments so that they sound the best they can when you go into the mix and the reason I do this is I just want to start the mix with the best quality instruments that I can even if that means I'm going to undo a lot of that stuff with EQ later on now this is what people in the old million-dollar studios would do anyway it's called pre tape EQ basically the engineer would make sure that they were getting the best quality sounds from their microphones even if that meant adding EQ before it was even recorded you know baking that EQ in so we're gonna be going in we're gonna do a little bit of fixing a little bit of enhancement and we're just going to get the best possible sounds that we can so let's get started with a little fixing now the main two things that I will fix during this step is basically cutting out any sort of low and Rumble that isn't useful and an instrument as well as searching for instrument resonances you know finding a resonant frequency cutting it so for the first one for example I'd be going in here and I'd be adding an EQ plug-in so just go in here and I would add a high-pass filter and I'd sweep it up you know until it wasn't affecting the tone at all but I was taking out a lot of that sort of low-end noise that just lives down at the bottom man I mean plans [Applause] [Music] usually somewhere between 50 and 100 Hertz is where you want to live with these kinds of filters so that was honestly simple enough and I would want to go and do that with most everything obviously not my base instruments not the the kick in the bass and stuff like that I will say you want to be careful about doing that kind of filtering on individual microphones if I have multiple microphones that all recorded the same instrument this is something but I want to do on the bus and that's because there could be some strange phase problems that happen in between eq's that are recording the same thing where the e cues are set up differently so I would just make it easy throw it on the bus add it there and slide it up rather than adding it to the individual channels now I would do the same thing with the next step of the fixing process and that is going to be cutting room residences and this is of course just if we find any room residences your track might not have any but a lot of tracks have just some really aggressive you know ring maybe in the snare or in the guitar tracks maybe even in the vocals themselves so let me listen through this real quick and see if I can find any [Music] so here's one that I just found check it out [Music] do that like that's going on in there I was able to find it right here so that's something that I'm gonna want to cut so I'm gonna just take that out narrow my bandwidth [Music] now it's gone so I'm not getting any of those resonances it's a lot cleaner now if I was to go back and forth you'd really hear a difference [Music] [Music] one of them you just see that and the other one you absolutely can [Music] so I would be doing that with any instrument that was tracked in a room no if it's to sit the sizer it's probably a little bit less necessary but if it's recorded in a room room resonances are possible so I definitely would want to go and clean that up throughout this mix as well so now that we've used our EQ to clean up some of the tracks let's move on to a little bit of enhancement now there's a few different things that we're going to do to enhance these tracks while we're doing our initial mix prep the first is using analog emulations to add some of that warmth some of that spice and to emulate the signal flow of an analog studio I've got a great video on what all this means how to do it that I'm leaking down in the description below so I actually have a premade channel strip that will do this I'm gonna bring that up okay so let's go ahead and add these to all of our tracks okay great so we have now added all of our analog emulations so it's time to move on to the next step in this enhancement process and that is balancing the mic levels of any stereo instruments so I'm going to go into one of my stereo miked instruments for example this electric guitar and right now you can see that all of the different microphones are all set to the exact same level so I'm going to mix them in together so that I can get the best tone possible so I'm just going to solo this and we're gonna listen [Music] that sounds pretty good to my ear and then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pan these mics left and right just to get a wider stereo image once I'm actually in the mix I can make it mono if I want it to be a mono track but I want to start off with a stereo image because eventually not to give you any spoilers but we are going to bounce all of this down to a single track [Music] cool just like that so I'm gonna go through and do that with the rest of my instruments as well great so I have balanced my mic levels I've done some of my initial panning so finally we are gonna shape each instrument stone with pre-tape EQ and that's really simple we're just gonna be going in adding just a little bit very wide EQ just to nudge our tone in the direction that we want so we're starting off our mix with our best foot forward so for example let me grab the solo right here turn this on [Music] so what could I do to enhance this and again I'm wanting just very very broad strokes nothing huge [Music] [Laughter] [Music] he's a little cut around 300 probably [Music] you [Music] real little boost around a thousand [Music] is the little boost around 2k and now I might go in and you know maybe you grab my digital EQ right here now that I've added a little bit of nice saturation and make a few more cuts like right there to make me feel a little bit too aggressive [Music] something like that so you can see we're just nudging it in the right direction I'm not doing anything aggressive I'm not doing anything more than like three D B's it's stuff that if I got into the mix and I felt like it was too much it would not be hard to undo so I'm gonna go through and do that for the rest of this mix so now that we've done that we're gonna be moving on to phase four which is our final prep this is really where we're just doing our final bounces a little reorganizing stuff like that and then we're gonna get started with our mix so first off we're going to want to bounce each bus in place so we have a single stereo file so for example for this I'm gonna want to bounce this track in place so that I don't have three different individual microphones I just have one file and I've got all my effects that I've put on here so far I'll have those baked in to start the mix off right so in order to do that every single da has a different way of doing it I'm going to go down to bounce and then bounce track in place and I'm gonna call it eg1 balanced and now I have exactly the same thing that was coming through here but I don't have to deal with any of these anymore now there are a few exceptions to this for example I'm going to want to bounce my snares together my overheads together stuff like that but I'm not gonna want to bounce the entire drums together because I'm probably going to do some processing individually on each drum that's pretty much true with any complex instrument if you have a complex instrument with multiple different instruments that are all being recorded together you usually don't want to bounce them together before the mix but for this for example I probably would want to bounce the snare together because I like sort of how the the overall balance is I've got them working pretty decently together I made sure that I got the phase right so I'm going to bounce this in place cool so I'm going to really quickly do that for the rest of this mix okay so we've gone in and done all of our bounce in place now what do we do what do we do with these old tracks well what I would suggest is creating a little dummy folder which I have down here named edits and I'm actually gonna drag this all the way back up to the top just to make this easier and I literally drag in all of my edited files into this folder and then I make sure that all of them are turned off and that allows me to go back and re-edit stuff during the mix if I absolutely have to like if I found out that I did a particularly at it wrong or something like that I have access to it but it's not clogging up my view it's not keeping me from actually doing the mix so all I'm gonna do is just drag all of these different old busses up into here okay now that I've done that I'm going to go in here I'm going to turn all of them off just to make sure that they're not being processed it's gonna save us some cpu now check this out I'm going to minimize that I'm going to hide it which I've done by hitting this little H button now check out the difference look how few tracks there are now there was almost a hundred tracks and now we only have one two three four five 17 18 19 20 19 or 20 tracks that's it from almost a hundred a little over a hundred to nineteen or twenty that is really really cool so now that I've got all of this down time to do some reorganizing so I want to do some recoloring of all these tracks because it did actually change the color you know originally I had them a brighter red brighter orange stuff like that so for me I like to go in and just fix all of this just because it's gonna bother me if I don't okay and then I'm going to color all the tracks by region color great so that's all fixed up now next I'm going to separate the vocals into verse chorus and bridge sections that's just because I usually do different processing on different parts of the song to do that it's super simple all I'm going to do is cut out certain sections and I'm going to move them to different parts of the song okay so for instance I've got my vocal chorus track down here so I'm gonna grab this I actually need to create a breath track as well so I'm gonna go down here and I'm going to move this I've got one for the bridge as well and then let me make my first one great so now I've got all of my different vocal tracks split into verses choruses and so on Oh in fact this actually needs to be down here so next thing we want to do is I am going to turn down all of my faders because I want to be able to start this mix off fresh I'm not gonna be rolling off of the volume balance I did before because that was a really rough volume balance the only thing I really cared about with that was being able to hear everything whereas now I want to actually set my volume balance up nicely okay now that all of my faders are down now we're going to start adding some plugins to our soon-to-be mix first of all I know that I'm going to want to mix in mono for the first part of this so I'm going to go over here I'm gonna add a game plug-in I'm gonna turn mono on now that's just going to allow me to mix in mono just so that I'm getting a clearer view of what I need to cut with an EQ to get rid of any kind of masking problems and then finally we have one last step and that is to save this as a new file we want this to say tired friend mix draft one perfect and now it's time to mix it's time to start going in throwing faders up getting an initial volume balance and ultimately making your songs sound the best you possibly can what you're gonna be able to do way better now that you have fully prepared your tracks for mixing so you've now learned how to do mix prep but here's the thing that's just one small piece of the puzzle when you're trying to get mixes that are ready for the public you're gonna get this perfect with practice you could still end up with an amateur sound and that's just because there's so many mistakes that you can make in other areas of the mix so that's why Rob mazes the founder and musician on a mission the guy you've seen in half the videos on this channel well you put together a free workshop where he shares the seven steps to making radio ready music at home he's created a brand new approach to home mixing and recording that's gonna help you do all of this stuff way faster and honestly it hasn't just worked for him over 36,000 people have already been through this workshop and they've seen results in their music in just a few days so if you wanna see results that fast it's your turn if you want to learn the exact seven steps that will take your mixes to a professional standard in under a year and keep you from wasting precious time and money and effort on the wrong things then go and watch the free workshop now just click the link on screen or in the description down below to get your own access it's totally free and seriously you're gonna love it and if you're new here don't forget to subscribe we make tutorials and tips just like this one every week on this channel we'd love to help you grow well that's gonna be it from me this has been Dillon pines with musician on a mission and remember create regardless [Music]

Channel: Musician on a Mission

Views: 17,139

Keywords: musician on a mission, rob mayzes, mix prep, home studio, home recording

Id: qi4fi2aomVg

Length: 32min 28sec (1948 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020