Recording - November 2011 - 56

Just as good guitarists or keyboardists don’t always have to look at their instruments to find every note they want to play, you shouldn’t have to keep scrutinizing the screen for every track when you are creating a mix. Whether you are mixing with a mouse, digital controller, or analog console, having a solid setup routine for your mix sessions will allow you freedom to create a better mix. There are two basic approaches to lining up your tracks for the mix sessions: You can organize your tracks from the bottom up (Figure 1) or from the top down (Figure 2), whichever makes the most logical sense to you.

Organize Your Mix Session
Can you improve the sound of your mixes just by organizing your workspace? Yes!
By Pat Bautz I mix a lot of projects for other people, and based on what I often see in the files I receive, I’d like to point out a few practical matters where session organization is concerned. These items may look simple enough, but not everybody seems to realize how much easier the creative workflow of a mix can become if these practicalities are implemented.

Color coding and track names You will notice in the illustrations that instrument groups are color coded for easy identification. Label each track yourself, don’t use the automatically generated name from the DAW. I receive a lot of sessions with track names that are too long to work in a DAW, for example, “Electric guitar right chorus”, or numbers that are generated by the DAW, such as “001_ Electric guitar right chorus”. Keep them short and precise—most DAWs can handle track labels of up to nine letters or digits. Because of the combination of color coding and track naming, you can even use the same or a similar name on two tracks of different instrument groupings without getting confused. Here are a couple of common track naming examples: Acoustic Guitar left or right: AC L – AC R Electric Guitar left or right: EG L – EG R Track groups and aux bussing You will notice in Figures 1 and 2 that after each group of tracks, an aux bus has been added. The instrument/vocal groups are routed to each of the buses that are next to them on the console. This allows the engineer to not only treat each individual instrument or vocal, but to treat the related tracks as a unit. Treating them as a unit has many advantages, such as compressing or eq’ing the group as a whole and reducing the load on your CPU. Usually the only instrument not bussed is the bass, or maybe another single instrument. Bus naming is another setup routine that will help your workflow. Naming your busses is simple and saves time when assigning individual instruments or grouped instruments to reverbs and delays. Comment fields, markers that make sense Use the comments section of your DAW, it will help you or any future engineer understand vital information or the intent of the artist or producer for each track. For a better workflow, always add marker/memory locations, which follow the arrangement of the song, markers such as Intro, Verse 1, Chorus 1, Verse 2, Solo, etc. This will save time when you (or someone else who gets to work on that session) are trying to locate a specific part of the song. Shave the phase The first thing I do after laying out the session is to check the phase relationship between drum tracks. Because a drum kit has multiple microphones recording the same source, from different

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

RECORDING NOVEMBER 2011

Recording - November 2011

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