In this section we'll take a broad overview of the mixing process step by step will the actual tools will be discussed in the next section called the tools. And if I mentioned certain things in passing, like, say transient processes for example, don't worry if you don't know anything about them because the tool section breaks apart the tools the tread, but in this section here will give you a roadmap of how to arrive at your perfect mix. Okay, so there's many stages of mixing, but the very first one I would really stress is to organize your workflow. Now you might be a naturally organized person, and if so, you're probably gonna love this section because it naturally fits into how you see the world. If you're on the other camp, who perhaps don't see organization as being particularly important. Let me sell you on this one thing.

Now if you're looking into the interaction between Your lead vocal and maybe nine different background vocals. Wouldn't it be a much better workflow if they were organized right next to each other, and perhaps have been color coordinated. Now, I know that the neat and tidy crew right now are loving this idea. But the benefit is not just being kind of neat and tidy. It just allows you to make very, very quick decisions and find the stuff that you need. Immediately instead of waiting through a ton of tracks that aren't labeled right you trust me you do not want that kind of workflow.

Mixing is a taxing process on your brain and in the best of circumstances, it can be mind numbing, if you have to stop and dig through a pile of tracks that make no sense to you. Anytime you have to stop and do tedious work, it tends to get you out of kind of your creative zone. So I normally and in pretty much every mixing You know, starts the mixing process off with your basic housekeeping. You know, I kind of take off my creative hat here, brew a cup of tea or a cup of coffee and sort through everything so that it presents as simply and cleanly as possible. So let's see how. So here we go.

We have a song here with a bunch of tracks here, here are all our MIDI tracks, I tend to put my mini tracks up top, and then my audio tracks down here, I think I have the 11 MIDI tracks and then about 25 audio tracks things like a full drum kit down here. We have a bunch of vocals, some guitar parts up here as well. Now everything's the same color everything is kind of named pretty quickly. In fact, a lot of these been automatically named if I can move over to our mixer. So in this particular da w in reason, we have a either the sequencer view or the mixer view that This is pretty typical in a lot of da W's here. Now let's see what the problem is right here.

That's a lot of knobs and a lot of faders. I don't really know which one is which, if we go along the bottom here, kick, snare top. Okay, all of this seems pretty good here. Eight corners. I don't know what that is. Rose, I'm assuming it's electric.

Electric piano, then some since here is a bass there. I probably want to put that over with my rhythm section here. A bunch of vocals. We've got some guitars there and then a bunch of other vocals here. I don't know which Burchell is which, and they're not really organized and they're not color coded. So there's basically three things I like to do when I start a session is first name things like for example, here, this is a the name of a patch that was brought up and in a lot of da W's.

As soon as you bring up a patch, it will name that track, that patch That doesn't really help me out. I don't know what kind of part that is. Maybe that's an arpeggiated part, I'm not sure I'll chase that down the vocals here, all of these were just automatically as I started adding more and more vocals, they just you know automatically added it to vocal eight vocal nine vocal 10. But what parts of these which are tena which are soprano parts which are which doubles which triples I mean all that stuff, I have no idea what that what that is. I also don't have all my vocals together. And I also don't have things color coded so there's basically three things I like to do.

I like to name everything you know, there's a lot of this is named pretty well. I certainly need to name these what actual vocal parts there were. And then I need to organize them by dragging them across and to kind of logical formation from left to right. I typically go from drums and bass and guitars and in vocals all the way over to the right this Looks like there's some other drum parts over here. So I first name them next organism and in the third, I will start to color code them. Let's start out with a naming.

Okay, I've gone ahead and rename some of these now these vocals will start making sense. They need to be dragged in order though, but this was an art part. Let me just solve this and this is what it sounded like. So rather than having some kind of obscure patch name there, now I know that's the art part. So if I'm hearing that too loud, my mix I can just go grab that. I will make a lot more sense when I start bringing all my synth parts all my keyboard parts together, as well as all my vocals together and all of that kind of stuff.

I went across here, and this was called something else but this is the electronic drums and I doubled a very low kick drum right here. Just goes So that just comes in on the on the choruses. So normally it would just be playing like this. And then in the choruses it just gives it a bit more on right there. But now I know what all of these are. In fact, I've named all of these across here.

Now it's time for me starting to start to drag them into sections. I normally start out with my rhythm section on my left hand side, and then you know, based on some guitars and keys and then all my vocals across here, so let's do that. So now we have everything in order and it's so much easier to see I have my all my electronic drums here, then my real drums there, followed by bass then guitars, all my keyboards together, and then my lead vocals and then all my backing vocals going from lower end register the higher register, and if they're double or triple A name things like bgv one, a big v One big one that just had a double part, this part had a triple part. And this part had triples as well there. So it's starting to be a lot quicker if I know I just want to get over to my drums, I go straight over the left hand side vocals, I go straight over the right hand side.

So it's starting to look a little bit better. Let's take it to the next level by doing some color coding. Now, before we start color coding these, this will obviously be different the actual method of doing that, and da, W two da, W maybe even different versions. But so we won't get into all of that. I'll leave that on to you if you just want to look into your documentation of whatever you're using in terms of how you color code things. And is there any international agreement on sounds, a child's colors and all that knows really not.

But whatever you do, just stick with the same one that you use all the time. I tend to just kind of things, think of things That kind of closer to the bottom in terms of the rhythm section to be a darker color. So I'm going to select all of these, which are my acoustic drums or right click on the channel color here. I'm just going to pick a brown color here, which is say the OCA right here. So now I have all of my electronic drums here, I simply do my Did I say electronic. So these are all my acoustic drums.

If I go over here to my electronic drums, I tend to put them a darker color. So that would be the next one down, which would be brown. So I mean, just see what we've done already. That by naming everything right, and then putting things in order, but also in just now knowing if if I want to do something on that on the electronic drum, bang, I go straight there. There's a visual representation of that as being the electronic drums and then these being kind of related the drums, they're a little bit lighter in color. And then you can go ahead and just color all the rest of here.

You You can use your own judgement what you'd like to color but try to color things in the same kind of scheme every time you do it so that way you can see every session and really understand what's going on. So let me do this off camera and we'll come on back. Okay, check it out. Now it's a lot more clearly you know exactly where things are going electronic drums, we've got acoustic drums, synth bass, some guitars, they're kind of related, right, darker blue and lighter blue, all of my keyboards across here, my lead vocals I typically put in red. And then if you have a lighter red or an orange, just like that few background vocals. So Isn't this a whole lot more clear, just to know exactly where to get anything.

And if you go over into looking for all of your tracks, most da W's will follow all those track colors. If not, you might need to right click or something like that. And I normally make them the same colors as I've had them over here. So it's just a lot quicker now. Nothing has happened in the mix as of yet. I mean, listen to this, this needs a lot of work.

It just seems all clumped together, there's nothing, there's no life to it this certainly nothing's been panned and mixes way out. There's a lot of problems with this mix, but now just spending all that time just organizing everything, it'll just make it so much quicker when we start to do a rough mix and then start soloing some of these tracks and really going after some of the problems. So organize your tracks I cannot over estimate this I mean if you have like five or six tracks, it's not that big a deal. But right now I think I have 35 tracks isn't like that. So it is really worthwhile spending the time that that little bit of time to organize your tracks so that we can get cracking and and do some work. Well, I hope you can see the benefit here, it's a really a great way to spend time so you don't have to spend that time later on when you just want to be in creative mode rather than, you know what I would kind of call housekeeping mode.

Now, a further way to help with housekeeping is to build up templates in whatever da w you use. I normally have templates with a bunch of effects sense already set up in my favorite da w with my favorite plates, delays, a whole slaps parallel compression, crushed basses. Basically if I use a bunch of different effects and earnings, I normally spend time creating this in an empty song and then save that as a template. Now, each da W is going to have a different way of setting this up, but just need to look at your documentation about how you save templates. Now, if I'm mixing someone else's session, I'll load up that empty template and then import those tracks in if I'm recording my own And I'll start out with with one of those templates. But either way, I would highly encourage you to start looking at ways that you can kind of templatized your projects.

Now, assuming that we've done all of that, I would then go through and start building a rough mix in a rough mix. I'm just basically trying to adjust levels and pants to kind of see what I've got. I typically start with drums and then add the lead vocal in the background vocals, and then fill in the mix around those drums and vocals. And it's in this process that you kind of just start to understand which of the important parts of your mix and the importance has a lot to do with the genre of music. Now, we can start you can start with assumption here, that the lead vocal will always be the most important part but if I was mixing a pop or a folk song in the lead, Michael, lead vocal might even be more important in a rock Song, you know, the guitars would be driving the song and a hip hop song, it'll probably be a, you know, a drum driven song.

Now you you want to keep note of any instrument playing kind of the app or the end notes in a reggae song, for example, what is important in that genre. So basically, the rough mix gives you time to understand the song and what the producer had in mind when the song was recorded. Obviously, if you're doing somebody else's song, go through any notes, with those songs, if that came with them. The next step is identifying problems within your mix and just fixing those then then could be a myriad of these, but let's just look at a four quick ones right here. If there's any mistakes in playing, and you have the players sitting around the place, and obviously you can punch in. If it's your song, you can obviously punch in as well.

But if you're, the people who have performed those tracks have gone, then you might need to scrounge around See if you can copy and paste. Obviously if it's something Within one of the courses start, you know, scavenging around in some of the other courses and see if you can find that, you know, half a measures like that. And then you can just bring that over from one course to another and just do that copy and paste. Now, if there's been any peaks, hopefully the person who's been recording this has been very careful in terms of not distorting anything, if something is distorted, and it's distorted for a long period of time, there may be nothing you can do unless you can go back and copy and paste. But if it's a very momentary thing, you might want to go in through some of the editing and see if you can just kind of mask that or even just drawing the waveform or something like that.

If it's a lot of peaks, then you're probably need to go back and rerecord that. Now on the other hand, if it's very low levels, you might want to check out the clip gains and just bump them up in the editing process. Normally, in any da w you have clip gains so that you You can just bump that up in the editing view. And that way you can kind of bring it up so that you don't have to deal with that in your mixer. And then finally, EQ problems if anything's not sounding great to you if there's some real funkiness in you know in the snare or real boom Enos in the kick drum, and boxiness, then just go after those more learn about that in a little while. But this is not the time to be creative.

This is mainly just to go through and just find things that really bug you. And here's the way I do it. When I'm playing it back. If you solo every track all the time, then you can really start chasing your tail and spending hours and hours chasing down minutiae that actually doesn't even come up when you have it up in the mix. So I normally play things back. If it doesn't bug me then I won't chase after it.

And then we can just go on from there. Now once all the problems have been fixed, then we can go on And start doing things a little bit more creative things like could we build the vocals with some parallel compression, maybe build a parallel crushed lead vocal to blend back into the mix, or maybe use some transient designers to beef up your Toms. Add some triplet delays to your guitar pitches, so many cool ways to make your tracks pop and kind of sound better. And we'll look at all the tools in the next section and see them in practice a little bit later on. So once we've organized our workflow, we've built a rough mix, noting the important parts fixed out some problem areas and added some creative touches. And then we build a mix, you know, just one section at a time until we have a static mix that we work from start to end.

The only problem is that there are hills and valleys and arrangements and there are parts of tracks that sometimes get lost from time to time so we need to make notes as to how to ride The mix as the timeline just moves along. Now you can do this manually with, you know, your faders with the mouse or whatever. But most da W's allow you to automate not only just the faders, but almost anything in your your mix. Now once those changes have been noted and perhaps automated, you can then mix out a stereo file stereo file in a high quality format like a WAV file or an AI FF file. So here's the overview of the mixing process. We first start out by organizing and you might think that's a really lightweight thing to do.

But I hope I hopefully I've made the case that once you organize, then you can really get creative later on rather than you know, vacillating back and forth between the creative world and then the kind of the housekeeping world get your housekeeping done first. And that way, all your your, your bandwidth in terms of your creative control, things like that can be unleashed and you don't have to get back in all that That housekeeping. And once you've organized everything, then you'll go ahead and set up your rough mix things like your, your pan, your levels, maybe a little bit of effects. The great thing about the rough mix is that you can kind of see what you're dealing with. And then you can also find out what the really important parts of the mixer obviously, if it's a pop song isn't that most songs gonna be the vocal if it's an instrumental, what are the lead parts in that instrumental that you're really going to listen to.

Going through your rough mix allows you to really make notes and kind of see what you're you're dealing with and kind of zero and things you're gonna have to work on. And then certainly, you're going to start working on things, fix your problems first. If anything is bugging you, then go through and attack it. If it's not bugging you that much, then maybe just just leave it alone. Sometimes you can solo too many tracks and get down to nitty gritty and try and just chasing your tail and all these things that actually probably won't even Need to get fixed if everything's brought up in the mix, but fix your problems first and then you can get on to the creative things, things like your effects. And anything you want to do to kind of add things to the fixing is kind of getting rid of problems.

Creative is kind of adding to your mix. And then you get down to your actual process of mixing which includes things like automation and things like that.