Mixing Part 1

Today, I'm going to talk about mixing flow. When you've just finished recording 24 tracks of audio, you may be overwhelmed at the thought of mixing such a huge project. I know I was when I first got started in audio production. What you want to do is start with the main rhythm tracks. So, go to your drum tracks and get them sounding pretty close to the way that you want them. Next, move on to the bass. Follow that up with guitars and high frequency instruments, like keys. Lastly, get the vocals and backing vocals in place.

Sometimes, I like to do the drums and bass guitar, and then do vocals before I bring up the guitar levels. Another cool trick is to bus similar tracks to a group channel. What you would do is send something like all the seperate drum tracks to one group track. This is really helpful when you want to raise or lower all of the drums. Instead of raising seperate faders for all of the drums, you can bring up the volume on one master fader for the drums. This saves a lot of time and lets you raise the level of all of the drum tracks exactly equal to your drum mix.

You can also then add overall compression, reverb, or eq to the group channel. You now have a good starting point for that twenty some track mix that seemed like it would be next to impossible to mix. I mixed for some time before I came across a proper working order. So, save yourself a lot of time and get the drums and bass just right before you bring in everything else.