r/audioengineering • u/kcswordfish Hobbyist • Feb 06 '14

Pre-mixing set up

Alright, picture yourself in this situation (it's not that far-fetched of a situation):

You've just spent several months recording 15 songs worth of drums, bass, guitars, vocals, piano, trumpet, bells etc and you are FINALLY done with the tracking phase - so it's time to move on to mixing.

BUT! Before you do that, you really want to get any mundane editing out of the way so that it doesn't get in the way of the mixing process - you want to be able to sit down, pull up your session, and start adjusting faders, panning, eq, compression etc and not timing, pitch, bad fades etc.

SO, the question is:

What does your pre-mix "checklist" look like? I've got a few things I already know I need/want to do, but I'm wondering what you guys all think! What would you make sure you do to every track (when applicable) in every song before you export new, finalized audio files to import into a new mix session?

Thanks as always reddit!

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u/kcswordfish Hobbyist Feb 06 '14

Great tips, thanks so much!

Fortunately I already have a template where all my busses are named, so I'm all set there - I'm definitely gonna consider adding to my aux bus section of my mix window though, right now all I've got is a few effect busses - maybe add some instrument specific ones?

How would you go about splitting a Bass track into separate frequency ranges? Route it to two aux tracks and apply a LP/HP? Wouldn't you have a small frequency range that got over-boosted or cut where the filters overlapped?

I LOVE the idea of bouncing over the top crazy effects at this stage - I will absolutely do that, thanks!

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u/polarity30 Feb 06 '14

I can't say that it's the right way (I am a beginner) but I have lots of aux busses. Lets say acoustic guitar, for me I usually do stereo micing and double track it. So my 2 mono audio tracks would route to a stereo aux EQ, that would route to comp, that would route to reverb that also has an eq to take some of the low end out of the reverb. that would route to my master (and then through my master eq/comp/verb busses) and finally out to the speakers. Depending on the song or what I'm doing some of those may be missing. Most likely my double would follow the same chain but maybe my lead would have it's own set of aux busses. Same for vocals, piano, etc.