One of the many great things you can do when mixing with software, as opposed to the old-school way when you had to use and actual physical mixing board (shock, horror!) is the ability to easily drag, move and color-code tracks around for easy organizing.
In the below video from WinkSound, Michael White shows you how to quickly color code tracks and groups of tracks in Pro Tools. He demonstrates by giving the percussion/drum tracks one basic color scheme, the guitars a different color, and so on.
Of course you can do this in Reaper as well. Simply select a track by right-clicking in the track control panel of a track (or a group of tracks) and selecting Custom track colors in the drop-down menu. Then just pick a color from the palette. This will change the color of the track item and the track title/name, but not the track panel background. To also color the track panel background, go to Options, Preferences, Appearance. Then put a check mark into both Set track label background to custom track colors and Tint track panel backgrounds.
Below is the WinkSound video on color coding tracks in Pro Tools:
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Preparing To Mix The Song – More Listening And Less Doing
Once you’ve mixed enough songs, you start to develop automatic habits that can be real time-savers. For example, You might always arrange the tracks so that the guitars are on tracks 1 and 2, the bass on track 3 and the lead vocal always on track 4, etc. You might then also have automatic habits like immediately reaching for certain effects (EQ, compression and so on) on your tracks and even start dialing up settings for those effects before you’ve really even listened to the mix.
But it might be prudent to stop all that and just listen first before you do anything. Take stock of what you’ve got when everything is raw and do more listening before you do any acting. This is good advice that I will be taking for my next mix since I read Graham Cochrane’s article this morning – Stop And Think Before You Mix.
Check out his article here: http://therecordingrevolution.com/2012/11/12/stop-and-think-before-you-mix/
Using EQ To Fix A Room Mic Problem In A Drum Mix
A very common technique when recording drums is to close-mike – put microphones very close to at least the kick, snare, hi-hat and toms – and also have a room mic or a pair of room mics to capture the sound of the overall drum kit. The room mics are usually several feet away from the drum kit. Then you mix the room mics in along with all the drum mics.
Another common thing to do is put a lot of compression on the room mic, which makes the entire drum mix sound, for lack of a better term, huge. But sometimes using a ton of compression, such as using a ratio of 20:1, on a drum room mic can over-accentuate the sound of the cymbals. Having your drum mix sound like it’s swimming in cymbals pretty much ruins the sound you were going for with the room mic. But you can fix that by using an equalizer (EQ) effect to basically filter out the main frequencies where the cymbals live.
Graham Cochrane shows you how to do that in this very informative video:
Handy Export Options In Pro Tools 10
Here is a video from Avid, makers of Pro Tools, the highlights a few very convenient export tools. The first one is the ability to change the format, bit depth, and sample rate on the fly, before you actually export the mix. The second feature is also nifty for sharing sessions with others. The example in the video has several stem tracks (sub-mixes from the session such as flutes, guitars, voices, etc. If you want to share a session that includes only the stems (as opposed to every single track plus the stems), you don’t have to render the stem tracks and import them into a new session (the old way). All you have to do is select the stem tracks and you can save only the selected tracks as a new session, which will contain only those tracks. I love time-saving tools!
Check out the video below:
Common Mixing Mistakes
I just finished reading an article that talks about the hallmarks of an amateur mixing job. Bobby Owsinski lists seven things that a lot of beginning or amateur mix engineers commonly do (or don’t do) in their mixes that prevents them from sounding truly professional.
I agree with most of the things on his list except maybe the last one, which he calls “Dull and Uninteresting Sounds.” His main beef here is the use of sounds that are either dated, or already used by a lot of other recording artists, like generic Roland synth sounds, the extreme Auto-Tune effect a la Cher and T-Pain. I don’t really think those are mixing issues. You can have a perfectly professional sounding mix using dated and/or common sounds. Obviously T-Pain and Cher had professional mixes using those sounds.
One additional mixing mistake I would add to the list of amateur mixing issues is the lack of proper use of the stereo field. I find that folks who make amateur mixes tend to put everything either too much in the center of of the sound stage, or too far apart, leaving sonic holes or bunching things up too much. I know that my first big “aha” moment was the discovery of all things stereo – what it was, and more importantly, what it wasn’t (panning two versions of the same audio, for instance).
Take a look at Bobby’s list and see if you aren’t making some or all of those same mistakes. Check it out here: http://www.prosoundweb.com/article/defining_characteristics_of_great_vs_amateur_mixes/