It’s really not that hard to lose control of your mixes. Without proper gain staging and a nice balanced mix with the faders, you’re already fighting an uphill battle. But what if you know you nail those things on every mix and still at some point during the mixing process, things start to go sideways?
More often than not, we lose control because we haven’t given ourselves enough options and flexibility. While I think it’s incredibly important to be decisive and commit to your decisions as you go through each stage of the mixing process, it’s as valuable to include options within your workflow so that if you lose control, you can very easily get yourself back on course.
This video is all about taking control of your mixes, giving yourself flexible options within your workflow and ensuring mixing is a stress-free, fun experience!
Now, I’d love to know…
What do you do to keep your mixes under control?
Leave a comment below!
professional sounding mix every time...
I enjoyed the article today your tagline was very captivating honestly I didn’t expect you to go this direction what initially came to mind when you said do you lose control or some things like saving your mix under a different name so you can revert back to the time where everything was good it sounded great if you got too far off the beaten path experimenting I also thought it might have something to do losing objectivity because you’re not taking enough breaks to allow your ears to rest and reset and I also thought it might have to do with becoming a slave to deadlines through poor planning and procrastination and getting distracted by all of the many bells and whistles online like a new plug-in or the most amazing techniques there is an old adage that goes excuse fail to plan you plan to fail and it definitely applies when mixing by preparing your tracks in advance organizing them into groups color coding them so they’re easy to find and having your favorite plugins instantiated with a favorite preset all set up in advance in a mixing template so you don’t have to waste creative time rebuilding this setup every time you sit down in front of the computer
Thanks Pat. I’m glad you liked it. Everything that you’ve said is valid and goes towards getting a good mix together. I’ve covered a lot of those, so I felt like showing you something different. I’ve really experienced my mixes going wildly out of control at the stage I mention in the video. I hope it helps you.
I also think you might have set a record for the world’s longest sentence! 🙂
Hey I’ll take a win any time I can get one! As I was creating this response I was driving and doing voice to text and after I miss two punctuation stops, it just became comical at that point so I kept going.
I appreciate it. It’s a work of art.
I think Mr. Pat almost reached the achivement (?) of the Portuguese writter José Saramago, who wrote an entire book in just one sentence… (I`m not thinking of reading it) 🙂
About this another great video, say no more: my favourite Ableton Live 9 Lite is also limited to only 2 return tracks!… (that I use with Delay and Reverb by the way)
Guess I will be forced to upgrade sooner than I thought…
PS: really liked this video; think it might be eye-oppening for many people.
“See you soon…”
It’s funny that I’ve been using this practice of sending channels to processors (FX, etc.) and sending that output to a dedicated channel – on an analog board for live sound – for over 15 years, but I tend to neglect to do this in my DAW. Maybe it’s because the plugs are so much more flexible than the analog gear in many ways, but I need to keep this in mind because, as you said, it is a more powerful configuration.
REAPER offers the ability to apply automation to any parameter of any plugin without adding a channel – not sure if PT or most other DAWs have this setup. This also makes it tempting to not bus the FX to another channel, but using that new channel still offers more flexibility.
When there are several tracks for one instrument (say, a DI and 2 cab mics for a guitar), then those can be mixed together on one bus and that bus can be sent to an FX channel to apply the FX chain to the pre-mixed group of channels from that instrument on a separate channel. I am in the habit of putting groups of channels like this on one bus (REAPER calls this organized bus a “folder” and makes this setup visually clean and easy) to keep a larger channel count from being overwhelming or cumbersome to control.
Thanks for the reminder to use FX channels!