6 Easy Steps To Prep Your Tracks For Mixing
Here’s a quick guide on prepping your sessions and tracks for mixing. There isn’t one set way of doing this, but most engineers will most likely appreciate you taking the time to help get things organized and ready to mix by following these simple guidelines.
- No matter what, it’s always best to give your mixer the highest quality files. This means a sample rate of at least 48K and 24 bit, but please use the highest rate you have recorded at.
- It’s important to give your mixer as many options and leeway as possible. For this reason, you should provide them with both “wet” and “dry” stems. This means one set of tracks (aka stems) with your plug-ins and effects, and one without. This is to ensure the mixer has everything they need! Check out How To Export Files From Your DAW for an in depth look at this process.
- If you didn’t record your song in Pro Tools, you can skip this next step! For those that did use Pro Tools, you’ll be submitting your PTX session file as well as audio files, so here’s a few things you can do:
- You can keep your plug-ins and effects in your session.
- Often it’s a good idea to consolidate your session so your mixer will only receive the main playlists, especially if your session is large in size. You can do this by going to File > Save Copy In. While doing this there is an option to click “Main Playlist Only”. This will export a copy of your session to deliver to your mixer! (You can skip this if it’s essential your mixer has the playlists for editing).
- It’s also much appreciated that all tracks are properly and succinctly labeled.
- Double check that all files line up and start from Bar 1 or 0:00:00 in your session!
- Once you’ve exported, please then organize your files into two separate folders for WET & DRY tracks in a folder with the name of your username & song. Labeling the tracks something like this will help your engineer keep them organized:
Email – Song 1 (Instrument – Wet)
6. Please also include an up to date rough mix of the song!
All files can be uploaded to us here.
