November 12th – Mixing Continued
Last week we:
 Imported tracks
 Listened through to the song and marked all the sections
 Noted some problems in the recording (one OH channel is unusable,
might need some HPF on certain inputs)
 Assembled a rough mix of just the critical instruments to telling the story of
the song: lead vocal, bass, kick, snare, hat and overhead
 Added a simple plate reverb and tape slap echo as aux tracks with aux
sends on every channel
 Created sub groups for Drums, Bass, Guitars, Keyboards, Lead Vocals,
and BG Vox
This week we’ll:
 Expand on our rough balance by adding
o Some overhead to get a better picture of the snare sound
o Some simple filtering and effects
o A little bit of the room mics to get a sense of the live space
 Dig in to tools like Alloy for more EQ, compression etc.
 Print our mix of just Drums/Bass/Lead Vocal to listen to outside of class
and take notes on
There are often 3 different reasons we might use some processing:
FIX
 To try and mitigate problems in the source recording that we don’t like
FIT

To ensure we can hear each element without them getting in each other’s
way
FEATURE
 To create a new and interesting sound that goes beyond just hearing the
instrument in its original form, but actually creating something unique
Types of processing you might use:
 Filtering
o Low and High Pass filters to only include the parts of the spectrum
that are important to that instrument in that mix
o This is a great thing to do at the microphone or preamp during
tracking, so you may not even need to do this duing mixing. Listen
first!
o Filters can affect phase, so they should still be used judiciously

Equalization
o To FIX problem areas if certain frequencies seem to be jumping out
 This is a great thing to do with microphone placement during
tracking. If something sounds unnatural or off while you’re
tracking, move the mic and see what you can do!
o To FIT elements together
 A full, rich sounding guitar tone may need to be sacrificed to
incorporate a strong vocal sound on top of it
o To FEATURE certain sources
 Filtering out all but a certain range of mid-range frequencies
could make a vocal sound like it’s coming through a radio or
telephone

Compression
o To FIX problems like inconsistent volume during the performance,
or movement back and forth from a microphone
o To FIT sounds together dynamically where the attack of a kick
drum might need to be featured while it’s decay is compressed, but
the attack of the bass guitar needs to be compressed while its
decay comes forward to augment the kick drum
o To FEATURE
 A great big snare sound might come from pulling a lot of the
dynamics out so that it seems to have a prolonged attack
and substantial decay characteristic
 A heavily compressed vocal could feel ‘in your face’ because
even whispered moments will still be very loud
Printing your mix
Now that we have a very basic balance of Drums/Bass/Lead Vocal, let’s print this
mix so that we can listen to it on some different systems that we’re familiar with
(headphones, car, ear buds, laptop speakers, home stereo) and get a better
sense for how the balance is working.
There are two ways to print mixes in Pro Tools
1) Select the entire length of the song, go to the file menu and select
“Bounce”. This will record the entire mixdown onto a two-channel stereo
WAV file. In ProTools 10, this happens in real-time, but you can’t make
any adjustments while it’s happening. In ProTools 11+ (and most other
DAWs) this can happen faster than realt-ime
2) Create a new stereo audio track. This is where we’ll record the mixdown.
a. Assign all the outputs of all the tracks (or aux submasters) to a
stereo bus (let’s say Bus 33-34)
b. Assign the input of our new stereo audio track to be this same bus
c. Assign the output of the new stereo audio track to be our master
output (analog 1-2)
d. Record arm that stereo track, and record the entire length of the
song
e. Some of the advantages of this method are:
i. You can punch in/punch out on the mixdown
ii. You can keep track of multiple mixes (V1, V2, vox up, vox
down, etc.) as separate mixes in different playlists
f. Once you’re ready to export that mix for distribution (or to import
into something like iTunes etc.), select just that region, then go to
the Clips Menu (all the way on the right side of the PT interface)
and select “Export Audio Files”