[cowparsleyman]

..sounds just like a DJ Crew name...could be cool...

Anyway, I just want to know a little about your Mixing Organisation

Is it really organised, do you both creating Groups for your instrument groups? and colour code them, are they always the same colour Green for Gtr, Violet of Vocals, Red for Drums?
Do you put your sub mix busses to the left ot the right of the instruments they group? and colour code them?

Are the aux busses all together and are they always colour coded the same way?

Do you create templates so you can pull all this in without having to faff about with it every time?

Do you leave notes on tracks to remind you what needs to be done on it next time?

Or can't you do it because each song is different, and you want to keep your options open, or maybe you didn't know about it, or your DAW doesn't support it, or maybe you just don't care.

Just curious really.

[Boydie]

I am ultra organised -  but I leave room for on the fly experimentation

Coming from SONAR, where you couldnt mix up tracks & busses I have retained the general discipline of having all tracks to the left and all busses to the left

However, the added flexibility of STUDIO ONE has added a few refinements

Generally, from left to right (and top to bottom in track view), my track setup is:

Reference tracks - these bypass all effects and busses and go directly to my “MASTER FADER” (more on this later). I load any reference mixes from clients (so I can line them up and A/B them) or any reference mixes I want to emulate the sound/feel of

Bass - I like my bass next

Audio drum loops / percussion

Drums - usually a VST (addictive drums 2) but could also be multitrack drums

Rhythm Guitars

Lead Guitars

Acoustic guitars

Lead Vox

Backing Vox

Piano/Keys

Strings/Pads

Synths

Horns

I then have a blank track colour coded WHITE, which is to define where my tracks stop and my busses start

I work a bit differently with busses and my flow tends to go right to left

My final bus for output is called the “MASTER FADER” - this does not have any effects on it so it is a bus where I can send my reference tracks to directly and is also a final MASTER FADER bus that I can send my MASTER BUS to. My MASTER BUS is where I do my mastering effects and send all sub busses to

I will then have MASTER DRUMS, MASTER GUITARS, MASTER BASS, MASTER VOX, etc. Busses as a final grouping for groups- this is especially useful for final mixing of overall levels or doing a “no vocals” version of a mix

My effects busses all then reside at the far right with different reverbs and delays that I can mix in to using sends

I leave for “ad hoc” busses or VCA groups by mixing them in with the tracks on the left hand side

Eg if I have 3 dirty rhythm guitars and 2 clean guitars I may create an additional “Dirty Git” bus and “Clean Git” bus so I can process these sub-groups together. I might want to use a bus compressor to “glue” my 3 dirty guitars together. I would then still send these sub-busses to the MASTER GUITARS bus to maintain my organisation and still allow my to create a “guitar heavy” version of a mix by just increasing a single fader

All tracks are colour coded (bass = brown, drums = yellow, guitars = green, vocals = violet) and I also use different shades to represent intensities/importance - eg lead vocals are dark violet and backing vocals are light violet, lead guitars are very dark green, dirty guitars are green and clean guitars are light green

It is often these little things that make all the difference diving around a very busy mix!

[shadowfax]

My Template is...various instrumental tracks, Guitar, synth/strings, bass, piano, routed to their own seperate group tracks which are routed to a make space buss, with a dynamic eq (which is side chained to the vocal)  this surpresses the mid range of the instruments slightly whenever the vocal is active, (the bass is excluded from this though) the make space buss is routed to the master bus which goes to stereo out..
vocals are routed to their own buss which then go directly to stereo out because I don't want effects on the master bus to affect the vocal..
drums routed to their own group channel..always Jamstix 4 triggering EZ drummer which then goes to the master buss,
all groups color coded and kept to the right..instruments to the left..
drums are in a seperate mixer which I call up when needed..don't like to see too many tracks at once..I get confused
all effect tracks go to an effect bus with high and low pass filter on it..this goes to stereo out

probably forgotten summat but I think that's it...

best, Kevin

[Skub]

I'm afraid I'm not gonna blind anyone with the science of my approach to mixing a track. 

When I'm done recording,I listen in mono and adjust levels if anything jumps out at me. That's about it.

When I'm happy with the mix,on the stereo out I add eq,compression and a limiter for a simple master. (pomps tipped me to the compressor and limiter,I don't have many aftermarket plugins,mostly just use the in house Logic stuff)

Sorry to disappoint with the lack of tech stuff,but my ambition with a daw was always to enable me to use one as a tool to get a half decent sound for my songs. I have no real interest in the spanners side of stuff,it hurts my poor old head! All above my pay grade. 

[pompeyjazz]

Interesting post and fascinating insight into how all you guys work. I think I'm more in the @Skub camp as I got into DAW land to be able to record music at a reasonable quality. That's not to say that I haven't enjoyed the technical aspects as well but I have resisted the urge to go down long and wasteful rabbit holes after a couple of adventures down the warren 

I'm a bit more organised than I used to be which is particularly useful if the number of tracks starts rocketing. I do colour code and group and use saved FX chains. Like Davy, I also mix in mono initially to get levels and EQ right and after I've finished mixing I use one of my many saved FX chains for the master. I'm currently using a derivative of a Master FX chain based on what @adamfarr has used. Cheers Adam 

I guess there is no right way. It's so subjective dependant on genre, vibe etc etc

[cowparsleyman]

@pompeyjazz @Skub @shadowfax @Boydie - Yeah very interesting indeed, I have a couple of workflows, one to speed up production, where I use Templates, I have a range of Templates say EDM, Acoustic etc. taking the EDM as an example,

Master Buss is empty of plugins, I like to decide on those right at the end, although I have a good idea of what I might use.

When I get a fx chain that I like I'll save it so I can bring it back at any time, this helps a lot, I put as much detail as I can in for example "rpsSlowGlideStratSlide"

Don't go for internal bouncing, lie in good old days, one just has to pay for it with latency, so I get any live drums done early on with low buffer settings.

Instrument tracks...

Vocals - Violet - Lead Vocal has it's own track, BVox have their own Group which usually has a VCA controlled by it's own submixBuss
Drums - Red - Has it's own folder track.
Perc - Pink - Very important and often under used - guiro, cabasa, triangles etc...(saving up for BFD3 Percussion expansion pack)
Guitars - Green - Also are usually VCA controlled
Synths - Cyan
Bass - Blue -  Beginning to start with Amplitude Ampeg SVX and work from there.

How to deal with those pesky hooky one offs? Well I group those together so they are easy to find.

I am now beginning to experiment with Samples, so I have a dark blue Samples track, I can see this growing into a subBuss.

If the song requires it I'll split some of the groups into more subBusses to process them separately. Very often I use many drum sources in a song, and especially for EDM I'll process them differently, in my DAW I can apply any plugin and route to aux busses at object level, which is just brilliant, I'm pretty sure that most other DAWs can do that too. Also synths usually get separated into more than one group, my rabbit hole is synths, they can take over if I'm not careful, so many, with 1000's of presets, I now know roughly what each one is good for.

I have to mention the stunning good electric piano plugin called lounge lizard, better than anything Ive heard. PluginBoutique had it for a song some while ago but boy it's good enough for me not to go for the Arturia V6 Stage73 or Wurlie most times.

Templates just take the work out of setting up instrument routing etc. especially for some drum and multi timbral synths software like MAGIX Independence or Xpand!2...

If the song has a really prominent Vocal then I might route all the subBusses to an subAllInstr which carries all of the instruments, then to make the LVox stand out I'll use Trackspacer 2.5 as the only plugin on that buss, sidechaining the LVox. Makes it a breeze to control.


The other way is totally free, but much more time intensive, it's my favourite way of working and is used really for "Oh I have this idea...."

For Remixes I use a genre specific template and hoik all the stems in above the existing template tracks/busses, and the template is based on the genre that I'm aiming for not what the stems come from, and usually get rid of most stuff.

So that's it. The idea is to make it quick to start, easy to find stuff, especially when actually mixing! (on my faders holding shift slows down the movement, use that a lot on Vocals and Bass)

Hope it helps, many ways to skin a cat, no right way, we all admire each others work, but we can always spot one that's been carefully produced...

[Viscount Cramer & His Orchestra]

Organisation isn't the first word that springs to mind for me.

I do use track colours....at random...and not every track usually. Track names are also not necessarily a good indication of what's on the track cos I move stuff around a lot. Flute might be 'Sax Bounce 1' for example.

In short it's a mess.

[cowparsleyman]

@Boydie - Like the idea of an empty white buss separator track