Getting Down To The Mixing Stage

After producing Grace's song, it's time to pass it on to a mixing engineer. I was glad that my friend, Alvin volunteered to mix the song as I believe he will do a good job. Meanwhile, the song that I decided to mix was Li Ping's song that was produced by Jia Rou. The song itself is actually pretty decent but the main problem is the vocals, where it can get really soft on the lower registers. Nevertheless, I'm more than willing to accept the challenge.

Getting Organised (My Template):

After obtaining the audio stems from Jia Rou, I started a new Logic project and imported the stems into the file. 

As soon as I pressed the play button, I noticed that all of the stems are all set to unity gain so it's no wonder that I'm clipping.

But before I proceed with the mixing, there's some organising to be done. To start off, I grouped all of the drum stems together and assigned a channel strip colour for them.

After grouping the drums together, I did the same thing to the other instruments. I also renamed some of the tracks to suit my understanding. So I ended up with five other categories:

1. Effects and other instruments with minor roles.

2. Orchestra Strings

3. Pianos and Synths

4. Bass

5. Vocals

I personally like to work on every single channel strip individually, so I won't send instruments under the same grouping to a bus just yet unless necessary. After grouping the tracks together, I decided to make extra notes such as what I think is wrong with the sound and the role of the instrument. 

When I start to mix, I want to start off with the drums first. So to make it easier for me to mute and solo all the drum tracks, Instead of dragging across the channel strips, I assigned them to a group.

  

So this is how I organise my tracks. You may noticed that I've made some adjustments to the volume faders in the mixer. This is because I actually started to do some basic mixing first by making sure that each track is roughly at the right volume. But I will save the explanations for upcoming posts as this post is really just about making things look less hectic. That's all from me today and as usual, your feedback is much appreciated.