Importance of Streamlining

Streamline you workflow people. Streamline!

We’ve all got to that point. We’ve taken a break from attempting a mix, it’s not gone great so give ourselves some headspace so we come back to it after a day or two only to find there are 140 different tracks half of them muted and named god knows what - “VeVoFnl” was the name of one of my vocal takes, now I’m sure that meant sense to me at the time but after taking a couples of days off and coming back to it I feel like I must have been having a stroke. So please for the sake of our lord and saviour Chris Lord Alge name your tracks something normal.

Speaking of Chris Lord Alge (now how was that for a smooth transition) I recently came across a sound on sound article about the mixing of My Chemical Romance’s “Welcome to the Black Parade.” Now I don’t feel like I should have to provide a link to this as if you haven’t heard this I question how you found these blogs in the first place but here it is anyway

He mentions that the initial Pro Tools session came with “159 tracks” in it. Dear Lord (Alge) that is a lot of tracks. So this is where comping tracks down is essential in maintaining a decent workflow. Due to his preference of mixing through his Sony 3348 – a 48 track digital tape recorder. – He needs to bounce everything down after he EQ’s compresses things within Pro Tools to get the sound somewhat like he wants before he goes onto his real mixing with all the analogue gear. He and his assistants still call this part “prepping the session.”

To give you an idea of how much comping he did one stereo pair on his 3348 had 26 tracks of marching snare drums. An ensemble of brass, strings and woodwind that consisted of 10 tracks was again bounced down to a stereo pair and 29 guitar tracks were bounced to 3 stereo pairs in total. So by streamlining his working process he has to deal with less junk cluttering up his mixing process.

I had a similar situation mixing a song recently but to a much much less extreme degree. I had 3-5 tracks per guitar and bass, which to process them as one instrument I could either sub group them and put the effects on the aux track or find the mix between the mics and DI I wanted and then print them all to a new audio track. For the sake of cleaning up the edit window of my session I like to opt for the latter and hide and make inactive the original tracks.

I implore you all to clean up your track names and comp down any extraneous amounts of tracks into a more manageable amount of tracks. You’ll find the mixing stage a lot easier If you do this little bit of preparation.

You can thank me later.