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Prep Mix Q&A

This was from marco santana ruiz and fourteen other people actually voted for this one fourteen yeah, I'd like to ask josh and a low this was asked a lot of fear when josh was on I'd like to ask if for the sake of time do you think it's better to mix all the songs on the same session or to keep them separated? Ok, I've done both and, uh I understand why you would want toto do it all in the same session and it's because, you know, once you kind of get levels and settings on one, you have it on the rest, but if you have an album that, uh, that's very simple, then okay, sure. You know, like just two guitars, drums, base, a few vocals, that's it no real changes I can see that happening. I personally prefer to do a session for song, but uh, I can see you getting away with it on a simplistic kind of album. But if the album has a ton of changes in this super dynamic and there's new sounds and every song and just all kinds of stuff real complex mix, no way absolutely not. And I think that it's...

still questionable to do that for for a few different reasons, but mainly for cpu reasons um we have tried it, though gets confusing too because you have so much so much that's the other thing it goes against everything we've been talking about today about producing complexity like it makes it really hard to navigate when you have that many songs and that many markers all in like a knauer of music or something right in front of you three songs a little weepy or something for and it does kind of simplified it because to have all three songs in the same timeline yeah, there you go too far you know, like you said, if full albums worth like like you're gonna have a lot of little unique to facts and unique tracks that only apply to one song at a time so why make your computer run that process in the background when you're working on the other all the other songs that those effects don't apply to, you know yeah it's like two or three songs and they're very similar nature or whatever you know you could call it what you know a nine minute song if it's like three, three minutes songs they're pretty much the same thing you know you can look at it that way but uh, who would want to mix a forty five minute long song um what's that yeah, exactly um just uh we noticed it bogging things down on a h d seven system which is really powerful I was just thinking especially if you're getting grew it out all the drums and stuff to you there is no way you're gonna get your computer you're gonna have like you know, one hundred thousand files or something in one session like you don't think pro tools would even make it I don't care what your yeah I mean not not to be condescending or anything but I feel like that's a demo like he said it's ok for like two or three songs you're doing a single or like a very short e p but you do albums like that that's a demo move got uh let's see is there a faster way to print rather than just sitting through the whole thing? Uh okay easy question is the answer like it uh is there risk of getting out of tempo prince because of plug in leighton see if so how should we go about avoiding it when printing uh don't use plug ins that that introduced late and see like that? Um it was a bigger issue on earlier versions of pro tools pro tools also this is another thing where they lag behind uh there plug in delay compensation engine it was horrible up until ten and they really got a straight on eleven so on earlier versions of pro tools yes, this is a big big deal and if you're on nine or earlier uh you there's just look it up on google there's a ton of ways to use that toe do all these work arounds and not use our task plug ins for certain things and it's just a pain but on on you know pro tools ten and eleven it's it's pretty solid pretty pretty all right it's caught up one more let's see how do you work with band members other engineers et cetera that think prep that it is mixing I see this confusion a lot people think routing and busting is part of the mixing so the press well I'm it kind of is um the part that isn't is uh you know like you have to draw the line at certain places obviously you're getting tracks to mix you have to put them into your d a w and route them it's not the band's job to rout them for you um however if you're getting a bunch of tracks and sail the vocals are all out of tune now that's a different story say the drums aren't edited right now that's a whole different story but it is you know like a few guitar noises here and there like hampton noise at the beginning of the track and things like that you find clean it up but you just you have to draw the line now unfortunately when you're not that far along in your career uh you you know it's a little bit more desperate so you don't wantto always run the risk of losing a client by saying that's, not my job, I don't want to do it, but like josh noel said earlier, uh, it's also kind of dangerous to get people, uh, to expect you to do free work if you get a project that needs a lot of editing, plus mixing, you're talking about possibly twice the amount of work or more than that, so something that might take a week and a half could take maybe up to a month, sometimes for the same price. That's not ok, and so I guess it's a question of how much you value your services in your time. S o I've got kind of one more question here. Ah lot of the questions that we have here are about again, things we're going to cover in the next two days, so maybe I'll get ask this one question and then kind of get your final thoughts, and then we'll wrap up for the day how clear of an idea of the end result to prefer to have before beginning prep and before mixing on what's your work floor mental state performing such an idea whoa, this person wants to say, say it, answer this for me I know there's a delay is, uh, is he talking about something that I produced where is he talking about something that was given to me to mix a somebody else produced a little bit about both yes, two completely different things if it's something that somebody else produced um, you got a check if they have a rough mix or not if they sent you a rough mix, that means they have an idea they've got a vision and they just want you to give them a really bad ass version of that vision. So, uh, yeah, you should have an idea. I mean, obviously you don't know what anything is going to turn out like until you start working on it. So I feel like it's a very big mistake tio to assume anything with music like it's going to be this and it's going to get guitar it's going to this plug in just cause I like it, it shouldn't do that things were going to turn out how they're going to turn out, but vision wise yeah, the artist has a vision, they should let you know and then you should try toe try to get there and if you produced it, of course you should have a vision for what it should be. So maybe it's not like that romantic ideal of like mozart writing a symphony in his head while dancing with the chick or something and like knowing it but you know you should have an idea at least what the goals are like no who the band is at the you're mixing a nails record or something uh you know it's going to be nasty, you know, it's going to get raw, you know? So you're pretty natural sounding so you know what the criteria is your mixing a demon borgia record it's a whole different story so know your client no what what they want and that will help with the vision you want yeah like just like if you get demon borger to mix and you give them a nails mix, you're going get fired so great all right, so I think you have one final slide just kind of to wrap everything out yeah, let me a skip forward to it because, uh, I'm going to skip through this checking phase thing because we're going talk about that tomorrow we're going to talk about that tomorrow when we get teo guitars because a lot of that stuff applies. So basically I think that the main thing that the big deal about prep is that you need to get your files in a to a point where they almost want to mix themselves and I know that I know that that sounds like a cliche, but the best mixes that I've ever been involved with other I was the engineer or the soul mixer uh, stuff just kind of fell into place and kind of makes itself because he was set up properly to do that. We didn't have toe fight the computer or fight the tracks or fight these weird set up barriers that prevented us from getting further like, for instance, having to spend sixteen hours to reprint all the samples on drums. If we decide we want to change the samples were now, it can do it in like, five minutes, you know, that has happened to me before most of the album's I've been involved with that have the best mixes while they were very hard work. Uh, the musical part of it was pretty natural because all the preps stuff was taken care of and also the other big I guess the other big deal is that you can't mix tracks there on mixing bowl. There might be a myth out there about studio magic, but a lot of the studio magic involves producers and mixers being tyrants and getting rid of people who can't deliver. And you know that producers and mixers are known for being a hard ass is and a lot of the magic comes from people's ability to say that's not good enough this has to be better uh, at the source so the same thing goes for prep uh, you can't get a great mix out of a disorganized session um you can't get a great mix out of an improperly routed session any of that stuff you have to do all the stuff first and then mix you'll be way better off yeah and uh some things we didn't cover today that we're going definitely cover tomorrow um we were going to talk about phase relationships that's part of prep but that also comes up a lot when you're actually mixing and getting tones and stuff so we'll just talk about that tomorrow uh especially one talk about layering guitars and samples together go into some detail on that but uh yeah otherwise you guys now know how to prep, so I expect you guys still make up his records this week. Um let's actually talk a little bit more about tomorrow, what we're doing throughout the day and maybe some of the bands that we are we going to be working on some actual mixes that has done so so maybe named some of those bands and just talk about what we're doing throughout the day? Yes so we'll be going through some work I did for chelsea grin some work I did for reflections and stuff it it for monuments, the contortionist just different different bands have worked with and we're going to be going into the mix sessions and kind of taking them apart and you'll see how the different methods of prepping will show up in these mixes and, uh, why they work and why they were chosen, will be going into, you know, plug in settings and tones. And all that internet forums. Stuff that everyone wants to hear.