MAXIMUM HOME RECORDING - MIX PREPERATION

Mix Preparation

Once you have all your tracks recorded there are a still few things you will want to do before you begin your mix. First of all you want to get your headphones out and listen to each individual track from beginning to end. You are looking for noise you can edit out. Is there breath noise or room noise on the vocal track when the vocalist isn’t singing? Is there buzz from a guitar amp while the guitarist waits to come in for a solo? You want to edit all these noises out. This will leave you with a track that has a bunch of little chunks of audio. It’s a good idea to create a fade to fade into each chunk and then fade out at the end of each chunk. This will prevent any popping noises or obvious transitions from silence to sound.

Consolidation, it's not just for debt anymore,...

It’s also a good idea to consolidate your tracks. If you’ve done a few punch ins to get a good overall performance you will have a track that consists of a few separate snippets of audio. You want to make each track one single piece of audio that starts right at the beginning of the track, even if the track has no sound until halfway through the song. The reason for this is that you may wish to work with this audio again in the future and, in the future you may have a newer version of the same recording software or perhaps even a different software package altogether. Having the tracks consolidated as one audio file per track allows the tracks to be dragged into any session on any software with relative ease.

Avoid Ear Fatigue

It is best to do all this work the day after or a couple of days after the recording is complete. During the recording process your ears are subjected to loud volume, especially if you have a one room setup. Give your ears a chance to rest and recuperate. During you mixing sessions take frequent breaks someplace quiet or a place where the sounds you hear are quite different from what you are recording. I read this little phrase somewhere and it applies to home recordists as well as full blown recording engineers.

“Engineers who abuse their ears, have very very short careers!”