Ideas For The Mix: Sorting & Gain Staging - Pt 1

Initial Setup

 When you're sent a bunch of stems (audio wavefiles) of someones mix and you've been given the task to turn it into an instant hit, things can seem daunting and a little overwhelming. As you import those stems and scroll through possibly 40 to 100+ audio files how do you know where to even start let alone hand the client back a finished two track mix?

 In this short series and rather than showing settings, for Eq's and compressors etc, as so many others have already done, I want to walk you through a mix and offer ideas, some philosophical, some practical  and examples as to how you would find your way to the finished song. It's not about the plugins used, it's not about the settings used, as these constantly change from song to song, it's about getting from raw to finished two track songs.

How and where to start

 This may seem to be the most monotonous and unexciting of tasks but believe me when I say sorting out stems, grouping, colourising, re-naming and finally gain-staging everything is the most important part of starting any mix project. Celebrity mixers (Chris Lord Alge) have junior engineers doing all the grunt work for him, like roadies setting up for a gig, he has them sorting and setting up the mix the way he likes it ready for him to walk in and do his thang! But for most of us we have to do this task ourselves, more is the pity. 

 Laying a good foundation at the start will dramatically reduce time spent on a mix and that is a good thing. It leaves more time to be allocated to actually listening to what your trying to achieve rather than being distracted searching for the other Kick Mic tracks or where the Lead vocal is at and seeing levels clipping etc.

 So lets dive in as I show an initial setup and preparation for getting ready to mix.

UPDATE NEWS: S1 Maintenance update 3.3.1 build 39379 Released.

After the recent update release of Studio One version 3.3  alas a few ghosts in the machine, bugs in the code appeared and some had trouble with various issues. Presonus being ever so customer friendly have moved extremely swiftly in releasing a maintenance update version 3.3.1 build 39379 that should apply all fixes.

The update can be downloaded inside of Studio One 3 or by going to your My Presonus account, logging in and downloading the installer from there.

The update specifically addresses the issues below;

Version 3.3.1 Release Notes (September 6, 2016)
The following issues have been fixed:

[Win] Melodyne 2.1.2 causes Studio One to lock up on launch
[Win] Older Win 7 machines are missing a MS dll
[Win] Softube Console 1 fails at launch
[Win] Moving an Arranger section does not move included events
[Win] Plug-in compatibility issue with outdated PACE implementation
[Win| compatibility issues with certain audio interfaces
Preview function for layers not working
Disabled Tracks and instruments lose bus routing
Missing a "Cancel" option in Combine/Load Instrument dialog
Disabled Channels are part of Mix Engine FX signal flow
Disable-state of Plug-ins not saved/restored in presets
Activate monitoring after enabling Track not working
Output routing changed for disabled instruments

Thanks for this Presonus great work, I'm sure you'll all agree.

What's Useful in the latest Update S1 v3.3

Pro's & Con's

When it comes to an update release for any software it usually starts with lots of "Oooh's" and "Aaah's" later on there's RUNNING AND SCREAMING! Things can transpose sweetly for some and for others endless mishaps with things suddenly not working as they used to and the inevitable roll back waiting it out for a fix to be issued.  So it's good advice to sit it out on the touchlines for a while and watch as others dive in an possibly hit their head on the bottom, so to speak. 

Rather than do a full in depth look into the update v3.3 (Which has already been done by others) I thought I would be more personal and say what I found to be Pro's or Con's for my own workflow. So with that, check out the list below and the short video.

Pro's

• One click global Fx's On/Off - Now that has been a feature we have all been waiting on. Nothing worse than spending endless hours splashing plugin inserts all over our mix thinking we have created a master piece, taking a break, and then coming back to hear how much we dislike what we thought was brilliant before. Now as we go along we can A/B things, with all our adding of plugin's and see if we making things better or worse or even no different at all.
• Combined On/Off for multiple selected Effects and Instruments - This has proved to be a major enhancement in speed to my workflow. Before hand wanting to send from various multiple tracks to say a Bus or Fx channel was ever so awkward, laborious and time consuming. Now as long as you have the tracks you want to work on highlighted adding a send to one automatically adds the same send on the other tracks to, brilliant!
• Disable Tracks, Instruments or Plug-ins - For those working on a lower spec computer this is fantastic as CPU hogging VST Instruments, plugin inserts or whole tracks can be temporarily disabled to allow you to carry on working when your CPU wants to give up the ghost and die. 
• Performance improvements for Mix Engine FX - Console shaper had proved to be a bit of a hog on CPU resources and now it comes with a tweak to lower that drain on power. Now in some plugins doing this can seriously effect it's signal quality but so far Console shaper sounds the same to my ears.
• Copy Track now includes automation - Duh well shouldn't it have always? Great to see it's now been implemented.

Con's

• Integration with Notion 6 - Not a major complaint, but as I personally don't own or use Notion this was of no consequence to me.
• S1 Freezing on startup - Some have experienced S1 freezing on startup, this is mainly due to Melodyne have a few issues. I'm told if you log into your Presonus account there is an update for the integrated Melodyne that fixes this issue, fingers crossed for all those affected.
• Soloing Layers Problem - A lot our finding trying to now solo layers in version 3.3 gives no sound, a fix is currently in the making.
• New Autofill option for multitrack drum quantization in Slice mode - I can understand why this was added (For Oldschool Pro Tools users) who may be so used to doing things this way but there's far better and more efficient ways of doing the exact same thing in Studio One it kind of makes it redundant to anyone who never worked this way in the first place.

Now that's what update version 3.3 brought to my workflow and overall a most welcome one for me. You on the other hand (depending on your own workflow) may have experienced other issues but as usual updates are system specific, what works for one doesn't work for another. Hopefully the few problems already identified will have a fix released in the very near future.