Faster & More Intuitive Mixing with a Mix Template

Mixing any audio puts both sides of your brain to work, with the technical side of things calling on the left brain and the creative stuff calling on the right brain. When you’re having to constantly switch between the two, it can slow things down. So, when inspiration strikes, and you can already hear what you want the track to sound like and you’re itching to get started, it can be a bit of a buzzkill to have to make sends and seek out plugins before you can actually get stuck in. The solution? By making your own mix template, you’re not only already set up to start working, but you can do it all within a more intuitive and faster mixing environment.

Note: In this article I work with a band layout (so with drums, bass and guitar etc.). But a mixing template can be applied to any project in any genre.

What’s a mix template?

In this case, your template is an empty project that you’ve made in your DAW recording software. In this special project, you just set up all of the things that you use in almost every mix you make. This includes your busses, audio tracks and effect tracks. Looking at it from this end, you immediately realise how much time you actually waste by setting up the same things over and over again, every time you sit down to mix a new project. Below, you can see the example template that I made especially for this blog. Of course, you can give your template any name you want and, over time, you’ll get to know what you want and need from your template and build and refine things over time.

Click on the image to see a bigger version:

A good start is half the mix

Besides making your template, it’s always a good idea to make a habit of preparing all of your tracks before you start mixing. When you prepare well, there’s less risk of your creative flow being disrupted because you need to stop everything to fix something. Here are some quick tips:

Neaten up all of your edits with a fade or crossfade and then export the edited track from the start to end.
Export any virtual instruments as audio files. When you’re mixing, everything needs to be fixed so you don’t have to mess around with MIDI.
If you’re working with a massive list of tracks, then do yourself (and your computer) a favour and do things like combine the bass guitar tracks you recorded with a DI and microphone. So: check the phase, balance the tracks and then export them.
The same goes for any guitars or other elements that you recorded with multiple microphones.
Things like choirs or layered vocal harmonies can also be combined. Balance all of the voices and pan them across the stereo image before exporting your choir as a stereo track and save yourself some space.

The master bus

Just like the ‘top-down’ mixing philosophy (working from big to small), I always start with the Master Bus. I recommend not using any compression, EQ or anything like that, but just the essential analysing tools, like a frequency analyser and a plugin you can use to listen to the mix in mono to check the mono-compatibility. This will allow you to do stuff like load in reference tracks and send them directly to the Master Bus without sending them through the same effects chain as your mix.

The mix bus

For your actual mix, you can make a separate bus and name it ‘Mix Bus’. Here you can tweak the whole track with EQ, compression and saturation. Putting these kinds of processors on the Mix Bus is a point of discussion. Strictly speaking, using audio processors that treat the whole track encroaches on the territory of the mastering engineer. But a good argument for doing this is that you’re better off solving global issues with a global solution. For example, if the whole track is sounding a bit dead and lifeless, then a high shelf on the Mix Bus will probably sound better than a high shelf on each and every track.

Bus-compression and saturation are also essential for boosting the vibe of a track, and the final effect in the chain should always be a brick wall limiter, which will make sure that your mix is near-enough at the volume level that you want the end-product to be. This will sit somewhere between the -14 and -8 LUFS mark. The limiter is only there to give you a good idea of how well your mix will hold up after mastering. When your mix is done and you’re ready to send it over to the mastering engineers, then bypass the limiter before exporting the mix. In your bespoke template, make sure to set up the Mix Bus to send to the Master Bus.

Subgroups

All going well, every instrument in your arrangement has a clear function. By putting all of the instruments with a similar function in the same group, you can quickly adjust and optimise this function. The mixing legend Michael Brauer uses four subgroups as part of his ‘Brauerizing’ system:

Group A: Instruments with a lot of high-end (acoustic guitars, pianos, violins). Here, EQ and compression are largely used to balance the trebles.
Group B: Instruments with a lot of low-end (drums, bass). Here, EQ and compression give you more solid basses. With the attack of the compressor, you can dictate how smooth or punchy the rhythm section gets. The timing of the release can make or break the groove of a song.
Group C: Instruments with a lot of mids (guitars). Mid frequencies are the most essential of them all. With this bus, you’re giving your mix definition and presence.
Group D: Instruments with a lot of width and space (like synth pads, string sections). You can use automation here to create a sort of ebb and flow. Feel free to go all out with stereo wideners as well. Because it’s a separate group, you don’t need to be worried about your mix drowning in a stereo soup.

As you can see, this system is open to interpretation. Pianos and synths can be just as mid-heavy as an electric guitar, so there’s no need to see this as some sort of gold standard. Instead, experiment with other groupings. Just make sure to send the outputs of your subgroups to your Mix Bus.

Tracks

In your template, you can also create the tracks you know you’ll always need ahead of time. Don’t be too stingy. It takes no effort to just delete the tracks you don’t need.

If you always work with a full drum kit, then already create two tracks for the snare microphones (top and bottom); two microphones for the kick drum (interior and exterior); three for the toms and two for the floor toms.
If someone else made the recordings, it’s worth thinking about the various forms that those tracks could arrive in. Sometimes, you’ll get an overhead stereo pair as a stereo track and sometimes you’ll get them as two mono tracks. It’s not actually possible to convert mono tracks into stereo tracks and vice versa in some DAW software (people from Steinberg, if you’re reading this… hint, hint). By creating both a stereo track and two mono tracks for the overheads in your template, you’re prepared for anything.
Bass guitars are often recorded via both a DI box and a microphone. So create a Bass DI track and a Bass Amp track.
Guitars are often recorded with two microphones: a darker model (usually a ribbon mic) and a brighter model (usually a dynamic microphone). So create a GTR Dark track and a GTR Bright track.
It’s also worth making a new bus for each of the instruments that are recorded with more than one channel (either with multiple microphones or a DI + microphone). This is so you can send all of the tracks for the respective instrument to their dedicated bus so you can balance and adjust everything at once using EQ and compression.

To sum up

Tracks → Subgroups→ Mix Bus → Master Bus

Now, the output of a track is sent to a subgroup. The subgroups are sent to the Mix Bus and the Mix Bus is sent to the Master Bus.

Plugins

No track is ever the same as the next, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still prepare a load of your go-to plugins ahead of time. But beware: of course, you won’t need every plugin every time. So, when you add them to your template, make sure to set them all to bypass and only turn them on when you actually need them. This will save your computer a mass of CPU power!

The Standard Setup

On pretty much every track, the standard setup will probably look like this:

EQ
Compressor
EQ

A good rule of thumb for using this setup is to only use your first EQ (before compression) to filter out frequencies and only use the second EQ (after compression) to boost frequencies if they need it. But feel free to completely ignore this rule as and when you need to, because you can only get a spanking guitar sound or an in-your-face vocal sound by shaking up the compressor with a pre-compressor EQ boost.

Problem Solvers

Then there are a few tools that you won’t need on every track. While you’ll probably need to put a de-esser on the vocal track to dampen any sharp ‘S’ sounds, you won’t need it on the kick drum. And, while you can definitely put a gate on all of the close-mics of the drums to limit any crosstalk, it doesn’t make sense to put it on a synth track. When it comes to any problem-solvers like de-essers and gates, it’s best to solve the problem as soon as possible – so always place them at the front of the chain.

Effect Sends

For effects like reverb, delay and chorus, you can already prep some effect tracks. The sort of space you’ll need to create will, of course, will depend on the atmosphere and goal of the song, but you can still sketch out some broad outlines for yourself. For example:

Ambience
Room
Hall
plate
16th note delay
8th note delay
Chorus

You can already create sends on all of the tracks you made, and route them to these effect tracks. Although, this might be an over exaggeration since you’re unlikely to need them on every track – like, you definitely won’t need any chorus on the kick.

What Now?

You’ve built your bespoke mega-template and you’re ready to start mixing a new track. This can unfold in roughly one of two ways:

You can just copy your whole template project and give it a new name. From there, you can open your newly-named copy and import the audio files of the track you’re about to mix.
DAWs also have a function you can use to import all of the tracks, including the routing, sends and plugins. With songs with just a few instruments, it might be more useful to start with an empty project. In that case, you can just import the tracks from your template that you actually need.

If you’ve tried it out, let me know how working with your own mixing template went in the comments!