Thursday, December 6, 2007

tool thursday, with jed hackett...

Clean Up Your Room! Or in This Case, Session.

So you’ve got your tracks cut, overdubs complete, and things are all tweaked up and ready to be shipped off to your favorite mix engineer. Let’s talk about a few things you should do to make everyone’s lives a little bit easier.
First of all, save your mix as My Song for (some engineer with three names) so that when you clean things up you don’t lose your original files. Now it’s time to do a little house cleaning. Get rid of every track that you are not using from your new session. Then remove every alternate playlist from the tracks that you are keeping. If you have a hidden playlist that you would like to include with your session, make a new track and bring that hidden playlist to the top layer of that track making sure you label it appropriately, like “Alternate guitar solo”. The idea is to only have the tracks that you want the mix engineer to use in the mix, in this session, with no alternate playlists.
The next part requires a little communication with your mix engineer. Find out what plug-ins they have on their rig. If you are using a plug-in that they do not have and it is critical to the sound of an instrument, say Guitar Rig or Amp Farm, then you should print a track for them with the audio processed by that plug-in. If you have soft synths like Trilogy or Stylus in your session, make sure you print those tracks as well. You may also have a chat with them about the size of your session and see if they would like you to submix any parts together, like the 16 tracks of Oohs you put in the chorus. See if they like automation and plug-ins left in the session. Some engineers like to build off what you already have going on and others just want a clean slate. If you use the comments field to leave notes about the tracks, make sure you leave that field open so they realize you have left comments. You may also want to warn them that they should look for the comments. It’s also not a bad idea to print a rough mix for the engineer so they know what you and the A&R department have gotten use to.
Now that you are on the same page with your mix engineer, it’s time to clean up the remaining tracks. Go through and check that all of your crossfades are clean… you did put in crossfades, didn’t you? Clear out any unwanted noises between phrases, check that you didn’t cut off any breaths on your lead vocal, etc. Once you are sure you have everything all neat and tidy, no laundry on the floor, go ahead and copy the first click of the song from the click track to every track that you have. This will give the mixer a fail safe way to line up your tracks if for some reason they aren’t lining up when he/she spots them in their session. ( And don’t be putting a click over some audio you intend to use at the top of the song! Make sure you paste these clicks before everything starts.) Now consolidate every track from the same start point to the end of the last piece of audio in the session. Once you so this, every track will have only one piece of audio, start and end at the same point in time, and have a click at the front just in case.
The next thing you need to do now that you have cleaned up all the clutter is to empty out the trash. Remove all unused audio from the session. In the Regions menu within the Edit window choose Select> Unused. Then choose Clear. This next part is very important! When prompted, choose Remove. If you choose “delete” instead, as I said before, all of your files will go into the intergalactic bit bucket, never to be heard again.
The final step is to Create a new folder on your drive entitled Ready to Mix and save a copy of your mix session, with the audio, into that new folder you just created. In the Pro Tools menu, under File, choose Save Copy In. When the copy window opens up, next to “Where:”, find the folder you just created, check the box under Items to Copy labeled All Audio files. Also check the box labeled Session Plug-in Settings Folder. If you don’t check these boxes, your audio files and plug-in settings won’t be copied along with the session. Click Save.
Congratulations! You now have a very neat, organized and hopefully idiot proof session to send to your mix engineer. If you follow these steps you will quickly become one of their favorite clients. Cleaning things up like this can cut hours off of their set up time and leave them more time to do what they do best…mix. It may even translate into cheaper rates for you in the future!

Mixers, please write in with any other helpful advise on this subject. Thanks and see you next week.

Jed

2 comments:

Brendan Harkin said...

Jed,
I detest receiving mix files with consolidated audio and no alternate playlists. It is INEVITABLE that a punch/crossfade will need to be massaged during mixing and to not have the option is very frustrating. Of course things should be neat and well labeled but I suggest that the mixer should be asked what his preferences are. Every one of us works in a slightly different way.
Brendan Harkin
Wildwood Recording
Nashville

Jed Hackett said...

Brendan,
I agree, clients need to talk with the mixer and find what their preferences are and yes it is frustrating to have a messed up punch that is already consolidated. That is a potential down side to consolidating the files. The reason for consolidating when using esession.com is for cross platform compatability. That way every track has only one audio file, of the same length, starting at the same time position and can be lined up on a different DAW. However, if everyone involved in the session is on Pro Tools and your preference is to not consolidate, by all means, do so and save yourself from potentially sloppy crossfades. Thanks for writing in, I appreciate it. I'm sure your not the only one that feels that way about consolidating. Take care-Jed