HOW TO - Prepare Your Song for Professional Mixdown

A song is ready for the mixing stage when all creative and production decisions have been finalized. This includes ensuring that vocals are pitch-corrected, best takes have been comped, and tracks are meticulously edited. Should any of these production steps require attention prior to the initiation of the mixing process, we kindly request that this be communicated to us in advance.

 

1. Please initiate by opening your respective project.

 

2. Export the most recent rendition of your song as a WAV or AIFF file, labeling it as "Artist - Track - DEMO REFERENCE". We require the version of the song that you were content with at the point when you decided it was ready for a professional mixdown.

 

3. Organize your tracks systematically, ensuring that related sounds are grouped together — all drum sounds, all percussive elements, all synthesizers, all vocal tracks, all effects, etc.

 

4. It's essential to appropriately name your tracks. To maintain order, please precede each track's name with a numerical identifier. Each project will contain a unique set of tracks, but a sequence in a typical project might resemble the following:

 

         01 KICK

         02 CLAP

         03 CLOSED HIHAT

         04 OPEN HIHAT

         05 CRASH CYMBAL

         06 CONGAS

         07 SHAKER

         08 TAMBOURINE

         09 BASSLINE (LIVE)

         10 BASSLINE (SYNTH)

         11 PIANO

         12 SYNTH LEAD

         13 SYNTH STRINGS

         14 GUITAR ACOUSTIC

         15 GUITAR ELECTRIC

         16 VOCAL LEAD

         17 VOCAL BACK LEFT

         18 VOCAL BACK RIGHT

         19 VOCAL ADLIB

         20 EFX DROP

         21 EFX AMBIENCE

 

5. Please ensure all inactive tracks are eliminated from your project.

 

6. Check each track for any existing processing. If a track has been processed, duplicate it, eliminate all processing plugins from the duplicate, and append "DRY" to the track name. This applies to DI tracks as well. The intent behind this step is to maintain flexibility - there are occasions when the processed track is the best option and other times we need the dry track to recreate the processing in a manner that better works with the mix, and using superior quality tools. After this process, a typical track sequence might resemble:

 

8. Audit the routing of the tracks and ensure you remove ANY PROCESSING present on the MIX BUS or MASTER OUT. Often, drum tracks are routed into a DRUMS BUS where they might be processed by a compressor before proceeding to a MIX BUS which could have an EQ, another compressor, or something similar, finally culminating in a MASTER OUT which might have an additional plugin such as room correction software or similar. It's important to disable these additional processing stages, ensuring the track content is exported in the cleanest state possible. As noted in step 6, processed versions of the tracks will be retained, but we want to avoid additional processing during export.

 

9. Inspect the levels of each track, ensuring that the peak level does not exceed -6dBFS. You can easily verify this by soloing each track and observing the master level meter. The preservation of the existing mix balance is irrelevant at this stage - the primary objective is to export the tracks without clipping, and with maximum fidelity. During the mixing phase, we'll reference your DEMO REFERENCE (step 2) to restore the mix balance that you liked.

 

10. Create the folder, and name is in this format: Year_Month_Day_Artist Name - Song/Project Name - BPM - key (e.g. 2022_04_05_John Slate - The New Song - 104 BPM - C# minor)

 

10. Solo each track and export it to the folder (the standard format is 44.1kHz 24bit WAV or AIFF; MP3 is not acceptable), maintaining the naming structure as outlined in steps 4 and 6.

 

11. Verify the exported tracks to ensure all files are accurate.

 

12. Insert the DEMO REFERENCE from step 2 into the folder.

 

13. Include at least one, but not more than three, reference tracks from other artists and position them in the folder. If you do not have the files, kindly provide YouTube links in the text file (step 14).

 

14. If necessary, incorporate a text document containing any supplementary notes for the mix engineer.

 

15. Upon completion of all preceding steps, compress the folder into a zip or rar format.

 

16. Upload the zip/rar file at the following location - bit.ly/cyclestudio.