Perfect Tracks For Your Engineer

How to send your engineer perfect tracks for mixing. The first time.

The key to a great working relationship between you and anyone else working on your tracks is to provide the best possible tracks that leave nothing to be desired or guessed.  If done correctly, your editor, reamper, or mix engineer should have everything they need to be successful on the first try. If you record your tracks well, export them correctly, and quality control them before uploading, every person down the line will thank you and want to work with you again. But sending missing tracks, empty tracks, quiet tracks, or just simply wrong tracks will significantly slow down the process, likely cost more, and also cost you quality future working relationships. Take your time, do it right, and everyone will be better for it.  

PERFORMANCE

Gain, clipping, and distortion

• This right here is the number one killer of audio tracks.  If you decided to track your vocals so quiet that the HVAC in the background is the same volume as you are, you’re screwed.  Same goes for tracking any instrument way too loud. In digital media, setting your input level too high and tracking too hot will blow out your tracks and make them completely unusable.  Exceeding the max volume causes digital “clipping” which is a fancy way of saying unwanted distortion.

DI tone, amped tone, and reamped tone

• Listen to the sound of your raw guitar or bass DI coming through the speakers without any amp or cab simulation or processing of any kind.  Is it too quiet, or so loud it’s distorting, or nothing but mud?  Fix it!  There isn’t much that can be done to save garbage guitar and bass DI tracks after they’ve been recorded.  Sure, there’s a few tricks we can try, but they don’t come close to getting it right at the source.  Now that you have a good raw tone, crank up an amp sim and make sure it sounds right.  Amplifying your signal can show you things you never heard before in your DI.  Again, if it’s too quiet, too loud, or dull, fix it.  Once you’ve tracked your DI’s, listen to them closely.  Listen for clipping, good tone, chirps and squeaks, ring outs, or any unwanted noises you didn’t notice while tracking.  If you already edited and reamped your tones, make sure they’re good to go as well. They should be mono, not too loud or quiet, and not have any timing, performance, or editing errors.  

Performance 

• Again, this can show up in guitar tracks as chirps and ring outs.  In all instruments, a poor performance can mean off time, out of tune, too soft, too loud, or just sloppy in general.  Or maybe you forgot to fix your guitar and there’s a nasty hum or forgot to lube up your kick pedal and there’s an annoying squeak in every take.  Be critical, consistent, and down right crazy about reviewing every possible thing and solving every single issue before spending any time tracking.  And once you track, go back over your list and triple check every single detail again just to be sure it’s the best it can possibly be. 

EDITING

Comping

• Comping takes refers to splicing together multiple takes into one seamless track. Let’s say it takes you multiple tries to nail a guitar solo. What happens when you like the first half of one take and the second half of another?   When that happens, cut each take at the exact same spot, place them next to each other on one single track, and add a short crossfade where they meet to prevent any popping noises.  Make sure to blow up the wave form so you can see where each note starts so you don’t accidentally cut off the transient or the pick attack.  This goes for vocals, drums, and bass as well.  The fewer the tracks being sent to your editor or mixer the better.  

Editing - timing

• If you spend more time tracking, you won’t have to spend any time editing.  But if you’re rushed for time or money, editing is a must.  Your performance can’t be too far off time, but a little off time can be adjusted without compromising the quality or feel of the performance.  If you’re finished with the editing, make sure the quality of the editing is up to par.  Whether you’re stretching, slipping, or time aligning, make sure it sounds good to your ears.  It doesn’t matter if it’s technically on time if it sounds like trash.  And don’t overlook this step, it’s way more important that you may realize.  A lot of people don’t know this, but editing can lend so much to the sound of your mix that it actually starts to become its own unique sound.  

Editing - cleanliness

• When editing guitar and bass DI’s, clean up any stops, starts, pauses, or anywhere else there’s unwanted noise. Same goes for the drums and vocals.  There shouldn’t be one single thing on any track that you don’t intend to be in your final mix.  Mixing is also boosting.  Your tracks will go through round after round of amplification, boosting, saturation, clipping, compression, and maximizing.  When they do, every little detail will become audible.  Including your mistakes and noisy tracks.    

Clicks and pops 

• It’s hard to miss, they’re loud artificial noises that will ruin your sound completely.  Although short in duration, they have to be dealt with.  Clicks and pops are almost always the result of poor editing or not applying the necessary cross fades when splicing multiple takes together into single tracks.  Clicks and pops can also be caused by a track cutting off while there’s still a guitar note or cymbal sustain ringing out.  I like to apply fade ins and fade outs to every single track even if it’s not needed just in case. 

EXPORT

Wet when necessary

• This is one of the trickiest things to teach/learn in my opinion.  Knowing when to export a track dry vs wet.  Dry is the same thing as raw.  A dry/raw track has absolutely no processing whatsoever.  A wet track has some form of processing of some kind.  This could be a guitar or bass DI already ran through an amp sim, or a vocal take with an eerie echo effect applied.  Here’s my rule of thumb:  if the effect needs to be included in the final mix and it doesn’t impede the process down the line, the track should be exported wet.  For example:  if you spent a week dialing in a crazy effect for a special vocal part and it’s exactly the way you want it on the final record, export the track wet.  But if your guitar DI is being sent off to be edited, make sure it’s a dry/raw track with no processing whatsoever.  

• Another rule of thumb is to export wet whenever there’s anything time-based used on the track like a whammy pedal, or tremolo, or delay.  In this case, exporting the track dry and rebuilding the time-based effect would be a waste of everyone’s time. 

• If for some reason there' s no way around it and the track has to be exported dry, do everyone a favor and export a dry version and a wet version so everyone knows what you were aiming for and we have a reference when we sit down to recreate the effect from scratch.  

Track naming

• Naming your tracks with proper names will save you and your engineer hours of work down the road.  No matter how the tracks export out of your session, go back and give each track a proper name so everyone is on the same page.  Every track should include number, instrument, panning, type, and fx.  

• Number - Ex:  01, 02, 03… if you don’t number your tracks, your computer will alphabetize them and your drum tracks will be mixed in with your bass and guitar tracks.  Instrument - Ex:  Guitar, Drums, Bass… don’t make your engineer guess what instrument is on the track by naming each track after the member that performed on the track.  Don’t label your guitar track Brian, label it guitar.  

• Panning - Ex:  Center, Left, or Right… If you give your engineer three tracks all labeled lead vox with no panning info, expect him to make up his own panning or layer all three of them on top of each other with no idea which one should be the lead.  

• Type - Ex:  Lead, background, rhythm… This is super important for guitars and vocals so we can determine how things are supposed to be mixed.  If you meant for a vocal take to be a backup vocal, label it backup.  If it’s a lead guitar, label it lead.

• FX - Ex:  Chorus, Eerie, Fuzz…  if you exported a track with a specific effect you want in the final mix, include that in the track label so we know what it’s supposed to sound like.

• Here’s a couple examples of properly named tracks:  10 Guitar Left Rhythm, 01 Drums Right Hihat, or 25 Vocals Lead Left with Chorus.

• Can you see how proper labeling can help your tracks stay grouped by number, identified by instrument, panned correctly, and mixed the way you intended without a bunch of back and forth between you and the mixer?

Reference Track

• Export a rough mix of each song to include with the rest of your files.  This will help identify any timing issues with the song that may occur during import.  I’ll never forget the time a band sent me an instrumental to mix and they couldn’t understand why it was 20 bpm slower than they intended.  Well, they never sent a reference track and when the tracks were imported at a slower tempo due to bit rate, I had no idea because I had never heard a reference of what the track sounded like on their end.  

POST EXPORT

Quality control

• Before uploading your exported tracks and sending them to your engineer, import your tracks back into your session and inspect them with your eyes and ears.  You can also import the tracks into a blank session if you wish.  The key is to visually inspect and listen to every single track all the way through before sending it off to be mixed.  Some engineers charge you a fee for incorrect tracks.  Read below to see exactly what you should be looking and listening for. 

Mono/stereo

• Are all tracks that should be mono actually mono?  It’s so rare to actually need stereo tracks these days that most every track in a project is a mono track.  But on the other hand, you need to make sure that any track you intend to be stereo was actually exported as a stereo track.  Examples of stereo tracks would be two drum overhead mics summed down to a single stereo track with one panned left and one panned right.  I don’t recommend doing this just in case you need to make an adjustment to just one of the tracks.  When that happens, we have to import them again as individual mono tracks anyway.  A great example of a good stereo track would be a wet guitar with stereo effects like delay.  This is one of the few times a track should be exported as a stereo track.  

Panning

• Since most tracks will be mono, panning doesn’t matter all that much because they will have a single mono audio source that is automatically panned center when exported. At least that’s how my DAW works when I set it to export a dry/raw track.  It resets the volume to 0 and the panning to center.  On the off chance you’re exporting a track with effects engaged, you’ll want to export with the effects paying attention to the panning and output volume.  

All lined up

• All tracks should begin right at bar 0 of the song regardless of where the actual audio on the track starts.  Even if the bass drop doesn’t come in until the bridge, the bass drop track needs to start on bar 0 just like every other track in the song.  This way, there’s no guessing where each track should start, they all start together and each audio event starts at its actual starting spot within the song.  

Empty tracks

• Don’t waste your precious storage space and time by exporting, QCing, labeling, and uploading empty tracks and then making it worse when your engineer has to download, import, and inspect an empty track.  Like I said, some engineers will charge you a fee for incorrect tracks.  It takes two seconds for you to import the track into your session and identify that it’s not empty.  

MIDI

• Make sure any synth, bass, or drum MIDI is exported correctly and functioning as intended.  A quick note about MIDI performance -  make sure they’re programmed well.  There’s nothing worse than a programmed drum MIDI performance with every single note velocity cranked to 1000%.  They just sound extra fake and dumb.   

Tempo

• Should be fairly easy to identify tracks that were exported wrong.  Especially when reviewed against the reference track. This is one reason I prefer importing the exported tracks back into my original session so I can line them up with the originals and see if they all line up and playback as intended.  It’s quick, easy, and makes your engineer much happier.  

Notes

• If you have any particular requests or vision for specific sections of songs, include a single set of notes for the entire project with notes listed by song. Example: "I included both a wet and dry version of the intro vocals because I'd like them blended together". Or "I want this entire song to sound dull like it's under water". That last one was a real note by the way and it turned out so good.

I know this looks like a lot of work, but this is what you’re signing up for when you agree to send your tracks off to another engineer.  Engineers will forgive minor issues if it looks like you put in the time to make the tracks perfect.  We can tell when there’s a lack of attention to detail when we’re sent empty tracks or tracks that don’t line up.  When that happens, most engineers will be less forgiving, charge you more on the next project, or back charge you for tracks that you were supposed to quality control in the first place.  Just remember, every single thing you send out to another engineer should be visually and audibly inspected from start to finish.  Do your part, hold up your end of the agreement, and make a name for yourself as an engineer people want to work with.