As a musician, so much mental energy is spent getting cool sounds, dialing in arrangements, and nailing the vocal, that preparing your sessions to be mixed and mastered can be an afterthought.

With a few simple steps, you can make sure your session is set up for success before it goes to a mixing engineer:

1. Organize your DAW session with a consistent track naming convention using groups and color-coding.

2. Commit MIDI instruments to audio and print aux effects.

3. Stage your gain structure at the track and group level to ensure your mix bus doesn’t clip.

4. Zip up your DAW session folders or high-quality audio files and use a file-transfer service.

If you’d prefer to watch the tips, here’s the YouTube version of this post:

If you’d prefer to read, let’s get into more detail:

Organize Your DAW Session

A lot of engineers have DAW templates that they use to organize files from messy sessions that artists send them. But it still takes a lot of time to sort out what each track is and group them properly. And that’s time that the engineer isn’t using to make your music sound more polished.

Here are a couple of rules of thumb for organizing sessions:

• Follow a simple naming convention with your tracks. (e.g. INSTRUMENT-TRACK-PANNING like “GUITAR-TREMOLO LEAD-R” or “DRUMS-SNARE-C)

• Group similar instrument tracks together. (e.g. Groups in Ableton, Track Stacks in Logic, Routing Folders in Pro Tools)

• Color code your clips, tracks, and groups by instrument. (e.g. Green for Electric Guitars, Yellow for Acoustic Guitars, Blue for Bass, Red for Drums, Purple for Keys, Pink for Vocals)

• Trim your clips down to only where audio is playing for each track.

COMMIT MIDI & PRINT AUX EFFECTS

While engineers are likely to have a robust plugin library, they might not have that obscure synth VST you used for a certain pad sound. You’ll want to migrate all your MIDI instruments to audio before delivering the session. (e.g. Freeze/Flatten in Ableton, Bounce in Place in Logic, Commit in Pro Tools)

Similarly, to prevent conflicts with plugins, you’ll want to print any aux effects sends you have in the session to audio as well. The engineer might choose to use their own delays and reverbs, but to ensure they can keep your effects if they are integral to the vibe of the song, print them.

gain staging

There are many schools of thought around gain staging. Some say as long as your tracks aren’t clipping, you’re fine in the digital realm. But as emulations of famous analog gear in plugin format have become popular, many of them just don’t sound very good when you’re slamming hot signal into it.

To that end, giving your engineer some headroom to play with is vital.

For best results, either Clip Gain or use Gain/Trim inserts to bring your peaks down to the following ranges for each instrument:

• Acoustic & Electric Guitars: -12dB

• Lead Guitars: -9dB

• Bass: -6dB

• Drums: -6dB

• Keys: -16dB

• Lead Vocals: -9dB

• Background Vocals: -16dB

If you do this on both the individual tracks and also on your groups, your engineer will have plenty of room to make up gain in the mix and bring your song up to competitive volumes without unnecessary distortion.

One last important step in terms of gain: Make sure you have a gentle limiter with an ample lookahead on the end of your mix bus to catch any peaks at the end of the chain.

DELIVERING FILES

For mixing projects, many DAWs (Logic and LUNA) now produce session files that include all of the audio and MIDI information natively without additional files or folders present. But other industry standards like Ableton and Pro Tools still have separate Audio File folders that will need to be delivered along with the session container file.

For mastering projects, all you’ll need to deliver are high-quality .wav or .aiff files of the music you want to be mastered. Ideally, gain down your mix bus by -4dB and deliver two files: one with any master bus processing applied and one without. Keep these for your reference and for later comparisons. In some cases, a mastering engineer will also request stems (stereo files of your instrument groups) to better treat specific frequencies.

Compress the files in .zip format and send them to your engineer using a large file transfer service like WeTransfer (for sessions larger than 2GB, you’ll need to subscribe to their Pro plan).

You could use a cloud service like Dropbox or Shared iCloud folders to transfer the session, but those services are prone to synchronization issues.

WHY BOTHER PREPARING?

Couldn’t your engineer do most of these things for you? Sure. And many do. But if you’re going to pay mixing and mastering engineers per project, song, or by the hour, wouldn’t you want them spending their time doing their absolute best work on your song instead of organizing your files?

A few simple preparations not only save them time, but it also saves you time, as you’ll get your mixes and masters back faster.