#142: Prepare a Project for Mixing | Pre-Production and Logic Pro Workflow Tips

Have you ever wondered how you prepare a project for mixing? Maybe you're seeking answers to topics on how to get tracks ready for mixing, how to prepare for a mixing session or maybe you want to know how to prepare stems for mixing in Logic Pro, then check out EP 142 of the Inside The Mix podcast.

Embark on a sonic adventure with me as I unlock the secrets to impeccable pre-production and mix preparation for all you synthpop enthusiasts out there. Imagine having a meticulously organised Logic Pro session, with every track colour-coded and grouped, your control bar customised, and reference tracks at the ready to ensure your mix is nothing short of stellar. That's what I'm offering—a guided tour through the setup that'll transform your workflow and a free mixing template to boot! Listen closely as I narrate the steps to creating a seamless mixing experience that's as smooth as the synth lines in your favourite pop hit.

Ever wondered about the wizardry behind those cohesive yet distinct layers in a synthpop masterpiece? That's where the magic of understanding groups and subgroups comes into play. I'll dissect these concepts, explaining how groups can manage collective volume without upsetting individual track outputs, and how subgroups work like a charm for applying shared effects while keeping fader movements independent. It's a masterclass in balance and sonic texture, ensuring your productions hit that sweet spot where every beat, bassline, and synth shimmer with clarity and punch. Whether you're a seasoned producer or just starting, this episode is your ticket to levelling up your Logic Pro mix game.

Grab your FREE Logic Pro Synthpop Mixing Template!
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Are you READY to finish more tracks in less time, without sacrificing quality?
Download your FREE Logic Pro Synthpop Mixing Template: https://www.synthmusicmastering.com/logic-pro-downloads

Transcript

Marc Matthews: 0:51

You're listening to the Inside the Mix podcast with your host, mark Matthews. Hello and welcome to the Inside the Mix podcast. I'm Mark Matthews, your host, musician, producer and mix and mastering engineer. You've come to the right place if you want to know more about your favorite synth music artists, music engineering and production, songwriting and the music industry. I've been writing, producing, mixing and mastering music for over 15 years and I want to share what I've learned with you. Hello, folks, and welcome to the Inside the Mix podcast. If you are a new listener, a big welcome. Make sure you hit follow wherever you get your podcasts and if you're watching this on YouTube, make sure you hit subscribe and the notification bell so you get notified whenever there's a new episode. And to the returning listeners, as always, a huge welcome back.

Marc Matthews: 1:36

So it's a short introduction from me today, folks, as I'm going to be revealing episode two from my limited series podcast, logic Pro Mixing Tips for Synthpop Producers, artists and Musicians set to drop this summer 2024, date TBC, and in episode two we're kicking off with mix prep and pre-production and setting ourselves up for mixing success. So, before we dive into this limited series podcast episode, who is it for? If you are a synth pop producer, artist or musician looking to accelerate your mixing skills with Logic Pro, you're in the right place with this limited series podcast. Now, that being said, if you don't use Logic Pro, there will still be tips and tricks, techniques that you can take into other DAWs, but essentially, I'm helping you press the mixing fast forward button and learn how to mix exclusively in Logic Pro so you can create professional radio ready music and not compromise on quality. Now, during this episode, you may well hear me mention about a mix template and a project folder, and that is because it will be made available when the limited series podcast drops. So there will be the opportunity for you to download the mix template, the stems and the project folder as well, all entirely free. There is no paywall. It's all going to be free. It's entirely free podcast and free series. But for now, what I'm going to enable is, if you click on the link in the episode description, you can download my synth pop mixing template for Logic Pro. So click on the link in the episode description. Alternatively, you can go to synthmusicmasteringcom forward slash free and you can find it there. So you can download that template and you can start using it today. But, as a disclaimer, the actual project and stems are not available for download yet, just the project template in Logic Pro. So without further ado, folks, here is episode two of my Logic Pro mixing tips for synth pop producers, artists and musicians set to drop this summer 2024. So in this episode we are starting with pre-production and mix preparation. We want to set ourselves up for mixing success. So let's dive in.

Marc Matthews: 3:44

So first I've opened up Logic. I've opened up the project here and I've got it in front of me, and I highly encourage you to open the project in Logic as well and follow along as I am talking. So the first thing I did was I used the template and I imported the stems. The stems you can find in the project folder, but they'll already be in there for you if you've opened the project itself. Alternatively, you could import the stems and go through the process yourself if you want to. The option's there. So here I've imported my stems and I've got some groups. I've got drums, I've got bass, synth group one, synth group two, effects, lead vox and vox harmony. So, having imported those, I've then color coded them. So my drums are red, my bass is blue. My synth group one is yellow, my synth group two is green, my effects are sort of turquoise, my lead vox and my vocal harmonies are pink. Then what I did was, as soon as I done all that, I imported my reference track. So I highly encourage you to use a reference throughout the entire mixing process.

Marc Matthews: 4:45

In the template there is room for three reference tracks. I've got one here at the moment and that's the only one I used in this instance. So next I customize the control bar and display. So at the top I've got the only one I used in this instance. So next I customise the control bar and display. So at the top I've got it set to 134 BPM and I've got it set to D minor. I like to set the session up so I can see the key and I can see the tempo immediately, and that will become evident as to why I did that later in the series. I also have a custom display here, this control bar, and to customise that you can click the arrow to the right and it says customize control bar and display, and in there I've got it set with the positions, time and beats, the tempo, time signature, the key signature and the performance meter. I like to see how CPU intensive the plugins are that I'm using.

Marc Matthews: 5:33

So, having done all that, I then went ahead and made sure the labels were correct. So within drums, my group is called drums, bass is called bass, all the way down to vocal harmony. And within each one, if I expand, I've got kick one snare, one snare, two, clap, hat chorus down to crash right Again. Open the project and follow along with me. Folks, I've got bass, bass, guitar, down to wah bass in this instance, and then I'm not going to open them all, but you can go through these at your own leisure. I've got my chorus up right, chorus up left, and my advice here is to make them short and obvious what they are. For example, with my effects, I've got bubble effect. If I just move this out I can't remember what they all are. I've got reverse CD effect and I've got noise pan. So make it obvious, make it easy for yourself, right, label them something obvious. That's why I've got these big uppercase drums bass to make it nice and easy when I'm mixing.

Marc Matthews: 6:28

So next, at the top of the edit window, I expanded sort of the transport area. Forgive me, I don't, I cannot remember what it's actually called, but anyway, I wanted to see the marker track, basically, and in here I've set it out so I can see the intro, verse 1, chorus 1, verse 2, chorus 2, bridge, chorus 3, and outro. It's really easy to add markers. You just click on the plus right and you can create a marker, and then you can hover over the edge of the marker itself and you can drag them and make them bigger, make them smaller, whatever you need to do. So, having done that, I'm now just going to quickly check the auxiliary sends and make sure everything is as it should be there. So this is a template, so it should already be fine, to be fair.

Marc Matthews: 7:06

And in here I've got my reverbs, my delays, my time based processing sends, I've got my parallel compression sends, I've got my mix bus, I've got my drum dirt channel, I've got my vocal double and they. I've got my vocal double and they've already got the plugins on there. That is the beauty of using this template you can just drag your stems into there, easy as that. And then, on the stereo, out, I've got my metering also, and you'll see that my labels, or rather my sends, have labels Sorry, and you can change those. I like to do this because that way I can quickly see okay, well, where's this send going, rather than think, oh, it says bus 24. Where's bus 24 going? It's a lot easier if you've got them already labeled. So this is a template. You may want to change these labels and if you do, you can go to Mix IO Labels and then you can scroll down and then you just click on the label you want to change, double click and then give it a new name. Easy as that, right To label those, and I highly encourage you to do that because it's so much easier.

Marc Matthews: 8:03

Imagine you've got I don't know a vocal and you've got three or four sends on that vocal going to bus 24, bus 3, bus 5. Where are they going? As soon as your project gets quite big, that might get a bit hard to manage and that's why I like to label my sends. So next I would put on a decent pair of headphones, a really nice set of cans, folks, and then I would listen to each stem all the way through and just check for any unwanted noise and eliminate that using the marquee tool or the scissor tool or something along those lines, and also check fades at the end and the beginning of regions and also the transition between regions as well. I'm not going to go through that now because I'm going to assume that's already done, because this is about mixing. We're not going through the actual editing process, so the editing has been done here, so we can kick on with mixing. But that's what I would do.

Marc Matthews: 8:53

Once I've done all my sort of admin-y bits surrounding the import and labeling, I would then look at the actual stems themselves and make sure they're clean and tidy. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to get rid of any unwanted tracks so you'll notice there's a green h at the top here in this edit window and show hidden or show hide hidden tracks. So you can press h on the keyboard, right. But what I'm going to do is I'm just going to hide the other two reference tracks because I don't need those. And this is where, as well, using the template, if you don't want to delete tracks, you could just hide those that you don't want, any tracks that you're not using Because you may want them at a later date, I don't know. You may import some stems thereafter. So I get a bit more screen real estate and get rid of any tracks that I don't need. I'm going to use that hide feature.

Marc Matthews: 9:40

Next is probably one of the most important parts of the mixing process, I think, in terms of like administration, right Is you go up to file and we're going to go to project alternatives and I would edit this alternative and I would call it import, which is what I've done here. Import, which is what I've done here. Every time I do something within the mix, I'm going to create a new alternative, a drum mix, a drum edit, bass mix, a synth edit, a lead vox tune, something along those lines, just so I've got versions I can go back to in case something goes wrong and I'm thinking I need to go back, I need to take a step back in time. So I highly encourage you to use those throughout the mixing process and we will do it. Throughout this limited series podcast, you'll see that I use this alternative feature a lot. So this here is really the foundation. I'm going to go to file project alternatives and import. So if you're following along, you will see that in this project we've got one alternative at the moment called Import, and that is basically our foundation of where we're going to start with this project and mixing.

Marc Matthews: 10:44

So this next part is the final part before we move to actual mixing and this is kind of like a belt and braces approach to version control. So in the Finder window on my Mac here, I found the project and it's labeled Mark Matthews, let you Go Stems. And I've also got the BPM 134 and the key as well, which I highly encourage you to do that when it comes to labeling your projects, because it makes it so much easier. I know immediately what the song is, I know the BPM and I know the key. So if I'm going to be sharing this with someone, I don't have to open the project if I forget what the BPM or the key is. It makes it so much easier and it did when I was creating these stems for this actual series and all I would do is I would hold the option key and then just drag, and then I'm going to create version 2 and that is my, my fail safe. That is my backup. If, for whatever reason, my project alternatives go wrong, go awry, let's say, or the project that I'm working on just totally corrupts, which probably won't happen I've got this backup here and I would label that probably just call it backup rather than two, and let's do that. So I'm going to put there. Call that dash backup and that would be my backup, and obviously I'm going to continue working in the one that I'm in. I've just got that backup there should the worst happen and I need to open the file from that import because my other project is corrupt.

Marc Matthews: 12:13

Okay, so let's quickly summarize the pre-production process. We imported our files, we color-coded them, we grouped them, we give them appropriate labels and appropriate group labels as well, or subgroup labels, however you want to call them. We've added a reference track. We've also added markers. We changed the tempo to the project tempo. We also added the key as well and we customized the display at the top. We checked the auxiliary sends to make sure they're all okay and we've got all the time-based processing and all the dynamic-based processing auxiliary sends that we want and that our plugins are there also. And then on our stereo output, we've got our metering plugins.

Marc Matthews: 12:53

We looked at version control, so we went to File Project Alternatives and we looked at version control. So we went to File Project Alternatives and we looked at version control as well. And then we're going to check for unwanted noises and anomalies within our files and eliminate those and make sure we top and tail with fades as well. We're going to hide any unwanted tracks and then finally we're going to create a copy of the project in the finder window as a final version control failsafe.

Marc Matthews: 13:22

So in that recap there I mentioned groups and subgroups and I kind of dismissed, saying whatever you want to call them, and that was wrong of me to do that, because there is a difference between the two.

Marc Matthews: 13:31

So if we look at groups I'm not using groups here per se but if you were to group tracks together, then what happens is when you move one fader it then moves them all and you retain that balance that you have between those tracks and you also retain the discrete outputs going to the stereo output for each one of those tracks. In this instance, in this project, I'm using subgroups, so you will see if you're looking at the video here. But I'll describe to you the output for each track of'm using subgroups. So you will see if you're looking at the video here. But I'll describe to you the output for each track of this drum subgroup is routed to this summing stack and then from the summing stack it then goes to the mix bus. So there's no discrete stereo output for each individual track within the subgroup. They go, rather the tracks go to this summing stack, there's some processing and then it goes to the mix bus and what happens is when I move the fader on the summing stack, it doesn't move the faders of the individual tracks within the subgroup there.

Marc Matthews: 14:27

So that's the difference between subgroups and groups. So there we go, folks. That is the pre-production phase complete, and that is episode two of the limited series podcast logic pro mixing tips for synth pop producers, artists and musicians. Now, caveat, there will be more at the beginning and the end of that episode, but obviously that will be revealed in the limited series podcast when it drops in the summer of 2024. So in the meantime, head over to synthmusicmasteringcom, forward, slash free and download my logic pro synth pop mixing template, or you can click the link in the episode description.