Most of us in the home studio world function as composer, musician, engineer, producer, and mixer. The downside of this type of multitasking is that we must constantly shift our focus and concentration among various areas. Since it takes years to be really good at doing just one thing, we’ve assembled a crash course in mixing to save you time spent away from other musical endeavors.
Our focus will be on DAW mixing. An advantage of DAW mix windows is that you don’t necessarily need to keep a track sheet since you have the ability to label tracks in the GUI. But keep some form of written production sheet to provide a handy reference for what you’ve accomplished and what remains to be done. Most DAWs offer a virtual notepad, but in the unhappy event that you lose your data, a production sheet will let you retrace your steps. Keep it where you can get to it easily, even when you aren’t working at your computer, so you can save your production ideas as they come to you.
Before you start mixing, the first thing you must do is to make a backup copy of your project and store it to an external hard drive, (such as a Glyph GT 050 FireWire), CD, or DVD. If you have the resources, allocate one hard drive, or at least a partition, to storage only! If you’re saving to optical media, be sure to label them, then treat them as you would your most prized possession.