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mixintheLeft And RightWhether you’re mixing on a console or in the box it’s good toget your tracks and channels arranged in a logical, familiar order.I use a system that I inherited from the usuallayout of tracks on multi-track tape and I’vegradually refined it with the use of colour fordifferent track types. Another basic thing isto have everything in your song and on yourconsole properly named – the recording engineermay know what “Audio 36” is but I don’t! All ofthis may seem painfully obvious but there is areason for emphasising its importance. I wasn’tfully aware of why it was so important until Iread Michael Paul Stavrou’s fantastic book MixingWith Your Mind, which explained it verysimply: Mixing is split into two distinct and separateprocesses, the technical (left brain) and thecreative (right brain). It’s tempting to leap intothe creative (fun) part of mixing too early, only tofind that you have to grind to a halt to fix a technical issue.Switching your brain from one side to the other is time consumingand counter productive so it’s best to get all of the leg workout of the way before you start with the fun stuff....Simon Gogerly, Producer/Engineer and AM ContributorSynth SqueeseI work with a lot of synthesisers, hardware, soft synths – youname it I work with it. I usually find a few different ways tocontrol the dynamic range of each individual line, I usuallyassign them all to a synth buss, hit it with 4:1 compression,which for synths isn’t that hard, then I work on a mediumattack and similar release, just to ‘gel’ all the synths together,for any sound sculpting compression, I put a singlecompressor on the synth line I want to compress.Charles Wilson III, Keyboards/Programmer, Smart AV Tango user, (JohnMayer, Justin Timberlake, Rihanna...), C/O Smart AVPre-RenderingWhen I started mixing, back in the multi-tracktape days, everything on the tape had to be finishedbefore a mix could start. The infinite possibilitiesof DAWs have changed all that and there’s oftena stack of editing/tuning/re-arranging to be donecome mix time. Wherever possible try and getthese tasks completed before piling into the mix.It can be a bit of a slog but it will save a lot of timeand brain-switching later....Simon Gogerly, Producer/Engineer and AM ContributorDialogue: Help Out the FXEditorAny non-dialogue sounds thatyou remove from your edit maybe useful to the effects editor.These include transients such asfootsteps and door closes, aswell as subtler movements aslong as they are good quality recordings.Lay these off, in sync,onto a separate track, and passthem on to the Effects Editor.These may be used instead of,or as well as, Foley.Susan Pennington, Dialogue EditorSpool Post, Audio Media Feb 2010Dialogue: Tidy Tracklay, Tidy MindTake A BreakTake regular breaks. This sounds inconsequential,but is all-important. Listening fatigue impairsjudgement, and the only antidote to listeningfatigue is to stop listening! Briefly, of course…Alex Theakston, Marketing Co-ordinator, Source DistributionChequerboard your tracklay so it’s neat and clear. Talk to the Dubbing Mixer to find out whattheir tracklay preferences are; most prefer you to keep each angle or mic type on separate tracks,so all the regions with similar noise or tone issues are on the same track, making it much easier toapply corrective processing. Label tracks and regions clearly and consistently with character nameand microphone information. I also like to colour code regions according to character. Remember thatsomeone else will be mixing the tracks you’ve prepared, so they’ve got to be able to understand at a >glance what’s going on.Susan Pennington, Dialogue Editor Spool Post, Audio Media Feb 2010Vocode!I had come across the vocoder a few timesin my career but it wasn’t until I worked withUnderworld that I learned of its full potential.One particularly useful application in mixing is tolayer a vocoder with the lead vocal (playing thesame melody) as an alternative to ADT or chorus.In fact it can be quite a useful way of reigningin a slightly pitchy vocal performance withoutresorting to tuning. I sometimes find that tuninga vocal can compromise its character, flatteningit out. The vocoder makes it sound more in tunewithout losing any of its personality.Simon Gogerly, Producer/Engineer and AM ContributorTerror ToolsGRM Tools was just phenomenal. We used that for creating just weird, strange effects that you don’t normally hear.AudioEase’s Altiverb is some of the best software that I’ve ever heard in my life...and Speakerphone – we used that a lot too.Don Veca, Audio Director, Dead SpaceAudio Media, July 2009AUDIO MEDIA AUGUST 2011 19