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Prepping a Mix Session

I had some questions about how I prep sessions for mixing in my studio. A lot of the sessions I mix get recorded in a different DAW than the one I typically use, and I’m guessing a lot of folks are in a similar boat these days doing mixes for their streams. So I put together a video on how I go about getting sessions ready for mixing.

David Stagl

2 Responses to “Prepping a Mix Session

  • Jonathan Johnson
    4 years ago

    Love to see Quiet arts defaulter getting used elsewhere, Vedate makes good stuff, been following his stuff from when I lived in New Zealand where he’s now living.

    Question, the clip gain normalizations to -20 makes sense and is a routine to many as a workflow, but what surprised me here in your video workflow – don’t you find raising drums to -2.5 Peak extreme, in that your limiting the headroom for any EQ choice boost? I could understand -10, But what your doing seems high to me – but you obviously have a reason to push it so high. Won’t that run you Analogue plug in sims input calibration too hot or is that the creative choice to cook the pre’s more?
    I must be missing something because it thought you’d want to leave headroom for any posable plus eq boost to not clip the eq chain… What is you wanted to add 6 or more db on something? could you speak at this?

    BTW this clip is great to show others the workflow and I agree Defaulter is the perfect (and little known it seems) app for this ( Just wish he Vedate would make it available on a PC like the rest of his stuff)

    Once again great job on the videos…

    • David Stagl
      3 years ago

      Sorry, Jonathan. Somehow I missed this comment. Personally, I haven’t found -2.5 to be too high for me. The reason it is so high is for the analog plug-ins. I think I got there from studying guys who are still using their SSL’s and based the level I aimed for on what I saw them doing to hit the front end of their consoles.

      As far as headroom goes, I’m not usually clipping inputs internally. Even if I was, though, it’s not really an issue when you’re working in Pro Tools these days because of the floating bit architecture in the latest version. As long as you don’t clip the outputs, you’re fine.