From the course: Tips and Tricks for Modern Producers

Stemming and prep for mixing

- [Instructor] All right now, I'm going back to this Miami track here because it's a really good example of something that made the beat, did some recording on that and then moved it into Pro Tools and did some recording in Pro Tools and also did some mixing. So what we had originally was a logic project here. It looked like this, and it was originally a demo for a certain ad that we decided to take elsewhere. So what we wound up doing was just taking the simple beat. I recorded the guitars into Logic, and then we also did a little bit of vocal recording and Logic as well and then some in Pro Tools and moved it all around. But what we wound up with were a batch of stems that we imported from Logic, okay? So, and one of the dead giveaways of that is that there are a couple of printed Reverbs there which are handy. The way that this worked was I brought everything into Pro Tools and what I do with Logic when I'm exporting stems. And this is assuming that I like the balance that I have, the general mixes is like feeling good for the stage that it's at, and hopefully it is and hopefully that's what you're experiencing too. I tend to export everything from logic with the fader volume and the automation all being printed into the track, so that the balance that we wind up with, actually feels really good when we import it into Pro Tools. Now things move around, pan laws change, Logic has some voodoo happening with it. There's a lot of really interesting stuff going on. But it's very important that we wind up with something that sounds like the demo when we're starting. So again, as I mentioned before, we're not sitting here trying to create a scenario where we wind up with a bunch of duplicated files. So when we import the files into Pro Tools, we either hit copy or we hit add. Copy is going to make a new copy of the stem, or the audio file that you're importing and put it in the audio files folder. If you just hit add, then it's going to stay where it is, and Pro Tools is just going to reference that. And so as long as everything is traveling together, add will work really well. It just depends on whether your session is immobile where it's going, things like that, okay? What I am going to add is I'm just going to grab the bounce here, there we go, and throw it in there. And we're going to add that over here. This was my Logic bounce. So I just want to talk about referencing a little bit basically. So essentially this is where my output is coming from. If I mute this, then we wind up (upbeat music) with nothing. You can check out some of my other videos and the way that I structure my template here but this is my output to my speakers. I have the reference from when I was doing production in Logic, this is the bounce from when I made stems, basically. And so what I'm going to do when I first import stuff now, obviously we've done a lot of work on this, but we're kind of jumping back in time, and so you're going to have to ride with me on this. You're going to notice that basically I'm able to flip back and forth without things jumping around too much. I'm using this reference as a way of saying, okay, is everything in the right place? But also creating a starting point the really serious mixers when they receive a track they have an assistant go in, lay out the Pro Tools session and then using the demo reference that they got from the artist or the producer they're making it so that demo reference sounds just about identical to the starting point that they're using for the mix. And this does a lot of things. It gets you in the right head space and it also makes it so that you're hearing what other people were hearing. It solves a lot of problems right off the bat. So let's just flip back and forth. And this is also handy as you move on in your mix, you can actually hear what you've done, you can compare, you can say, okay well, this sounds better, but this doesn't sound better or what happened to the clove? There's so much that you can do. So I'm just going to use a keystroke to flip back and forth between these two, okay? (techno music) ♪ Get you head on ♪ ♪ Take it easy ♪ ♪ Feel the sand under your feet ♪ Okay, so we've got a volume discrepancy here, I'm just going to deal with that real quick. (techno music) ♪ Get your head on ♪ ♪ Take it easy ♪ ♪ Feel the sand under your feet ♪ ♪ The sun is shining ♪ ♪ You are flying ♪ ♪ Take a moment to be free ♪ ♪ Move around and think about it ♪ ♪ Feel the world as you dive in ♪ ♪ Come dance with me ♪ ♪ I'm right in the sea ♪ ♪ Trying to let your body free ♪ ♪ How you want to feel ♪ ♪ Move with the breeze ♪ ♪ Let the rhythm set you free ♪ ♪ I'd just prove my fear ♪ ♪ Turn around and feel me ♪ Okay. So we can hear that everything's in the right place. And there's some stuff that we can learn from that demo. We've done a lot of cool work on this one throughout this course but if we had really tried to knock it out of the park in terms of the mix there's a lot of stuff that was in that original demo in terms of the brightness and some of the gain staging that can be handy to us, and especially if this was something that was produced by someone else. They're telling you that, hey, we like the background's up, you know what I mean? And, this is something that happens where you come back to something the next week or the next day or something and maybe you don't have the backgrounds as high for whatever reason. And so you're like hey, I'm going to turn this down a little bit. And that's how it feels to you that particular day. But then you have that reference to go back to and say, here's where I left in the production stage. Does this feel good? And you can compare. And it just gives you a concrete way to say Oh, this is how I felt that day. I hear why that's not quite right now. Or maybe I hear why I need to go back to that, there's a lot that you can do with that. And so getting that demo and getting those stems all loaded and organized is the really, really important thing that really is going to save you a lot of time, getting the levels right, getting organized but it's also going to really help your workflow and let you start with the things that you should be starting with as opposed to putting out fires right at the beginning of your mix.

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