Music Mixing and Mastering: What to Bring to Your Studio Session

Are you a musician, artist or are you in a band working on a new music project? This article is part of a series designed to help you have the best experience every time you are in the recording studio. The topic of this article is what I need to bring to a mixing session in a professional studio. I assume you have recorded your own song and go to the studio to work with a professional mixing engineer. This is an important question because there is a lot of confusion surrounding this topic.

If you have recorded your own song, you are probably using a digital audio workstation (Pro-Tools, Logic, Cubase, Reaper, etc.) to do your multitrack recording. So you will have several different tracks with different instruments (bass, guitars, kick drum, snare, etc.). Your mixing engineer will need each of these tracks individually. There are a couple of ways this can happen. One way is to take the entire studio session project to your mixing engineer and ask him to export the audio files you need.

However, if you are using different software than your engineer, you will have to export or render each track individually to a separate stereo / mono audio file (.WAV, etc.). I would do this by soloing each individual track and rendering only that track as a high resolution audio file. It’s important to render each track to the exact length of the entire song so that everything syncs correctly when your mixing engineer opens it. So even if you have a voice track that only plays incidentally throughout the song, the rendering for that track should be the full length of your song.

Another important consideration is the digital resolution with which you process your files. This refers to the sample rate and bit depth (most commonly 44.1 kHz and 16 bit). It is important to render at the native resolution, or the resolution at which you recorded your audio / MIDI. Finally, it is important that none of your individual tracks or your master track is clipping or “going red” and that you have no effects on the master bus (compression, limiting, etc.) of your renderings. Having a clean render ensures that your mixing engineer can do the best possible job for you. Just copy all your tracks to a CD / DVD, USB stick, or external drive and take them to your mixing engineer.