Our mixdown service brings you to stem mixing at an affordable price. We will ensure that your track is mixed down from your supplied stems to the professional standard and sound that you need.  Audio mixing will ensure your music is mixed by a professional engineer who will bring a fresh pair of ears to your project and use the best technology to ensure a final mixdown that will give your track a professional edge that’s ready for mastering.

If you are struggling to get that polished professional sound on your mixdown then this service is for you!

Tracks are generally returned to the customer as stereo 16bit 44.1kHz WAV files with -6db of headroom ready for mastering. If you would like your track supplied with more or less headroom than -6db please feel free to add this as a note to your order.

Audio mixing is the process of taking recorded tracks and blending them together. Tracks are blended using various processes such as EQ, Compression and Reverb.

The goal of mixing is to bring out the best in your multi-track recording by adjusting levels, panning, and time-based audio effects (chorus, reverb, delay, etc). The aim is to sculpt your arrangement to make sense of all your tracks in relation to each other.

A multitrack recording is anything with more than one individual track (also referred to as stems). There’s no right or the wrong number of tracks. The final output of a multitrack recording is also known as the mixdown. The mixdown is the final step before mastering.

1. Send only the tracks you want to be mixed. Besides the many benefits of digital recording, one of the downsides is that we don’t make decisions because we have seemingly unlimited amounts of storage. We keep multiple vocal takes or guitar solos, or whatever arrangement decisions we don’t make. However, sorting through your takes is not considered part of the mixing process. Compiling a final take is part of the production process and should not be left for the mixer to do unless you are also hiring them to help you with these decisions. Another practice is keeping ideas or parts that we ultimately don’t think fit in the song. These should not be sent to your mixer either. This point is especially important if you are sending your project session folders because keeping them clean of unwanted takes, clips, and tracks will save you hard drive space and ultimately a headache sorting through your files or uploading.
2. Clean up your tracks. This means removing unwanted noises between performance parts. Sometimes you want to leave a vocalist’s breath for emotion or a guitarist or drummer’s noises, communicate that to the mixer. Other noises include improper edits that cause clicking, popping or other artifacts. Crossfading at edit points fixes most of this, but a good measure of this is to hear if you can identify your edits with the track soloed and your eyes closed. All these little things that may not be heard before mixing will most likely show up in the master after loads of compression have been added.
3. Pitch and time correction. Not every mixer includes these services in their rates. You are safer to do it yourself than to trust that it is included. Be sure that all your stems line up and are of the same length. Be 100% certain that what you are sending to your engineer is your final version. You are generally billed for work completed by an engineer.
4. Turn off your processing, or not. This is probably the most subjective point. The reasoning behind not sending heavily processed tracks to your mixer is that they aren’t inhibited by the compression and EQ or other effects you have “printed” or bounced to the track/stem you are sending. However, in some cases, you’ve worked hard to define and shape a special sound, and that shouldn’t be ignored by your mixer. It is beneficial to send this to the mixer as well as some premixed material, such as background vocals and drum loops. Still send the unprocessed file in case something isn’t working. Most engineers like to have your rough mix as a reference. With all of your processing on, bounce a mix to include. Rough mixes help your mixer hear your emotional response to the song. Logistically, bounce or print your rough mix and include it in a track in the session.
5. Label your tracks clearly! Preferably in English. Short and simple is usually the best. Titles like Kick In, Kick Out, Snare Top, Lead Vocal or abbreviations like Kick O, Snare T, Track 1, and Vox (vocals) are common names and help easily define what instrument the track is. The shorter the file name, the better. There is no need to include the song title in the track name. Labelling your tracks clearly during recording will save you from having to rename mislabeled tracks later because most DAWs will automatically name and catalogue your files according to your track titles.
6. Track consolidation and export. Many DAWs have different processes for performing a track consolidation task and call them different names, but, in short, it is a process that takes all of your edits on a track and creates a continuous region/clip. It is advised that you have all of your tracks start from the session start (begin all at the same exact point) so to ensure they will line up when being imported into another session. After you have consolidated/flattened your tracks, you can delete all of the unused regions/clips from your session and hard drive to free up space. When your tracks all start from the beginning of a session and are continuous to the end of the parts contained in that track, they are ready to export to a separate labelled folder for your mixer.
7. Export folder and other info to include for your mix engineer. Properly labelling your folder is simple and can be done with just the song title and indicating they are the files for mixing by including “multi tracks for mix” or similar. The most efficient includes other information that your mixer would want to know. These are good practices for any project, whether you are sending them to another engineer, archiving or migrating to a different system. They will save your mixer time and expedite mix turnaround. Most professionals are happy to guide you through this process if you are unsure. There are many videos and materials online to help you navigate your software to help you consolidate your tracks, clean up your edits or just about any other process. If you have any questions about preparing or sending your tracks, send us a message, and we’d be happy to help.