Key Of Grey

November 17th, 2009 – Last Friday in my featured post (please read it if you haven’t already so I feel better about writing nearly a billion words), I mentioned the concept of premixing. There were a few terms I used in that post that I sort of glossed over, and premixing may be something that you haven’t heard of before.

Premixing is generally used to consolidate similar sections in a mix. This is achieved by routing several tracks to one auxiliary channel. You then leave those routed tracks alone and use the auxiliary channel to control their combined mix. You might increase or decrease the gain for that whole section, or you might apply effects to it.

Here’s an example of a drums premix. Effects are applied independently for each drum and cymbal. Next, the engineer will create an ideal balance of gain and panning for each track. Once the drum section sounds good together, it is routed to an auxiliary track where the whole drum section can come up or down in the mix.

When creating premixes, engineers will usually set them up for a variety of sections. Along with the above example of a drum premix, there may be guitar, piano/keyboard, and vocal premixes. If you don’t have a lot of tracks to deal with it’s not really necessary, but if you have a lot it’s something you’ll want to do.

In the picture above, you might be able to see the old-fashioned masking tape labeling I did for a client’s mix. You’ll notice that I’ve premixed drums, and created separate ones for acoustic and electric guitars. The reason I didn’t mix all the guitars together was because in certain parts of the song, acoustic and electric guitars trade off in importance and I wanted to be able to control the balance between the two. However, since there were several layered guitars for each, they got their own premixes.

In “Grandfather Clock” (the song featured in the linked post above), the instrumentation was quite simple, however when I brought home the song to mix on my home set up, I wanted to be able to adjust the lead vocals and doubling, separate from the adlibs and chorus hook. I created separate premixes of each to bounce and bring back home.

One place you might have experienced premixes before is in remix contests. When you get “stems” to play around with, those are actually premixes. If you’ve tried to play with levels between those stems, you’ve likely found how much easier it is to mix them compared to dozens of individual tracks.

If you have any questions, post in the comments!