If you’re working out of a bedroom studio without proper acoustic treatment, it’s often hard to make the right judgement for processing your sounds. Our mixdown and mastering services will ensure we shine brilliance upon every element you’ve crafted in your tracks to have it sound right on the best and biggest sound systems.
Let us know what you're expecting from the mix. Are you mostly happy with your mix and just can’t get that last bit of polish out of it? Are you happy with the song, but the mix is just totally off and you want a fresh take on it? Tell us a little bit about what you’re expecting from someone else mixing your track, and it’s much easier for us to make sure we start off properly.
Group things as stems when appropriate, especially if you’re layering sounds. I.E. If you have multiple tracks of vocal comps making up the main vocal, We don’t need all the separate vocal tracks, just send them all as a single stereo vocal file. If you’re layering a few different synths for your bassline or some other core part of the song, generally it works best if you export those all as one stereo file. If you have 5 tracks of similar sounding strings making up a subtle pad track in the background, export them as a single stem instead of separate files etc.
Please appropriately name each and every file something meaningful and descriptive. For instance, don’t call them Track1.wav, Track2.wav, etc. Instead, call the files something like Kick.wav, Cymbals.wav, Bassline.wav, LeadSynth.wav, etc.
In terms of effects, generally we would say to leave most of them on when you render the files. The exception are effects like compression and EQ, we prefer you disable those type of effects before sending the files to us unless it is critical to the sound of that track, I.E. you are side-chaining something.
It works better if we can enhance what you’ve already created, versus trying to RECREATE it from scratch. If you turn an effect or dynamics processor off and suddenly that track sounds a lot different, just leave it on. we can always ask for a version with it off if I need it.
Export each individual track in the project for the entire length of the song. Even if the part is only a few seconds long, it makes it quicker for us to line everything up in our DAW if every single track is the exact same length.
In most cases exporting each track as a 24bit/44.1kHz wav or AIFF is sufficient. If you prefer to work at higher sample rates, that is fine too. However, the best sounding option in most cases it to export the stems at the same sample-rate the project file is set to.
Please let us know the EXACT tempo of the song.
Once you have prepared all of your tracks per the above instructions, please send us the parts in a zip file using dropbox or e-mail.
Once we have the mixdown close to what we think is done, we will do a quick mastering pass on it, and send you a Test Mix to listen to. This is 95% of what the final master you receive will sound like unless you want us to make any changes. Listen to the track a few times, hopefully in a few different places, and let us know if there’s anything you’d like changed in the mixdown.
