Hey friends, This is a tutorial on how to prep and export a session for mixing. You’d do this if you’re hiring somebody else to mix your song, or if you want to mix it yourself in a fresh session.
I prefer producing in Logic and then exporting it to mix in Pro Tools, just like the professional studios do. A lot of things made in other DAWS tend to end up in Pro Tools.
Did you know the music industry stole Pro Tools from the film industry?
Step 1:
Do a “save as” of your session and add export to the title. The segmentation is good here and you’ll still have your rough mix intact.
Step 2:
Make sure all of the routing is going to the stereo bus and flatten any stacked tracks. You can highlight and hold shift and mass select all of the tracks in Logic.
Step 3:
Zero all of the panning and levels. Here you can also hold shift and select everything, and hit option and click the levels and the panning. It should then all go to unity.
Step 4:
Remove time-based effects and mixing plugins that the engineer will add later. Keep the elements that are essential to your sound as sound design, and ditch the rest.
Step 5:
Highlight all the tracks you want to export, and hit shift command K. This will bring up a panel for options. Turn off normalize, this will mess with the levels. Don’t bypass all the effects because we manually did this with intentionality already. Create a new folder for these audio files called Export_SongTitle.
The Pattern feature at the bottom allows you to type a keyword that’ll be added to the title of every track. This can be handy if you want separation.
Step 6:
Celebrate! Double-check all your audio files are the same length, as this will make it easier for you or your engineer to import the files when they all start at the same time.