This week Luke was showing us how to prepare to do the mix.
Alex and Ross took it in turns to use Pro-Tools this week as Luke was showing us how to prepare. One of the first things we were shown was colour-coding tracks, as well as grouping tracks, and so to demonstrate the drums, the bass and the electric guitar tracks were all individually grouped. This meant that you could select for example the bass group and then adjust all of the bass tracks levels at the same time. In addition, we were shown how to pan certain tracks to the left and right, as this is necessary if you have recorded, for example, left and right overheads. We were also shown how to eliminate popping between clips, which is done using a small cross-fade. Luke also showed us where you can enter comments on an individual track if you were preparing it for mixing engineers, however we obviously won’t be using this at the moment as we are doing our own mixes.
At the end of the session we were then able to copy the session onto our memory sticks to mix in our own time.