mixer template for bluegrass

banjo71

New member
I've got a buddy of mine who him and his daughter are super talented, and they do old time/folk/bluegrass music. Acoustic bass, guitar, mandolin and vocals. And they need me to add a banjo part, too, which I'm thrilled to do.

I'm sort of a newbie at setting up templates for mixers, I used to build them each song at a time, but I found it's easier, for a bunch of songs from the same artist for a cd, to build a mixer template and delete tracks I won't be using or add a few I will. But the basic structure is here.

I record a drum instrument specific for each session into an audio track and stop recording it right when the song should end, to avoid any bleed through later on at the end of the song. I've got a dummy track "temporary" just if they want to lay down a scratch track to the drums, because they plan on layering the tracking one instrument and vocal at a time. We don't really use drums in bluegrass, so I'll mute that drum track, and the temporary track off once they've laid enough real tracks down to add the rest of the instruments.

I'm using four different mics. For the acoustic bass, a Equation F20 next to the bridge, and a SM81 toward the fretboard, and also a DPA 4099 to be the center of the bass mix. He'd like to record his vocals and guitars with a KSM27. I'm running everything except the bass through a COMP-3a audio leveler, but with just barely any peak reduction used, except maybe for the vocals.


I'm doing a sub mix of bass signals into a bass mix audio track, but I'm grouping the vocals into an auxiliary vocal channel, and the other instruments into an auxiliary instrument channel. Then I'll add my plugins and then blend the two aux channels and the bass mix into a bus mix at the end of the mixer. I'll have a reverb aux set up too.

So I'm excited to get started. I'm recording at 24-bit/88.2 kHZ for the first time (I finally found out why PT was crashing when I changed sample rates back and forth. I got that fixed, although I'll just keep it at 88.2 for the duration of the work just to be on the safe side). I've optimized my computer, adjusted gain levels on all the outboard gear, and I think I'm ready to go!


Here's a screenshot of my mixer template.
mixer setup.jpg
 
I'm a fan of templates and saving channel settings. I recently upgraded my DAW to the latest version and deleted everything before doing so. I'll have to come up with new templates.

Look forward to hearing your mixes.
 
I use templates quite a lot, even if its to save time with setting up plugin chains on channels and buses, even if ultimately I by pass the plugin during mix down.

I have a repeat client being a talent school and I record up to 20 channels of vocals (maybe 60 kids sharing mics recorded in groups up to 15), the template has the stereo backing track set up and 24 channels of vocal channels, vocal and backing track bus etc. Saves a lot of time. The project is for the song & dance concert, so its maybe 20 songs.

Alan.
 
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