How To Prep Files For Mixing In Logic Pro | 5 Essential Tips

Generally, the process of creating music consists of three primary steps: Production, mixing, and mastering. Each of these steps plays a vital role in turning raw ideas into industry-standard songs ready to be released on streaming platforms.

Once you’ve recorded your tracks, added your audio processing plugins, and arranged everything, it’s time to move forward to mix everything together. However, there are measures you should take to prepare your session before you jump into a mixing session. These preparations become even more critical if you’re sending your Logic Pro project to another user to mix it for you.

Prepping stems in your Logic session allows for a much more efficient mixing session. Moreover, it makes it easier to showcase what you have in mind and your creative goals when working with a mixing engineer. Without further ado, let’s look at some of the boxes you must check for a smooth transition from the production stage to the mixing session.

1. Organize Your Session For Maximum Efficiency

Organizing tracks in your Logic Pro session is a primary pillar for saving time and boosting efficiency. This is something that you should have in mind while you’re in the production stage. The sooner you start implementing these methods into your arrangement, the easier it is.

For starters, make sure you use colors to make visual cues for different types of tracks and instruments. For instance, I usually color my drums and percussive instruments shades of red, bass lines yellow, guitars purple, synths green, and my vocal tracks blue. Coloring boils down to your own preferences, and there’s no difference in what colors you assign to your tracks.

You can access Logic’s color palette by pressing “OPTION + C” on your keyboard.

Besides coloring, make sure you group instruments correctly. This makes navigating through multiple tracks much less of a headache. Furthermore, you can use track folders and stacks to streamline your workflow further.

Arrangement markers can also help you visualize the structure of your project better. You can access them from the Global Tracks area to distinguish between different segments of your song, such as the intro, verse, chorus, etc. In another post, I have thoroughly explained how to use arrangement markers in Logic Pro.

2. Tidy Things Up

It is of utmost importance to ensure that timing and tuning on all tracks are as accurate as you want them to be. If there’s a note out of tune or out of time, it’s a creative decision and not a mistake.

Other than that, ensure you remove all the double breaths, noises, clicks, and unwanted sounds. Listen to where two regions collide with one another and use X-fade if necessary to create smooth transitions.

Also, as a rule of thumb, it’s best to add short fade-ins and fade-outs at the beginning and end of each audio region to ensure you’re omitting all pops and clicks.

If you’ve used comps to record vocals or other instruments, make sure to flatten and merge all tracks.

3. Bounce MIDI Tracks In Place

Working with virtual instruments allows you to fine-tune your sound by adjusting the smallest of details. However, spending too much time playing around with different parameters can be counterproductive. Therefore, one reason for bouncing software instrument tracks in place and turning them into audio is to create a mental commitment to the sound. I for one can go on tweaking VSTs for hours with no end.

Another vital reason for bouncing MIDI tracks is to manage CPU usage in Logic Pro. Virtual instruments can put a lot of stress on the computer’s processors, which can lead to a system overload. Moreover, the mixing engineer you send our project to might not have third-party VSTs and plugins you use as virtual instruments, so they won’t hear your software instrument tracks as you would on your computer.

Here’s how you do it:

•  Select the MIDI/pattern regions you want to convert to audio.
•  Control-click and hover your pointer on “Bounce and Join.”
•  Select “Bounce in Place…”

4. Manage Effects And Sends

It is likely that you’ve used a wide array of effect plugins on your tracks during production. While some of them are absolutely necessary to shaping the sound of your project, some play a less critical role.

Additional reverb and delays, panning adjustments, limiters, and even some compressors might be some stuff that you’d want to either address in the mixing session or leave to the mixing engineer to take care of for you. In such cases, you should bypass the effects before exporting your tracks for a mixing session.

It can vary from one project to another. The workflow of your mixing engineer plays a major role as well. It’s best to discuss this prior to handing your project out to another user to mix it for you.

Another thing you should take care of is the sends and buses you use to route audio. Again, you should determine which ones are necessary and which ones should be bypassed for the mixing session.

Something like a drum room send can be left out. But buses you’ve used for reverb and delay plugins play a vital role. Typically, you don’t want your reverbs and delays to be printed on your tracks so that the mixing engineer has the flexibility to make adjustments.

To do that, you can convert the auxiliary channel (bus) into a track that shows up among other tracks in Logic’s main workstation.

Here’s how you do it:

•  Press “X” on your keyboard to open the mixer window.
•  Locate the auxiliary channel you want to create a track for.
•  Control-click and select “Create Track.”

The auxiliary channel now shows up in your tracks area. Then, when exporting multitracks (stems), you can bounce the effect sends independently.

5. Exporting Tracks For The Mixing Session

If you’re mixing your project yourself, then it’s not entirely necessary to export everything out and then import them back to a new session. Instead, you can use Logic to create a project alternative and make all the necessary adjustments and preparation for mixing there without losing your production session.

However, when working with a mixing engineer, you’d want to export your projects as multi-tracks.

First and foremost, create a cycle starting at the beginning of your song and stretching out until where you want your song to end.

Then, export that once as your reference track. This is what the mixing engineer uses to understand what you were aiming for and how he or she can improve upon that.

After that, you’d want to export each track separately. Here’s how you do it:

•  Select All of your tracks.
•  Click “File” from the top-left corner of your screen.
•  Hover your pointer on “Export” and select “[number] Tracks as Audio Files…”

You’d want to choose “Export Cycle Range Only” for the Range to have equal length on all tracks. For optimal sound quality on each track, choose “WAVE” as your Save Format and change your Bit Depth to “24 Bit.”

Export everything in one folder and share it with your mixing engineer.

Final Thoughts On Preparing A Project For Mixing

A project that is ready for a mixing session looks a lot different than it did during production. Things like MIDI regions and effects should be finalized and, if possible, bounced in place to shift focus on fitting tracks together.

Doing a little bit of pre-mixing before moving forward with the mixing session can go a long way. If you’re more of a visual learner, click here to watch me explain everything about getting started with mixing in a YouTube video tutorial.

For more lessons on music production, mixing, mastering, and songwriting, check out my Free 6 Pillars To Learn Logic Pro Faster guidebook.