The Song

For this example, there will be a blend of acoustic and electronic sounds, including drums; vocals; guitars; and strings with drum loops, synths, and virtual sounds. Part of the exercise is to demonstrate how a large number of tracks can be paired down using routing features to create a mix that is manageable by one person in order to maximize creativity and minimize the hassle of dealing with so many tracks.

Following is a list of all the tracks to be mixed:

Wow, 47 tracks! With today’s modern production styles and the ability of DAWs to have very high track counts, it’s easy to come up with a lot of tracks at mixdown. The trick is to pare this beast down to some manageable number of channels. We must do this while providing ways of processing everything as needed, using external hardware and plug-ins, then outputting stems to an analog summing device, and then recording the mix from the output of the summing device. That’s fairly complicated.