Free Mixing & Mastering Templates

[jadown]

Are there any free mixing & mastering templates that I can download that have different genres other than the ones that comes with Pro Tools? I make mostly R&B, Pop, and some Hip-Hip. But I would love to have some templates that has whatever eq, compressor, reverb, etc placed on your standard instruments for each genre. If anyone knows of any please let me know.

Thanks

[joey santos]

If you have waves.... The eq presets by great mixing engineers are available for free on their site, waves.com

[tamasdragon]

Imho these kind of templates and presets are nearly useless. They might work in 1 situation from a thousand, but really, you cannot go too far with them.

You have to learn how to use things, and the added bonus with this method would be that you are actually able to manipulate the sound the way you want, and not only praying for the best.

Presets are only starting points, but many times they even failed to be that.

[se.audio]

Never heard of such thing (I believe you're talking about PT session templates, not plugin presets). The reason why this doesn't exist I think is because everyone has got a different way of laying down their tracks, aux, fx, etc...
As far as routing goes, I have made an MS routing template that I'd be happy to share you if you want. It's just a basic MS matrix decoder using the standard PT plugins that I use in Mastering.
It is available here: www.se.audio/free-downloads/mastering

[GW]

Originally Posted by jadown

Are there any free mixing & mastering templates that I can download that have different genres other than the ones that comes with Pro Tools? I make mostly R&B, Pop, and some Hip-Hip. But I would love to have some templates that has whatever eq, compressor, reverb, etc placed on your standard instruments for each genre. If anyone knows of any please let me know.

Thanks

If you want to save time and grief - ask a seasoned PT user to give you 40-50 min support session and sit next to him and formulate what you want and why and simply save that as your personal template. I save my personal templates in Pro Tools all the time, but adding Logic to my system I did just that - I included the template making support in my buy of a new mixer unit that I got!

I usually mix on different 8 channel mixers, therefor I place from left to right -

• Mastertrack with plugins inactivated
• Hardware Reverb via SPdif
• Software Reverb on Power Core
• Software Delay
• Instrumenttrack with EZ-Drums output bus Drums
• Audiotrack - input bus Drums
• Instrumenttrack with Bass Trilian outout bus Bass
  
  with the instrumenttrack plugins made Inactive for faster loadtimes

...and so on and so on. When I ride the unit with the Bank selected I always have Matering tracks on my left hand to the left and have my vocal-tracks last on the right side...

I just did this long posting to clear out that a basic strategy saved as a personal template can save a lot of time.

(Don't forget to add a setup with Memory locations and place you most used genre typical naming like Intro, Vers 1, Ref 1, Vers 2, Outtro and just drag them into position)

[se.audio]

Here's a bit of a guideline to get you on the track of clean sessions...:


As a general rule, every track should be routed to a bus that will group different frequency areas:

kicks
drumloops (as well as parallel comp drumloop bus)
guitars (divided into more buses if using acoustic + electric, both then router to a master guitars bus)
piano
synths
bass

reverb1
reverb2
delay (really short that acts like reverb)
delay (FX, usually triplets with low feedback)
delay (FX, quarter note with longer feedback)

master fader



Every bus should have:
HPF on it, where you put that filter depends on the instrument being processed.
EQ should be applied with "niche EQ" techniques.
transient designer (only on some buses though)
Compressor
brightening EQ
Tape saturation


Master should have:
EQ
Comp
Harmonic enhancer
Brightening EQ
tape saturation
Limiter








But then again, this is only a guideline and may not work in every situation. But at least it'll give you a good starting point...

Good Luck!

[lberrios1962]

Originally Posted by elmostephane

Here's a bit of a guideline to get you on the track of clean sessions...:


As a general rule, every track should be routed to a bus that will group different frequency areas:

kicks
drumloops (as well as parallel comp drumloop bus)
guitars (divided into more buses if using acoustic + electric, both then router to a master guitars bus)
piano
synths
bass

reverb1
reverb2
delay (really short that acts like reverb)
delay (FX, usually triplets with low feedback)
delay (FX, quarter note with longer feedback)

master fader



Every bus should have:
HPF on it, where you put that filter depends on the instrument being processed.
EQ should be applied with "niche EQ" techniques.
transient designer (only on some buses though)
Compressor
brightening EQ
Tape saturation


Master should have:
EQ
Comp
Harmonic enhancer
Brightening EQ
tape saturation
Limiter








But then again, this is only a guideline and may not work in every situation. But at least it'll give you a good starting point...

Good Luck!

Are you a mastering, mixing engineer, musician..or just a music student?

If you have to apply all that during a mastering session somebody would be in real problems. Is not need to use so many processing during mastering, it's ridiculous. Not even everything that you mentioned during mixing either. Way too much processing.

[se.audio]

Originally Posted by lberrios1962

Are you a mastering, mixing engineer, musician..or just a music student?

If you have to apply all that during a mastering session somebody would be in real problems. Is not need to use so many processing during mastering, it's ridiculous. Not even everything that you mentioned during mixing either. Way too much processing.

Mixing and mastering engineer.

As these were just quidelines for someone who wasn't too sure where to start, I put everything usually needed on there, but obviously, each project needs different things. The processing on the master would not normally be applied in mixing but in mastering (along with other processing on the MS channels...)
As far as what I mention on the mixing channels, these are required for mediocre recordings (which I assumer the original person asking the question would have since if he/she had good recordings, they'd probably know what to do anyway...)

[browniespeaks]

Oh botha!

[The Dougfather]

Izotope Ozone has some halfway decent presets that would get you going.