FabFilter

If any home studio producers have a good workflow and the time to share it, that would be great for a novice like me.

I recently bought the FabFilter bundle of 7 plug-ins for iPad. I am loving the videos supplied in the FabFilter site. Now I am trying to sort out a sensible workflow with the new plug-ins. I realise this will vary depending on the raw tracks and desired end product, but in general I would want to follow a tried and tested strategy before attacking specific issues.

Having these wonderful plug-ins available gives me an opportunity to change the way I do things.

For example, should I analyse the raw mix or individual tracks first to eliminate unwanted sounds? The analyser in Q3 should give me a good idea of where to place notch filters, high and low cuts, dynamic bell cuts and boosts etc. I could run it on the mix bus then see which tracks have issues.

Should I do a provisional master mix first rather than last? It has always seemed odd that I do the individual tracks, sub-group mixes and full mix before any mastering.

When to do compression. When to use dynamic eq? De-easing? On each track? On subgroups? Maybe on the full mix? E.g. If you don’t notice sibilants on the full mix is there any need to de-es at the track level?

Experience is a wonderful thing but it takes time to get, so a little help on the order to do things for the most efficiency would be really useful.

Mixing workflows are a very personal thing, mine now has little resemblance to what it was when I started. Mike Senior's book helped me a lot back then and I wholeheartedly recommend it. It's a good starting point, it will at least give you some of what you seem to be looking for, i.e. structure, but don't be afraid to do things differently as you get more experience. Whatever works for you!

Having said that, I don't think it's wise to decide on your workflow based on the tools you have, but rather on the order in which you want to solve the problems that will pop up as the mix progresses, and when they do, use whichever tool will work best to solve them. Don't get me wrong, Q3 and all the other FF Pro plugins I have (all of them except Pro-R) are absolutely stellar and will help you get there much faster, but using them as solutions in search of problems won't help you get better mixes.

Personally I do mix from the start into a mix bus compressor and Pro-L2, so I'm kind of "pre-mastering" as I go along, but I already know what to expect and it's easy for me to know whether a problem is track, bus or mix bus related. I think if I had done it when I was getting started, it would have probably confused me more than helped me, too many variables. Put it this way: aim to do a mix so good that mastering will barely need to touch it and you'll be fine.

When to do compression, dynamic eq, de-essing, at what level...? Sorry but you won't like the answer: it depends! De-essing if you don't hear sibilance in the whole mix? I wouldn't, because how things sound in context is what matters in the end (again, just because you have a super-duper de-esser, doesn't mean that you always have to de-ess). Dynamic eq is quite a life saver for very specific problems, like a singer whose upper midrange goes through the roof when he/she belts but is fine otherwise, or a bass guitar where some specific note resonates or not depending on whether it's played fretted or open string, so if you don't have that type of problem, you may very well finish your mix without ever using it.

Compression? In my genre (rock, pop-rock, blues-rock) pretty much always, but loops and pads may or may not need it, so don't use it systematically unless, again, there's a problem you want to solve, like a fader that seems to want to be nudged up and down all the time, or a sound that you think could do with some extra character, or a bus or whole mix that seems to need some glue to pull it together.

As for eq, you may want to start with broad strokes on buses or even the mix bus to get things going, but revisit later and see which tracks are causing the mud, harshness or whatever, then treat those individually. Talking about mud, it tends to accumulate very quickly and get in the way of progressing with the mix, so I do put high-pass filters where needed from the very beginning. In fact my template includes one Q3 per track and bus and obvious things like DS in the lead vocal, G in the snare and kick (it's always live drums for me), etc., but of course they all start in bypass and only come in as and when needed.

Anyway, all of the above is IME, IMHO, YMMV, etc. Hope it helps!

Cheers,