Mixing and Mixdowns at The Mixplant

Looking to get a professional studio mixdown done on your music? There are more people than ever starting to make their own music. Cheap computers have made it easy for almost anyone to have a full recording studio in their bedroom. This is both a blessing and a curse, as this has generated an influx of people who have fantastic ideas and musical concepts, but lack the experience needed to turn those ideas into professional sounding music.

Getting your song mixed at The Mixplant will give you an edge over everyone else, and allow you to fast track your music to the next level.

Does this sound familiar: You’re working on a great sounding track, everything sounds perfect and you can’t wait to send it to your friends/family or a record label. You decide that you’ll quickly compare your track to another released track in a similar genre, just for one last check. Then, as soon as the kick drum hits on that other track, you get that awful sinking feeling as you realize that your mix just doesn’t stack up.

Getting a professional mixdown can solve that! Unfortunately, it’s quite possible that all that stands between your track succeeding or failing is your mix, and I’ve seen it happen many times with labels around the world.

Mixdown Pricing and Details (Australian Dollars)

  • Mixdowns start at $125 for up to 10 stems. If it’s mixed by us, you can also get it mastered at 50% off the normal mastering fee. Higher track counts or really rough mixes may incur an additional fee due to the extra processing time involved. Contact me if you have questions.
  • Includes a 44.1kHz/24bit WAV file of your finished mix and a 320kbps CBR LAME encoded MP3 file for distribution as a record label demo, or to your Soundcloud, MySpace, Facebook, personal website etc.
  • Feedback! I’ll let you know what I did, and what you might want to focus on for your next tracks in order to improve them.
  • If you recommend a friend who uses our mixing services, you get your next track mixed at 50% off!

Preparing for a Mixdown

Preparing your track to get a mixdown is a fairly easy task. In order to keep the track count down to something manageable, you’ll need to bounce some of your tracks down into submixes or stems. Stems are simply just groups of tracks rendered into a single audio file. Chances are you already have certain elements bussed together, like percussion tracks, FX tracks, or some of your fancy synth work.

In order to create these submixes, all you have to do is:

  1. Mute the tracks you don’t want to appear in the stem (or solo the ones you want to hear).
  2. Turn off your master bus plugins.
  3. Export/mixdown/bounce the entire song as a 24bit file starting from bar one. Make sure your exported channel meters are not hitting the red or clipping when you export!

This will create a single file that contains all the sounds and effects in your chosen group of sounds. If you are unsure about some of your effects (i.e. using too much reverb on a send etc), you can bounce those effects separately, but this can get quite cumbersome if tracks from different stems send to the same reverb.

Be careful of sidechained tracks, certain DAW’s will disable the sidechaining if you mute the channel with the sidechain trigger on it. You’ll know once you export the submix if this is the case with yours so remember to check.

How many Stems?

The number of stems/submixes you want to export all comes down to you and what instruments you feel are complementary and already play nice together. I’m more than happy to answer any questions you might have regarding this process so feel free to contact me.

Some ideas for groups/submixes/stems could be:

  • Lead vocals
  • Backing vocals
  • Kick
  • Bassline
  • Hi percussion (Hi-hats, rides, tambourines etc)
  • Lower percussion (Toms, bongos etc)
  • Pads
  • Stabby synths
  • Lead sounds
  • Background noises/FX

After you’ve decided on your stems and have exported them, remember to label them clearly. This makes life so much easier for both of us. Again, don’t forget to disable any master plugins and dithering when you do this.

Before you upload your files

Please lay out all the tracks in a new DAW session at your studio first, just to make sure the exports have all worked properly. Before you spend all that time sending your stems, it pays to double check that a certain plugin wasn’t accidentally left on, some tracks you thought were silent were actually not muted, or some of the tracks don’t line up properly. It’s happened on a few occasions!

You should be able to press play in the new session and have it play your track back exactly as it sounded in your original mix. Now when I lay out all the files in my DAW, I will hear your full mix exactly as you’ve exported it. You’re now ready to send!

What you can expect from me:

  • Mixdowns have a turnaround time of 3-5 business days. If this changes, you will be notified ahead of time. Your mix can be expedited for an extra rush charge of $30
  • If there are any major issues with the tracks uploaded (some tracks double bounced to separate stems, limiter left on etc.) I will contact you before proceeding.
  • A link to a 320kbps MP3 file for you to approve. After approval, I will upload a link to a 44.1kHz/16bit WAV file to my server (other formats are available on request). This link will be made available for 3 months for you.
  • Two revisions/tweaks of the mixing work for free. Major revisions, or more than 2 revisions are subject to a small fee depending on complexity.
  • Once you are happy with your track, I will send a Paypal invoice which you can pay with any credit card (no Paypal account needed). If you don’t have a credit card, bank transfer can be arranged.
  • Major changes to your mix, or rewrites to the song after mixing will incur a full rate charge.

If you are still not happy with the final result, I will make sure your money is quickly refunded, hassle free.

If you have any questions at all, please Contact me and I will be happy to answer any questions or to discuss your needs.