Preparing your Song for Mixing & Mastering: Tips for Delivering Files to Your Sound Engineer.

So now that you've crafted and produced a song that is ready for showtime. What comes next?

Questions answered in this post:

Which files does my mixing/mastering engineer need?

What are deliverables?

What is a mixdown?

How much headroom does my finished mix need?

What are the LUFS standards for various streaming platforms?

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First we are going to look at general tips and then break it down for specific mixing and mastering requirements.

Step 1: Make Sure the Track is Actually Finished

At this point, it is assumed that you've recorded and produced a song to the best of your abilities with your team of superstar creatives. This means that all vocal tracks, instrument tracks, background elements etc., have been finalized. It is essential that before you are ready to move onto mixing and mastering that the track is FINALIZED. Once the track is ready for the mixing and mastering steps, sound engineers do not want you making changes or adding new parts or elements. Want to sour a relationship with an engineer faster? Please do interrupt their work with a new harmony or ad lib, after they've started the intensive surgical work to balance and enhance your track. Again: It is implied that once the track hits the desk of the engineer, all your work is done. Let them work uninterrupted. Professionalism goes both ways. The equivalency is asking someone to repaint your car, and then after they've started- you've decided you want to add a strip down the middle. These changes involve a lot of work, so please be smart about when you do the handoff of your project.

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Step 2: Deliverables

Terms you need to know as an artist who works with professional engineers are:

Deliverables: Files that are delivered either to you, you give an engineer, or files you hand off to a distributor

Mixdown: the transfer of a multitrack master mix to two-track stereo tape. I.e. taking your 25 tracks and making it into a two track bounced mix.

Sample Rate: What you need to know is which sample rate you recorded in/ want your final files encoded in. I.e. 44.1kHz, 48kHz, 96kHz, 192kHz

Bit Depth: Per iZotope: The audio bit depth determines the number of possible amplitude values we can record for each audio sample. The higher the bit depth, the more amplitude values per sample are captured to recreate the original audio signal. The most common audio bit depths are 16-bit, 24-bit, and 32-bit. This is important for you to communicate to the engineer for your final format requirements.

Format: This refers to the format you need your files in, when they are delivered to your distributor/digital stores. Example: You are a singer songwriter releasing an EP on Spotify, Apple Music, and making vinyl pressings. The minimum requirement for music files for release has been 44.1kHz, and at least 16bits, but some stores now allow up to 192kHz and 32-bit float. Not all distributors accept the same format. Check your final destination for requirements or tell your engineer where it will be released.

Note: A digital release is approached completely differently from a vinyl release. Often times, there will be a mix & master made specifically for the vinyl format. Avoid cutting corners and hire someone experienced specifically with vinyl mixing/mastering to avoid unusable prints.

Remember that before you handoff your track(s), you should know the destination of your deliverables and the format you require. Remixing or remastering a track in a new sample rate/bit depth after handoff to an engineer is extremely time consuming. Often times certain plugins or software will only be available at specific sample rates, which means sometimes they will have to start over from zero and rebuild the sessions/workflows.

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Step 3: File Prep

This is a crucial step that either makes the engineer your friend or enemy. This step involves preparing your files to be handed off to an engineer. A few things are required:

A: Edits should be complete (i.e. cuts, fades, placements etc.)

B: Files should be properly named i.e. Guitar L, Guitar R, Acoustic, Lead Vox, Backing, grand piano, dark 808 etc. This helps the engineer work quickly to reassemble your tracks and understand all the elements at a glance. Do not be the person with a track named track 001.

C: Files need to be consolidated: This is a requirement not a suggestion. Consolidation in the simplest terms means that every track in your session has the same start and end time. This means that if you have an ad lib that is only on bar 52, it should still have a waveform that starts where the song starts and ends where the song ends. This will be an empty wave form until bar 52, but the point is that all your deliverables can be easily brought into a session and reassembled without the engineer needing to figure out why something in your song got moved out of place or out of time. This ensures your engineer sees where every element is supposed to go because it will all be locked to a grid with the same starting and ending point for all your tracks.

D: Ask your engineer about format requirements before you bounce out your tracks.

E: Zip your folder of deliverables. Make sure all your stems (i.e. individual track elements such as fendertele.wav, steinwaygrand.wav etc.) live in the same folder and that the folder is properly named. Example: year_artist_name_song_title. This helps you and the engineer stay organized. To recap: Add all deliverables of your track to a unique folder with a helpful naming convention, and then zip that folder.

F: Deliver the zipped folder to your engineer. Note: Some zipped folders will be large and may need to be sent as a link vs. an email attachment.

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In Mixing:

You are delivering raw tracks to a mixing engineer to balance and enhance. The mixing engineer works with tracks such as 808, kick, tambourine, lead vox etc. They need individual stems to complete their job.

Helpful to provide:

A rough mix

Genre your associate with

Notes on direction/sound i.e. "vintage synth sound with very hyper pop modern vocals"

Reference tracks

Format you need for delivery

In Mastering:

You are delivering a mixdown of your track(s) that should not have compression or limiting done to the master channel. Here a mixdown refers to a finished mixed track that has been bounced to a stereo wave file. Again, let the engineer know what format your mix is in and what format ,if it needs to be changed, it should be delivered to you. Your mixdown should have at least 6dB of headroom on the master channel before it is bounced.

Helpful to provide:

Notes on direction/sound i.e "A master that sounds vintage tone wise but is loud and modern"

Genre you associate with

Reference tracks

Format you need for delivery

How much silence you want between tracks if an EP or album.

Bonus: Master for Streaming Platforms: Normalization, LUFS, and Loudness

• Spotify: -14 LUFS (integrated)

• Apple Music: -16 LUFS (integrated)

• YouTube: -14 LUFS (integrated)

• Tidal: -14 LUFS (integrated)

• Amazon Music: -14 LUFS (integrated)

• Deezer: -15 LUFS (integrated)

We hope now you have an idea of how to prepare your tracks for mixing, and your mixdown for mastering! If you have any questions or need services, please reach out!