Advise from the wise

[Bhang]

Hello Dave, thanks so much for being here and encouraging so many questions. I'll keep mine short.

What is the biggest problem you encounter on a day to day basis and how do you deal with it?

[Dave Pensado]

From a career stantpoint, balancing the mix time with the phone/email time. Creatively I wish the sessions were tracked better. I usually spend about 4 hours fixing things before I can mix. Then there is the problem that you never actually finish a mix anymore. With stems, the client can call as much as they want to make changes.

[H-Rezz]

Dave when you say tracked better are you referring to the sound, for example run through better gear whether that be better pre's and converters or the lack of attention paid to editing,comping stuff down, in other words a clean up job for you ?

Great to see you here again BTW

[Michael Lin]

Originally Posted by Dave Pensado

From a career stantpoint, balancing the mix time with the phone/email time. Creatively I wish the sessions were tracked better. I usually spend about 4 hours fixing things before I can mix. Then there is the problem that you never actually finish a mix anymore. With stems, the client can call as much as they want to make changes.

How many stems do you do for a mix for possible future changes? Thanks!

[elcubo]

Originally Posted by Dave Pensado

From a career stantpoint, balancing the mix time with the phone/email time. Creatively I wish the sessions were tracked better. I usually spend about 4 hours fixing things before I can mix. Then there is the problem that you never actually finish a mix anymore. With stems, the client can call as much as they want to make changes.

When you say "tracked better" can you tell us the usual deficieents in the trackin??? i wish i could sent you a session of mine...you could tell me my main mistakes...

[boothboy]

agreed that seems to be the biggest thing Back in the day a mix was done and when it was done ...it was done!! thats the beauty of lots of the older stuff, you can hear the flaws and that makes it real.
since the advent of DAW's the rules have changed, not that its a bad thing but there is no more of the old school finality,!!! artists and producers alike can now tweak until they are blue in the face!!! and it gets surgical afer a while and the music suffers for it In my opinion lets get back to the real music, the emotion, the reason we all hopefully jumped in!!

[AnAverageJoe]

Originally Posted by Dave Pensado

From a career stantpoint, balancing the mix time with the phone/email time. Creatively I wish the sessions were tracked better. I usually spend about 4 hours fixing things before I can mix. Then there is the problem that you never actually finish a mix anymore. With stems, the client can call as much as they want to make changes.

Hello Dave,

Thanks for giving back to the engineering community!

My question is about tracking. What are the most common mistakes you have to deal with in poorly tracked sessions or sessions that aren't tracked correctly?