Creating A DAW Template For Consistent Mixes (Detailed)
Hello, fellow engineers and musicians! Today we're going to do a deep dive into the heart of music production with a topic that might initially seem dull, but I promise it's a game-changer.
We're going to be looking at the art of creating your own personalized DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) template, which can become a secret weapon to enhance your work flow, productivity, and make sure you consistently hit the mark with your mixes. Get ready because this may well revolutionize the way you work!
Revelling in the Magic of Templates
Why bother with templates, you ask? The truth is, the answer isn't farfetched: when you create a template for your DAW, it's like a very fast sketchpad for your musical brainstorming. Imagine this: you enter your studio with a rush of inspiration, but at the beginning of the session, you spend valuable minutes setting up tracks, sending effects, and groups a mastering buss, and by the time you're all set up, your initial creative spark may have faded.
Templates change this narrative. They can act as a blueprint for your projects and offer you a solid yet flexible proven foundation on which you can explore your creativity. A well-structured template will give you a head start in every project and ensure you can implement your ideas quickly. They are also extremely helpful in maintaining consistency across your projects.
I consider templates essential studio hack, which massively reduces the time we spend on repetitive tasks. The benefits of using a template are many, but the most important ones are they save you time, ensure consistent quality, and let you focus on the creative process and the things that make your music or mixes unique.
Template Controversy
I am aware there is some controversy around using templates, and there are many engineers and musicians who believe every project should start with a blank slate. While I have no compelling argument against this approach, I can say I have tried this approach form any years, and since switching to templates have been able to achieve better results more quickly. If being able to work fast and achieving consistent results are important to you, then read on.
Finishing Songs
One of the recurring nightmares for music producers worldwide is the graveyard of projects that never progress beyond the 8-bar loop. Let's face it: we all have a massive library of unfinished projects and short-loop ideas that show potential, but we never finish.
Templates can help transform this. They provide a structured workflow with pre-set routing and settings, which subtly push you towards completing projects, instead of lingering in the twilight zone of eternal adjustments. This approach frees up your time to focus on the essence of music creation and mixing, thereby leading you to finish more tracks and eventually create a larger portfolio of work.
How to Start?
Your template should be a proven starting point, a loose but predefined structure that enables and enhances your workflow without limiting your creativity. Consider what you will consistently need in every project. It might be drum busses, vocal or synth tracks, or it could be something as simple as a few return tracks with frequently used effects like reverb and delay.
I would also highly recommend a master buss chain for quick AB checks against mastered references or for those brave enough to mix into it. This can be a game changer, which we will look at in more detail later. These basic tools ensure that your starting point has all the basic tools you need, leading to a smoother creative process.
Weaving Best Practices into Template Creation
Now that we've taken a high level look at what templates can do for you, let's focus on the nitty gritty of creating one. No rule book exists for this, but certain best practices can guide your template creation.
First and foremost, your template should reflect your workflow. Think about which elements you consistently use across every project and mix them. Many of us have found settings or effects chains that we particularly like, through experimentation and years of experience, and it makes a lot of sense to bring these into your template, especially if you find yourself defaulting to them manually time and again.
While I think having a basic selection of rudimentary instruments to help you get started quickly (drums, bass, a harmonic instrument like a Rhodes or piano, and tracks dedicated to tracking guitars or vocals), I would advise against populating your template with so many options for instruments and-loaded recording tracks, that it ends up being unwieldy, confuses you, or in the worst case, makes the project feel so heavy on your computer, that it slows down your production process and even overwhelms or demotivates you.
In this aspect, less is more, and a catchy song generally doesn't need extremely polished sounds to be convincing at the composition stage.
A good basic rule is that while the template can provide an efficient starting point, it should not become a rigid framework. It should support your creativity and workflow while remaining flexible enough for creative explorations.
Sculpting Sound, and Engineering Perspective
As you create your DAW template, from a sound engineering perspective, the focus should be on optimizing technical efficiency. To begin with, you'll want to configure the master buss.
Some initial suggestions would be to equip it with metering plugins to check your levels, frequency spectrum, etc., as well as a choice selection of high quality eqs, a compressor or two, and a low latency limiter to enable you to hear your work-in-progress against mastered references, without being too distracted by level differences.
While I personally always mix into a master buss chain, there are many who believe the master buss should be left untouched. While I fully understand this perspective, it has not led to optimal results for me from a mixing and efficiency perspective, so I have decided to work with a master buss chain.
If you would like to try my mix bus mastering chain, we are currently offering the Rapid Flow Mastering Chain for free with the code "BIRTHDAY"
Setting up send tracks for commonly used effects, such as reverb and delay, is another basic suggestion, especially if you take the time to make sure that the effects you select include your favorite settings that immediately raise your level of inspiration when you send a sound to it.
I personally like to low and high pass reverb sends or returns and makes sure that the reverb pre delay and decay times are synchronized to tempos some examples of finder details.
Composing Workflow: Often Overlooked!
From a workflow perspective, your templates should ideally supercharge your creative process. Whether you prefer to start with a melody, a chord progression, or a beat, having the necessary MIDI or instrument tracks ready to go ensures you can express your ideas immediately.
What I have found working with hundreds of music producers who rely on work flows that we have developed with my company, many feel compelled to start with a blank slate and are challenged to change their workflow into a template.
There seems to be some belief that a blank slate approach leads to more creative output, as there are no restrictions. While I tried this approach for many years, I concluded that working inside a template massively produces what I perceive as “creative friction,” which we sometimes experience when managing virtual or real-world studio tools and all the possibilities our DAWs offer us.
Those of us who focus on electronic music can sketch out a musical idea in a loop context using a DAW like Ableton, Bitwig, or Logic Pro with their built-in loop and session view functionality. This, in turn, enables us to validate it in a performance setting without committing to creating a complete sentence.
The way this can be done, is by a few tricks, such as making sure all the channel faders are up at their maximum position to recreate the balance mix, and then using a controller on stage to create your drops and build ups in real-time, using the faders mapped to the corresponding elements of your mix.
I cannot begin to explain how liberating it is to create a musical sketch in one hour, that you can then validate by playing to an audience in a club or a festival, and knowing exactly how people react, before working out the track in detail, or scrapping the idea based on real-world validation.
Genre Specific Variations: Balancing Differences and Similarities
While every genre has many similar elements, they also do have their quick quirks and trade marks. A dance music template may well prioritize a kick drum and a bass line while a rock-oriented template will probably focus on guitars and drums. These nuances and best practices of the genre that you work in, will likely influence your template design making sure that you meet genre-specific demands efficiently.
While many musicians strive for originality, with experience, many of us learned that there are certain dos and do nots in the genre that we work in, which, if not respected, can lead to a lot of puzzled faces on a dance floor, or losing the momentum and energy which you reset or album may have built up to that moment.
I am all for breaking the rules and exploring the creative boundaries of music creation, but it is my experience that“knowing the lay of the land”, is the essential starting point for explorations into more uncharted territory.
Templates for Orchestral Work
Templates are a distinct place for producers that compose music to picture, whether film or advertising work. To effectively create the illusion of an orchestra playing, it is common for these projects to have an entire orchestral setup on standby.
In fact, many composers go the extra mile by using dedicated computers just to play back these sample libraries. I recall a memorable visit to Hans Zimmer's studio, where I had the opportunity to watch him work on the score for one of the Batman movies. His intricate setup would allow him to seamlessly access anything from orchestral instruments to live synths, and various effect sounds.
Every sound received a blend of various send delays and reverbs, controlled using a touchscreen interface within arm's reach. He was clearly using a standardized template for his DAW and controller, which were essential to his workflow and creative process.
Mixing Templates
In the realm of music production, the value that templates can bring to the mixing process is often underestimated. They can significantly enhance one's creative workflow and output. While beginning every mix from Ground Zero might hold artistic allure, it’s uncommon for vital song elements to drastically differ in their basic processing or relative volume levels.
This is why we see professional engineers sometimes even have a hardware chain of processors dedicated to a vocal or drum sounds. It's beneficial to approach a final mix with a clean slate by, for example, resetting the faders and slowly bringing this up. However, elements like drums, guitars, or vocals, usually have similar frequency characteristics across different songs.
Using standardized channel strips as a starting point for these crucial elements saves a lot of time and eliminates the need for repetitive tasks while mixing. At Rapid Flow, this principle is central to our approach in the context of electronic music.
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Templates for Mixing
This might be one of the most overlooked workflow improvements that you can apply to Your creative process. While starting every mix from scratch might seem artistically valuable, in truth, it is rare that key elements of a song vary wildly in their processing or relative loudness to each other.
When starting a mix, it can be beneficial to lower all faders and start with a fresh view, but the frequency content of, say your kick drum, guitars, or vocal, will most likely overlap between projects. A templatized channel strip for these most important signals can be a huge time saver and spares you from doing repetitive work. This is exactly what we focus on at Rapid Flow in the context of electronic music.
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Template Pitfalls: What to Avoid
While templates can offer myriad advantages, avoiding certain pitfalls is essential. Overcomplication is the most common misstep. While including every possible contingency in your template is tempting, this often leads to clutter and confusion.
In the worst-case scenario, your template can become overwhelming. (Coming from someone who once integrated an Elektron Octatrack with all its settings, routings, and mapped controls to multiple virtual and real-world instruments, only to use it three times after hours of setup time, I know how easy it is to fall into this.)
The best templates have a common characteristic: they feel intuitive and fun to use. If the template you have created causes fog in your mind and hampers your inspiration, you know something is wrong.
Starting with Someone Else's Template: Borrowing and Personalizing
Whether you're a beginner, or looking for some fresh ideas and inspiration, starting with someone else's template can be a great learning tool. Many accomplished producers offer templates and there are companies offering both general as well as genre templates that can be a great starting point for your personal template.
I would recommend exploring such templates to see how they are structured and find the elements that align with your workflow. Based on these insights, you can modify or combine this template with other templates, and shape it into something that resonates with your unique creative process.
Knowing When to Overhaul Your Template
While a template should not be changed too often, it should also not be set in stone. Your personal DAW template should evolve with you as your skill set grows or your workflow changes. If you consistently add or change elements of your template at the start of each project, this is a clear sign that it's time for a revamp.
A good personal DAW template should support your creativity, enhance your inspiration, and lead to consistently good mixing results. It should help you finish tracks quicker, and result in more high-quality output, that you are proud to share with others. If you have not yet tried to create a personal template, I can highly recommend investing a few hours in this, and seeing the impact it has on your process of music creation, or mixing. You may well never look back.