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16. Mixing in Bitwig Studio 2 8-Track

1 Now we have an arrangement we like, it’s time to think about the mix. We could stay in the Arrange panel, but we’re going to jump into the Mix panel layout instead. First, however, we’re going to loop a section of our track in which all of the various clips are playing at once. 2 Our looped section runs from bar 57 through bar 81. Let’s set the playhead to the beginning of the looped section. Next, we click Mix in the lower-left corner of the GUI to enter the Mix panel layout. We now have a console-style view with a Clip Launcher. 3 Engage playback, and we hear our looped section. When starting a mix, it’s good practice to bring all the faders all the way down and start fresh. Make sure you take a break before mixing – it’s not good to track or arrange and then mix in the same session! 4 We bring each track’s level up one at a time. The balance between the drums and bass is crucial, so we’ll give that some extra attention. Our Dune CM sound is carrying much of the melodic content. The electric guitar makes for some drama. The latter might need a bit of processing. Let’s drag Bitwig’s Distortion device onto the track. 5 Now that we have levels that sound good, we can create a better sense of separation by panning some of the tracks to the left or right. It’s not usually a good idea to pan bass, so we’ll leave that one alone. We’ll hard-pan the treated guitar loop, and nudge the Legend 909 and Wersimatic tracks to either side. Ditto for our electric guitar and Dune CM. 6 We’re going to open an instance of Bitwig Studio 8-Track’s included Compressor device on the session’s Master output. We’ll select a preset designed for mixing and tweak it to taste. We don’t want a lot – just enough to add a bit of punch to the overall mix. If we were to send this out to a pro mastering engineer, we’d bypass the Compressor.