Save Time Mixing in Logic Pro with This Free Template

In this video, I walk through a new unified Logic Pro mixing template that combines my six free templates into one streamlined system. Instead of wasting time loading plugins track by track, everything is already set up for drums, bass, instruments, vocals, buses, and effects. The session is organized with track stacks, color coding, and ready-to-go routing for a faster, less cluttered workflow. You’ll see how this setup makes balancing, top-down mixing, layering sounds, and adding effects much easier. Best of all, the template is completely free to download. Here's the link.  

Here's the transcript: 

I was mixing a song the other day and I was using one of the templates from the six free templates pack that I used to give away.

And it was called the clean template.

And little did I know that it was no plugins on it, and that was the intention behind the templates.

But in that scenario I had already imported all the tracks, put them in place, named them, colored them.

Everything was ready and I already had a balanced static mix.

And then I had to load up the plugins one by one and it was really a drag of time, flow, energy, and everything.

And then it occurred to me that why not take these six free mixing templates and unite them, make them into one.

And it's yours to download.

The link is in the description below.

And in this video, I'm going to show you exactly what it is.

It's the way to a less cluttered mixing experience for you.

It certainly has for me.

Now, let's get into it.

Here you see all the tracks that I've dragged into the session.

And I've started dragging the tracks into place.

That's what I'm about to do now.

Right there.

So, I have all the tracks in place.

Now, I'll hit Command A to select all and color regions by tracks.

And then I can take away what I don't need.

First off, I'll take away all the empty tracks now that I have moved the regions.

And here we are.

So what you see here in this template is a folder for drums, a folder for bass, a folder for instruments, and then we have the vocals folder.

And it's actually two parts here.

So we have the verse and the hook, or the chorus as you can call it, that goes to a bus called Lead Vox.

And then we have the background vocals which goes to another bus called Backing Vox.

And those two go together into something called the Vox Bus.

And everything — drums, bass and instruments — goes into the Beat Bus or the Instruments Bus.

And all of these three buses along with the effects goes into the Mix Bus which in turn goes into the Master Bus.

And we also have a Mix Bus Print track.

This is for you guys who are into using I/O external hardware, printing it in.

I have a guide right there — Five Minute Logic Pro and Hardware Guide — you can check that out.

Now I'm ready to start mixing.

I can just start by checking the \[Music]

So you see here I have minus eight on the peak.

\[Music]

Overly dynamic.

The kick and bass relations are a nightmare here.

And everything is off.

But what I need to do now is just to adjust the faders.

I don't need to think about the plugins just yet.

And then when I feel that I have a good balance, I can, for example, do the top-down mixing approach.

Start with the Mix Bus right here.

Start with an EQ and start just tweaking and finding out the best possible balance.

Then comes a compressor.

This is set up like a VCA-style compressor like the SSL Bus Compression.

An EQ for some character — not necessarily to make gigantic EQ cuts and boosts, but more to play with the drive right here.

Insert some character.

And you also see here on the limiter, you can have it more or less, you can have it almost release-ready with minus one decibel of output level.

But of course, you can tweak this down to minus three maybe without much peak reduction, and then it will be ready for mastering as well.

So you have really everything set up here.

For example, the kicks are stacked into a track stack.

So you can process all the kicks together.

You can process the snares and the hats as single entities, sort of.

This is really great for layering sounds.

So typically, especially when producing hip-hop music and other electronic types of music, you would layer samples and blend them together.

And here you can EQ and compress them together as well to glue them further.

All instruments and vocals are neatly placed into folders.

And then you have the effects folder right here, which consists of a short reverb, medium, and long.

And the same with delays.

Something called the Crazy Effects, which is a blend between reverb and delays.

And I typically use also the Supermassive from Valhalla which is free.

I encourage you to try that out.

And then you have Fat Effects which is sort of like a collection of modulators with an EQ before and a compressor at the end, which you can use to infer some interest into the tracks.

And then you have a left and right effects channel, which is, for example, if you want to make something more stereo, you can pan something to the left.

And then you can use the Effects Right to send some effects or reverb or delay or something into the right channel.

So you get sort of like a balance between left and right even though you're panning.

So that's cool.

I also often use this for vocals — for background vocals — to create some interest and some more stereo spread, spreading out the vocals, especially the background vocals into the background.

So that's really cool.

And then you have all the buses which also contain plugins.

There are no plugin tweaks here.

It's just the plugins ready to go.

To do the hardware thing, you need to engage the I/O and then you need to find the inputs and outputs on your audio interface.

And when you're all set up, it will be sent to bus 20, which is a dummy bus.

This one will send the signal over to the analog print channel.

So, I've done this because it's a lot less messy.

It seems more complicated, but it's actually not.

But that's for another video.

Don't forget to download this template.

It's absolutely free.

Link is in the description below.

And if you want to see templates in action, check out one of these videos.

Thanks so much for watching.

Hope I see you there.

Peace out.