Pro edition
Session Sheet.
The demo splits the credit into four jobs. This is the paperwork behind the two that happen in a room. None of it is clever — all of it is the difference between a tracking day that ends at six and one that ends at nine.
Input list — 12 lines
| Ch | Source | Mic | Pre | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kick in | Dynamic, inside the port | Clean | Phase-checked against the outside mic before anything is recorded, not after. |
| 2 | Kick out | Large dynamic, at the head | Clean | Where the body is. Half of the finished kick usually comes from this one. |
| 3 | Snare top | Dynamic, off-axis to the hats | Clean | Angle matters more than model. Point it away from the hi-hat and half the mix problem is gone. |
| 4 | Snare bottom | Small condenser | Clean | Polarity flipped at the desk and labelled as flipped, so nobody flips it twice. |
| 5–6 | Overheads | Matched pair | Clean | Measured to the snare with a cable so the centre is actually centred. |
| 7 | Room | Ribbon, back of the room | Coloured | The one channel worth over-committing on. It is the sound of the record. |
| 8 | Bass DI | — | Clean | Always taken, even when the amp is the sound. It costs a cable and saves a re-amp session. |
| 9 | Bass amp | Dynamic, off-centre cone | Coloured | Off-centre for less beam and more body. |
| 10–11 | Electric gtr | Dynamic + ribbon, same speaker | Coloured | Two mics, same speaker, capsules aligned. Blended at mix, not on the day. |
| 12 | Acoustic | Small condenser at the 12th fret | Clean | Twelfth fret, a hand-span back. Not over the hole, whatever the internet says. |
| 13 | Lead vocal | Large condenser | Coloured | Compressed lightly on the way in — 3 dB at most, so the mix has somewhere to go. |
| 14 | Vocal safety | Dynamic, same stand | Clean | A second capture at a lower gain. It has rescued two records and cost one channel. |
Headphones
Five mixes, built before anybody plays a note. The day stalls here more often than it stalls anywhere else.
- Drummer
- Click loud, bass loud, everything else quiet
- Timing is their whole job. A drummer who cannot hear the click will drift, and a drummer who cannot hear the bass will fight it.
- Bass
- Kick and their own DI, click medium
- They are locking to the kick, not to the room.
- Guitar
- Vocal up, drums medium, own amp low
- They hear their own amp in the room anyway, and playing to the vocal is what makes an arrangement sit.
- Vocalist
- Themselves loud, some reverb, everything else balanced
- Reverb in the cans is not a mix decision, it is a performance one. It is free and it changes what you get.
- Everyone
- A talkback that is always live in the control room
- The single biggest time saver in a tracking day. Every second spent asking somebody to press a button is spent twice.
The take log
| Column | What goes in it | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Take number | Sequential, never reset | Reusing a number across a day is how the wrong take reaches the mix. |
| Complete? | Y / N / partial | A partial with a great chorus is worth more than three complete mediocre ones, and only the log knows. |
| Keeper marks | Bar ranges | Written while it is fresh. "The second verse in take 7" is a sentence nobody remembers on Thursday. |
| Comment | Five words | "Rushed the turnaround" or "best feel". Enough to comp from without listening to everything again. |
| Comp source | Take per section | The comp is a decision, and a decision that is not written down gets remade badly at 11pm. |
Handover
- Consolidated stems, bar 1 To the spec on the public page. Exported at the end of the tracking day, not the week the mix starts.
- The rough mix However bad. It carries the intent, and no set of stems does.
- The take log So the mixer knows which parts were chosen deliberately and which survived by accident.
- The input list Mic, pre-amp and position per channel. It explains why a channel sounds the way it does before anybody EQs it.
- Tempo map and key A number, not "about 120". Anything time-based downstream depends on it.
- A note on the mix bus If you were listening through a chain, say what it was. Do not print it.
6 ways a tracking day loses an evening
- No input list, and a mix engineer guessing why the snare has no top end.
- Headphone mixes built once, for the drummer, and four people playing to the wrong balance all day.
- Take numbers reset after lunch, and the wrong verse comped in.
- Comping decisions made at 11pm and never written down, then remade differently on Monday.
- Stems exported three weeks later from a session that has since been "tidied".
- A mix bus chain printed into the stems because it sounded good on the day.
The input list is for a five-piece tracking live in one room. A programmed record, a solo singer-songwriter or an orchestral date each need a different sheet, and borrowing one from the wrong kind of session is worse than writing a short one from scratch.