10 ways to speed up your song mixing and mastering work

Try out and understand all possibilities to create music, convenience and potential of audio mixing contemporary technologies. It sounds great, doesn’t it? But the more options emerge, the more complicated the choice is getting, and it can beat out of reason. Too many possibilities can destroy your creativity, disturb your work in the mixing and mastering vocals and liquidate productivity. To help you not to get steeped in nuances and in the struggle against the workstation (DAW), I’ll give some key tips for you attention. They will allow you to implement your ideas and to make the process of music creation as fast as ever.
1. Stepwise mixing.
You can boost your productivity with the help of two approaches. Mix fast as much material as possible, fill the space of a mix with the methods interesting for you, and then mix stepwise by detaching unnecessary parts. However, it can result in the loss of that very brilliance which is peculiar to all good releases. If it happens, try to do the opposite: mix instruments at once after recording by adding basic processing to them. Presets of plugins and channels will stand you in good stead. Try out the two methods and make a decision which of them is better for you. The same advice works great for mixing engineers either.
2. Documents.
The study of plugins and synthesizers of your DAW can take up an unconscionably long time so make it a habit of reading manuals at once.

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We are all tied to time that is why reduce the time of studying to a minimum by selecting only some instruments which you’ll look into inside and out. Make notes for yourselves. If necessary, take an account of useful functions and so forth. Try writing cribs to have them always ready at hand.
3. Preparation is a key.
As audio engineers say, to fail preparation is to flunk everything. Listen out for this proverb and prepare everything that can be of service to you beforehand. To make online pop rock mixing mastering run in an easier way there are plenty of templates for workstation, channel settings, plugin presets and a lot of other things at your disposal,
4. User list of plugins
If the plugin list of your workstation is long and non-systematic, boost productivity with the help of their categorization in files. You can do it according to the type of a processor or to the relevance personally for you. Try to create the file “track finisher” and load it to the hilt with all kinds of FX for rapid results at the completion of arrangement. 
5. Suppress distractive factors.
We all like creating music, however, external factors interfere with a creative process, and they frequently fill up all the music mixing studio time. Be prepared for it. Try to minimize all the traps connected with it. Leave social networks or just disconnect from the Internet, put your phone on mute mode, take a meal in advance, ask your friends to leave you alone for a couple of hours, and then pay all your attention to the workstation. 

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6. Hot keys.
It can seem to you a fast solution to hover your mouse over a menu button and to pick the necessary option, but these are the entire four movements at a time. Although key combinations seem to be a primitive choice, they can significantly speed up your work on a track while providing online hip-hop and rap mixing and mastering so try to keep at least basic combinations in mind. Such functions as quantization, compilation of audio, looping of separate sections are only a small part of what you must know. Whenever you enter the menu to pick out an instrument you need, check whether there is this function in fast access and use it. Moreover, most of workstations allow you to create variations of hot keys and even macros (chains of key instructions) on your own. With their help you can mute all sounds which last less than a bar, for example. 
7. Have you sit down well?
Do you have a comfortable arm-chair in your studio? Can you have headphones on for hours on end without having a headache after that? Is everything within striking distance? Have monitors been placed properly? It’s easy to concentrate only on the internal work process, but if your mixing studio isn’t ergonomically and comfortably furnished, the productivity as well as your physical fitness will suffer.
8. Set aside some time to put things right.
Is your project going out of control? Are there too many tracks? Are you short of time for great deal of ideas and alternative arrangements? Do shut-off plugins take space only to let you return to the original equalizer settings?

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All this holds you back, slows down the work on the project in the mixing studio and makes it confused and difficult for perception. Moreover, the processor resources aren’t infinite.
Work out a strategy for the struggle against it: save the project separately and then remove unnecessary tracks, use rendering for those parts which would rather be in the audio, try out all unused ideas and remove everything that won’t come useful for you any longer. Use the option “save as” to have two versions of the project left. To be said this strategy is widely used by lots of studios.
9. Comparison and contrast. 
One day each of us referred to an already completed project to understand why it didn’t sound like commercial tracks made by another mixing studio. Compare your work at early stages of creation and when you make any vital amendments. Permanent saving will re-record the file of the project so use the option “save as” and number track versions before making adjustments. Use more often rendering to compare a mix at different stages. It’s quite likely that you’ll like the original version of mix or arrangement much more.
10. Quality samples.
The fact that you have an enormous number of sounds is definitely good, but digging of great deal of files and samples can tire you that is why you should create an ordered file with necessary samples as quality is a lot more important than quantity – leave only the best. Only those sounds which specify your identity. The same goes for neglected projects. Or archive them in the arranged way or remove them forever. 

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