Welcome to GetYoshed!

Jaszcz (aka Yosh): Well Grant it’s a new year and we have a new web site.

Grant: Yes happy New Year to everyone and welcome to www.getyoshed.com. I guess we should explain to our visitors what the site is about. So what is it about Jaszcz?

Jaszcz: We created this site to help our clients(current and future), producers, musicians, students, and anyone else out there record better tracks so that they can have the best possible mixes.

Grant: So you’re going to give out your phone number and offer free 24 hour tech support! That’s great!

Jaszcz: Well actually I was planning on giving out your phone number.

Grant: I already get enough “emergency” calls at 1 a.m. with people having computer problems. I don’t need any more!

Jaszcz: Seriously, our goal is to help people record better tracks and we hope to accomplish this by giving you hints and tips on this site.

Grant: And our first tip really doesn’t have anything to do with recording but rather preparing your session(s) for mixing(assuming someone else is mixing your project).

Jaszcz: You know Grant there really isn’t anything worse than getting a Pro Tools™ session where the tracks are all called Audio 1, Audio 2, etc., or having 6 tracks all called “Lead Vocal” and no indication of which one is the correct one to use.

Grant: Sure there is! What about getting a session and finding out that 24 audio files are missing and they are on some drive called “Skip 250gig Backup” and no one knows who Skip is?

Jaszcz: Yeah that is pretty bad, and unfortunately common. Hopefully we will help our visitors avoid these problems. So let’s give some tips on preparing your sessions for a mix.

The first tip that I have is to be sure to label all of your tracks properly. Tracks that are just called Audio 1 and such are not very helpful when someone else is trying to sort out your session. Be descriptive and be sure to use the comment boxes that Pro Tools provides.

Grant: Deactivate and hide all tracks that are not going to be used in the mix. If you are absolutely positive that they will never be used, go ahead and delete them from the session(be sure you have a session with them saved just in case).

Jaszcz: Check all your punches and edits. Check them while you are recording your overdubs and be sure they have fades and crossfades, then consolidate the tracks after you are done with the overdubs.

Grant: Exactly! This helps out in so many ways. One, if the punch is bad(which sometimes you can’t hear unless you solo the track), it is easier to fix while the musician/singer is still there. Also if you consolidate your overdub tracks, it makes it less likely that audio files will end up missing. It is easier to keep track of one Lead Vocal audio file than 60 or so.

Jaszcz: Be sure to name all your sessions properly. For example if you just did guitar overdubs, name the session “guitar overdubs” so you can go back to this session if you have to.

Grant: Which leads into only have the latest, relevant session in your project folder. That will eliminate the chance that the wrong session gets used.

Jaszcz: Which in turn leads into being sure that all the audio files associated with your project are actually on the hard drive that you are sending to the mix engineer. There are several ways of checking this, but the foolproof, easiest way is to go out and buy a brand new hard drive just for the mix and follow the procedure below.

1) Format it accordingly (Mac OS Extended for us mac guys).

2) In the Mix ready session, be sure to remove any unused audio regions. To do this,

a) Go to the region bin and select unused regions (Shift-Command-U).

b) Clear the unused regions (Shift-Command-B) and when the dialog box pops up on the screen, click Remove


3) Save a copy of the session to the new drive

a) With your session open in Pro Tools, go under the File Menu and select “Save Copy In”

b) Select your new Mix Hard Drive as the destination, Session Format should be “Latest”(unless the mix engineer is using a version of Pro Tools prior to 7.x you shouldn’t change this). Leave your Audio File Type and Sample Rate the same as your session.

c) Be sure in the “Items To Copy” field that the “All Audio Files” box is checked(if you don’t, then you won’t have any audio files copied over).

d) Be sure to name the session with a descriptive name (i.e. “Song Title ready for mix”)

e) Click the save button and watch the little blue progress bar.


4) After the session is saved to the new drive, close down your current session and unmount all audio drives except the new “Mix Drive”. You can do this in Pro Tools by going to the Window Menu>Workspace and highlighting any drives and clicking the little toolbox icon in the upper left corner and selecting “Unmount. “

Note: Everyone should take this moment and make the computer’s internal hard drive(the one usually called “Macintosh HD”) as a transfer only drive. This will ensure that no audio files ever get recorded to this drive. To do so, in the Workspace window, where you see the column with the “A” heading, click on the “R” letter by your internal drive and change it to “Transfer” only.

5) Now open up the session you just saved to the new mix drive. If everything was done properly, the session will open up and you should get a dialog box saying “The Original Disk Allocation Cannot be used . . .”. Just hit the return or enter key and your session will open up and all the audio files will be found.


Grant: Now you can be confident that all your files are in the proper place and you won’t get that 9 a.m. call from the engineer asking where the Lead Vocal is.

Jaszcz: Good now we can all sleep better at night.

Grant: Sleep? What’s that?

Jaszcz: You know! It’s what you do on that couch all day while I’m working!

Grant: Not True!

Jaszcz: Well we are out of time. We hope you all find this site useful and if you have any questions or comments feel free to e-mail us.

Grant: Tell your friends about the site and see you next time. Don’t forget to bookmark this site so you can come back!