Preparing Your Tracks Before Handing Off a Mix

A common assumption is that a good engineer will sort everything out. In practice, when the delivered files are a mess, half their time goes into cleanup. Tracks named Audio 1 and Audio 2 have to be auditioned one by one just to find out what they are, and that's time not spent on the sound.

Getting it right isn't complicated. Decide how to split the stems, how to name them, and how much processing to print. This guide covers those three.

Exporting every single track gives you dozens of files that are awkward to handle; bouncing everything down to two or three leaves nothing to work with. Instrument groups are the usual middle ground: drums (kick, snare and the rest if needed), bass, guitars, keys, synths, lead vocal, doubles, harmonies, and effects.

How far to split the drums depends on the genre. If the balance between kick and snare needs real work, separate them. If the track is built on a finished loop, one stem is fine. When in doubt, send them split and include a combined version too.

The most common accident is stems that start at different points. Trimming each file to where sound begins forces the other person to re-align everything, and one misplaced track throws off the whole session. Export every stem from 00:00 with the same length. Silence in the middle is fine.

Put the song title, instrument and version in the file name — `Sonagi_Kick_v1.wav`, `Sonagi_LeadVox_v1.wav` — so the folder reads at a glance. If the tempo changes mid-song, send a tempo map or the project file.

Turn off the limiter and compressor on the master bus before exporting stems. Sound that's already squashed can't be un-squashed. On individual tracks, keep the processing that defines the sound — amp sims, vocal tuning, deliberate delays — and leave out anything you'd want adjusted later, like a master EQ or a bus compressor over everything.

Peaks around -6 dBFS give a safe margin. Quiet is fine; level can always be raised in the mix, while clipped waveforms can't be recovered. If you want to preserve the balance you like, bounce a rough mix as an MP3 and send it alongside.

Words like "warmer" or "tighter" mean different things to different people. Picking one or two existing songs close to what you want removes most of the ambiguity. Say what specifically you're pointing at — "how far forward the vocal sits in this one", "the weight of the drums here" — rather than sending the song alone.

Add the purpose of the track as well. A streaming release, a demo before a show, and a competition submission all pull the work in different directions. Set the deadline and the number of revision rounds at the same time.

You can filter the IGNITE musician list by role to find people who mix and master. Listening to the work in their portfolio first, then contacting someone whose past work sits close to your song, tends to go better than picking on availability alone.

Mentioning that you already have everything in this guide ready speeds the conversation up, because it tells the other person they can estimate the work.