Groups, Submixing In and out of the box, and Stems

The board has just been fixed and its awesome. Today we learned some new stuff: Sub-mixing and Stemming both in and out of the box. To mix in the box, we still use the 2Tk1 and mix buttons on the master fader. Going through the board, we can use the master fader itself, with the mix button down. Start by grouping a few instruments together, like all of the drum tracks with bass, the guitar with piano, and all of the vocals into 3 separate stereo aux tracks to be labeled as subgroups in ProTools. We get sub groups by sending the original audio tracks to AUX tracks. To record a stem in the box, create 3 stereo audio channels with the inputs set the same as the outputs of the subgroup channels. Mute and record enable. To get the sub mixes out of the box, patch those stereo aux tracks out 1-2, 3-4, 5-6 into line inputs with the 6 channels of your choices on the board (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) and pan the channels L R L R L R. You can send these subgroups on the group bus with via the group bus matrix (the buttons at the top of any channel strip on the board). These are sent to the Red faders at the right of the board, the monitor group channels (Yes, Will… they are monitor and group channels!). Send the drums/bass to 1 and 2, gtr/piano to 3 and 4, the vocals to 5 and 6, and make sure the monitor level pot is dialed all the way up. The each group hard left and right (1L, 2R, 3L, 4R, 5L, 6R). Now that we have these submixes/groups through the board, and we have our submixes in the box to be recorded as stems, we want to send the monitor groups back into ProTools to be recorded out of the box as stems. Create 3 more stereo audio tracks in ProTools and label them the inputs that you patch them to. Patch the monitor groups out of the “group outputs – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6” on the patch bay into ProTools inputs that are not being used as outputs, or you will get a feedback loop. Say, In B-1, B-2, B-3, B-4, B-5, and B-6). In ProTools set the inputs of the 3 stereo audio tracks you created to correspond ( drums B1-2, gtr/piano B3-4, and vox B5-6) and record enable. You should now be able to record your in and out of the box stereo stems from the submixes you created.