Speed Up Your Mixing with Templates + 5 Free DAW Templates

Picture this: you’ve spent weeks, maybe even months antagonizing over the perfect instruments to record your track with. You’ve played with the EQ, compression and effects endlessly until you were able to finally find the right sound for the genre you’re playing in. Next comes the mixing and mastering, which has taken you double time due to all the extra adjustments you’ve made in the previous stages of the song’s composition! Fear not, because all this extra work in the future can be avoided by using a mixing template, which is a guiding outline preloaded into a DAW, already including the tracks, buses and instruments you will need in order to begin recording.

Most DAWs, such as Ableton, Logic and FL Studio come with mixing templates as standard for vocal takes, guitars, and drums, which will come preloaded with audio effects routed to buses. In this article, we will be discussing the top 5 reasons why you should be using a mixing template to mix your work. Additionally, we will be introducing you to some of Lofi Weekly’s very own mixing templates, which are free to use for any musician and were created in 5 different DAWS to ensure we enable as many producers / artists to use it as possible! These templates are compatible with FL Studio, Ableton, Logic, Pro Tools, and Studio One!

The worst part for many producers and engineers is the constant setting up of various buses and channels for each individual track recorded. This is even worse if you have a layered song with multiple tracks for the same instrument, with the repetitive process taking up a large portion of mixing and mastering time. Having a mixing template takes away this burden, as each track will come preloaded with everything you will need to adjust to get a decent sounding mix, saving you the time and effort of applying them individually yourself.

When you get into the double figures of tracks it can become daunting to look at, especially if you’re not one for color coding and naming tracks. This is where a mixing template can really help you to keep tabs of each track of the song you are currently working on, as each track can be simplified down to only the basic mix and master functions, alongside EQ, and whatever other effects are desired. This will remove any additional features that you won’t use. Not only does this make your interface look less cluttered, but it will also voids the temptation to stray from the original mixing and mastering plan, by offering only a limited number of customization options.

It is very important that once a lofi hip hop producer has found their sound, their songs should all sound as though they have been mixed to the same standard by the same person, especially if the tracks are destined to be on an album together. This is so that your audience can listen through each song fluidly, without hearing a drastic difference between the mixing and mastering of each track. Having a set template which you always work off of can help you to maintain this sound, by using the same plugins and effects for your tracks and mitigating the desire to drastically stray from the other songs you have already completed.

Mixing templates are great for helping to beat writer’s block, because they can be tailored to any genre of music. For lofi hip hop music, we here at LoFi Weekly have created 5 free mixing templates for Logic, Pro Tools, Ableton, FL Studio, and Studio One. These templates all use the DAW’s stock EQs, compressors, stock distortion, mix buses, reverb and delay making it easy to access for any producer.

We’ve all had the dreaded moment of realization when we’ve listened back to a track that has just been released on Spotify, only to realize that when listening through speakers, the guitar is way too bright and piercing, or someone has played a bum note halfway through the track. A mixing template can be programmed to help highlight those issues early on in the mixing and mastering process, and also provide a simple solution to the issue. This will save you the embarrassment of releasing an incomplete product and save you the hassle of having to take a step back to fix the problem.

Whilst some may call it “cheating” We can conclude that mixing templates really do have a big impact on both the lofi hip hop producer (many cases also the sound engineer), as it really helps to improve the productivity and quality of work produced by people, without the need for repetitive bus channels or finely tweaked EQ. Despite this, it is still important to recognize that whilst you may be working off of someone else’s template, you are not constrained to what is on the template, and are free to add further customizations and altercations, in order to get the best and most professional sound for your music.