Today I want to share with you some rather technical tips to help you make your mixing time and workflow more efficient. These tips will help you organize your session, save a lot of time, and essentially make your life much more simple, easing your mind and letting you focus on what's really important, making music.

Tip #1: Color Code Your Tracks It's not so fun to look for a specific track in a list of 60+ tracks.

In fact, even 20 tracks is more than enough to waste a lot of our time on searching for a certain track.

That's why color coding your tracks is actually important, not just to look nice.

It saves you a whole lot of time and frustration. For example, if your looking for your lead vocals track, it's much easier to find it when it's colored in bright red.

You can spot it almost instantly.

It doesn't matter which DAW you're working on, it has the function to color certain tracks in certain colors.

Just color your tracks a way that seem intuitive to you, so you know and remember the colors easily.

After a few mixes of doing that, you will recognize each color immediately.

Tip #2: Name Your Tracks Effectively This tip is probably the simplest, but it's still important.

Do yourself a favor and name your tracks with short, simple, and logical names. You should be able to look at the name of your track and know exactly what track is it, without guessing, wondering, or soloing it. Just name your tracks by the instrument and maybe by the part it's playing. Try to avoid naming tracks by the name of the player, the brand of the instrument, or any other irrelevant detail.

Tip #3: Avoid Unnecessary Edits Editing can be a tedious job.

Especially when working with a lot of tracks or takes.

It's very time consuming to dive in and edit every track precisely. But the truth is, you don't have to do that.

Most of the fine edits you do in solo are barely audible in the mix.

So why spend so much time fixing it, when you can't actually hear it?

My suggestion is simple.

Start with rough editing.

Edit every track while locked to your DAW's grid.

This will "limit your options" and make your editing much faster. After you've done that, give the song a listen from start to end without touching or messing with anything.

If you hear some bad editing jumping right at you, fix it (and only it).

If you don't hear any editing problems, leave it as it is. You won't believe how much time you'll save, and without hurting the mix at all.

You might hear some editing problems when listening in solo, but it doesn't matter, because no one listens to your tracks in solo.

Tip #4: Mark The Sections of Your Song Just as it's annoying to look for a specific track, it's annoying to look for a specific section of the song. All you have to do is divide your into sections like intro, verse, chorus, etc.

You can do that by simply adding markers or regions in your DAW. Every DAW has markers or regions functions which let you map out your song structure.

Showing you exactly where every section of the song starts and ends, and when certain instruments go in or out.

Tip #5: Order Your Tracks

Position and order the tracks in a way that makes sense to you.

If you like all of your FX tracks to be last, do that.

If you like your lead vocals to always be first, do that.

If you like your guitar buss to be near your guitar tracks, do that.

The idea is to develop a uniform method or system, which will help you know how to order your tracks, without thinking about it.

You can do it logically or intuitively, just make sure it makes sense to you, so you won't have to think about it every time you open up a mix.

Tip #6: Be Consistent From Mix To Mix This tip is probably the most important one.

But the reason I wrote it last is because it relies on all of the previous tips. In order to save even more time, and work ever more efficiently, you have to be consistent from one mix to another.

What does it mean?

It's very simple.

For example, if you like to color your drum tracks blue, and position them first in order, do that every mix.

This way it will become intuitive to you that drum tracks are blue and positioned first. If the colors and order of all or most of your tracks become like second nature to you, your mixing process will be much faster and more efficient.

Obviously every mix is a bit different by a few tracks, but the core and the basics are the same.

All of these tips will save you a lot of time and frustration, and will help you focus more on actual mixing and less on boring technical stuff.

They will also help you create an efficient workflow, which is always good to have.

Once implementing these tips, your mixing process will become much more intuitive.

You won't ever have to look for a specific track or to deal with technical stuff. Hopefully these tips will help you take care of the technical side of things, and focus more on what we all love, making music.

Do you have any tips for help improve efficiency when mixing or recording?

Share them with us in the comments!