Hi All!!
I just finished recording an album. I’m a hobbyist but I feel like all my tracks are fairly well recorded.
But… now what?!? I want to send them to someone who can mix properly - do I just leave everything as is and send basic stems with no plug ins etc? Or should I try and do my own rough mix so I can show a mix engineer how I kinda want it to sound like and they can adjust/polish? Or do I do a full mix on my own, send that as a kind of reference but then still give “naked” stems? This is all new to me and I don’t want to do anything unnecessary or something that’s detrimental to the process.
Any advice would be most welcome and appreciated!!
Thanks in advance!
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Congrats on recording an album! Quite a feat
That depends on your mixing skills. Normally you wouldn’t want to give your mixer a bias unless you are sure about how you want your mix. Most good mixers mix for the “genre” and use pro reference tracks already. Unless you have specific needs for nostalgic elements or want to preserve a particular nuance, I wouldn’t give a rough mix. Just give the multi-tracks. But, a pro mixer would more than likely not be influenced by the rough mix anyway, so if you feel better sending one, no harm in it.
Thanks so much for the insight, I really appreciate it! I used to participate on this site a million years ago but life got in the way of my hobby - really trying to get back into it and hope to be here a little more frequently now - great community here! Thanks again 
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Congratulations!
Speaking for myself, I like to get the “raw” tracks to work from…
Now that doesn’t necessarily mean they wouldn’t have any processing at all on them. It all depends on how confident the recordist is in their decisions at the recording stage.
For example, it’s nice to get guitar amp sounds rather than just a bunch of raw DI tracks. Any MIDI instruments like keys or drums should be rendered as audio. If the artist also wants to send the DIs and MIDI tracks, that’s ok too, but there needs to be some basic idea of how the part should sound.
Vocals can sometimes benefit from a little compression at the recording stage.
Basically, if the elements are processed as you intend them to sound, then the mixer can polish them, enhance them, and fit them together from there.
Again, as someone who has mixed other people’s music, I always want to hear their rough mix. Anecdotally, I understand that most professional engineers do too. Even if the mix I end up doing is quite different from the rough, it’s vital to have some sort of starting point, so I can get an idea of priority elements, harmony balances, and just the general arrangement of the song.
Yes, this is what I think many mix engineers (including myself) prefer.
As a suggestion, check out some of the multi tracks I’ve uploaded of my own songs to the Cambridge Music Technology Multi-Track Download Library for other people to mix. It might give you an idea of how you can format your tracks to send off to a mixer for mixing (I have six songs from two albums available there): The 'Mixing Secrets' Free Multitrack Download Library
I hope that helps!
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Thank you so much for your insight! This is kinda how I thought the process might work but I was really unsure. Thanks for making it clear and simple with great rationale for the approach. You’ve helped me in the past too a few times; really appreciate you taking the time!!
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