The session opens. Ninety tracks, all the same grey, named Audio 1 through Audio 90 with a few called Guitar Idea 3 and one called asdf. Somebody has to mix this and it is you. The instinct is to start at the top and work down, which is the slowest possible order.
Before anything: save a copy
Save the session under a new name. Not because anything here is dangerous, but because a session you cannot break is a session you will explore properly instead of tiptoeing around.
Step 1: find out what you have
Fifteen minutes of listening now saves two hours later. Solo down the list and write, on paper or in a text file, what each track actually is.
You will find things worth knowing before you start moving anything: three tracks that are the same take, a channel that is silent for the whole song, two vocal comps where you assumed there was one, and the reason a fader was at minus twenty.
Step 2: name everything
This is the part with no shortcut. Names have to come from what the audio is, and only listening tells you that.
- Name it what it is, not what it was for. Shaker, not Perc Idea 2.
- Keep the same word for the same thing across the session. Vox everywhere, or Vocal everywhere, not both.
- Number the duplicates properly. Vox Dbl 1 and Vox Dbl 2 rather than Vox and Vox copy.
- Assume it will leave your machine. These names become the filenames when stems get exported.
Step 3: group and route
Now that the names mean something, this part goes quickly.
- Reorder the track list so related things sit together. Drums, bass, guitars, keys, synths, vocals, FX is a fine order and consistency matters more than the choice.
- Put each group into a folder so the arrange page collapses to something readable.
- Create a bus per group and route the group into it, so the mix has one place to treat each section.
- Color each group. Everything in the group gets the same color, so a glance tells you where you are.
Step 4: only now, start mixing
The reason to hold off is that routing changes invalidate mix decisions. A compressor set on an individual drum channel means something different once that channel is feeding a drum bus with its own compressor. Get the structure settled, then start listening.
Doing steps 2 to 3 in one click
Steps 2 and 3 are where the hours go, and they are the same job every time on every messy session.
DawBrooo runs inside Fender Studio Pro and does that pass in one click. It reads every track, sorts them into real bus folders, colors and tints each one a darker shade of its group, and renames them cleanly. Presets cover 14 instrument categories, from drums and bass through guitars, keys, brass, woodwinds, strings, mallets and percussion. Naming is yours to shape, with cleanup modes, folder styles and an optional prefix.
If a session is half sorted already you can run just one part of it: color only, rename only, or folders only. It works on tracks, groups, buses and folder names inside the session, and leaves your audio files alone.
Step 1 still has to be done by ear. Nothing can tell you that two of those tracks are the same take.