Template Mixing and Mastering: The Ultimate Guide to Achieving a Professional Sound

This treatment of templating for in-the-box mixing and production engineers was extremely valuable. Instead of forcing the reader through the lens of one (or two) of the major DAWs, Decker lays out a breadcrumb trail that is useful for any, giving great technical and musical advice geared to in-the-box mixing and production engineers along the way. Also, a blessing is that he gets right to the point--it didn't take him 500 pages to provide what is a very thorough treatment of the topic. My DAW happens to be Cubase, which, while arguably a most sophisticated system, can be very arcane at times. Decker's advice helped me to see new things about using my DAW simply because his expertise is so broad and can be trusted to be applicable to all of them.

One might think that a book that gives a step-by-step guide to building a professional mix template would lead amateurs such as me to blindly follow the pros.When I see the level of sophistication that Billy Decker applies to his mix template, he does things that I can't even hear. As an amateur musician with a home studio, I don't want to spend the time it would take me to learn to hear what Billy Decker can hear and do what he can do. I would rather spend my limited time on learning to be a better craftsperson in writing and performing songs.I thought this book was great, but not for the reasons most people might think. It offers up a mix template, but in the end I decided that I don't want such a sophisticated and professional mix.After reading this I thought: I'll just try to mix my stuff the best I can, and if I ever get anything that I think could be commercially successful, I'll go to a professional mixer like Billy Decker.

Billy Decker is not only a great mix engineer, but an even better person. I recommend anything he sells. I have a Decker board, and all of his plugins too.

I would say I’m an advanced user of a DAW and I also know my way through hardware EQs and compressors. My intention on the book was to read it through and make my own template for house/techno/hip-hop. I was able to read Billy’s explanation for each setting and adjust accordingly to my settings. I was able to build my templates within 45 minutes. Are there things I would do different for settings ? Yes! The most useful thing about this book is the uniformity of the tracks layout. Once you have that done you can start arranging and mixing right away. It will be difficult at first if you’re new to mixing but learn from each time you make movements and print it out to hear your progress. If you are making templates for dance or urban music I would recommend you drop your drum tracks even more (-5dB more) just to add headroom when you are ready to work with the master bus.

Billy is sharing his secret recipe for great mixes-in great detail! My bandmates noticed a difference immediately-and Ive been doing this for 38 years. What a great guy-he left the ladder in place for the rest of us to climb to successful mixes. You still have to use your ears and common sense but this book gets you 90-95% there. The investment in this inexpensive book and additional plugins is the best $ you will spend and save time

My hobby is song-writing and playing guitar. I want my recordings to sound pro to support the song. They never did and man it’s a lot of work recording and mixing. This book totally changed how I approach the recording and mixing process. Once I realized how Billy Decker was controlling his inputs more intelligently, standardizing some tones (drum trigger) then a he template accepts these inputs and outputs a good mix - fast. It is work to set up but once done , you’re Golden. Now as a singer songwriter I’m modifying the template slightly to suit my particular sound but the concepts learnt stay the same. If you want a faster recording/mixing process then get this book and incorporate its ideas into your workflow.

I am a 30 year veteran of mixing and recording. This book was so very helpful in putting me a much better mixing mentality. You wont become a great mixer without putting in the work and I had to ultimately alter elements of the template to fit my workflow, but he tells you that in the book. I would also add that I reached out to Billy via email with a couple of different technical questions, he responded immediately and helpfully. Get this book! You wont regret it. I have refered back many times since reading it.

Read this book for the process it helps you through, not necessarily the result. The authors describe, in detailed text, Decker's mixing template right down to fader and plugin settings to the first decimal place. They also say you can substitute plugins. Just for fun, I replicated his template exactly (we have all the plugins) and fired up a song. Master bus was 20 db hot and nothing sounded right. I used the default vertical zoom in PT, so to use this method you'll need to use a higher zoom level. The template also depends upon selecting your own drum replacement samples, so get this done upfront. There are some good mixing tips sprinkled through the book, such as dual identical lvox tracks. Good use is also made of serial compressors with just a little compression from each.

The good:The book gives an interesting insight into an alternative approach to mixing and is clear and (very) concise. I tend to mix as I record, so I can get a growing feel for how a song is developing, but very often, at the end of recording, I will bounce dry stems and then remix from scratch. This will, I am sure, save me time.The manufacturing quality is good and the book uses decent paper. I haven't noticed any obvious typos or other mistakes, which is pleasing - too many books in the audio or graphic production world don't get proof-read properly these days (or the author's second cousin, whoo has zero knowledge in the field does it).I don't use ProTools like the author, but I didn't have any difficulty in translating the template to Studio One and my own plugins. Although the author suggests copying the template exactly then amending it to taste later, I did this as I went along.The author is essentially a country mixer, and the default template would suit country, rock, pop, maybe even metal - but those are not really my styles. I believe I've been able to adapt the template for less traditional styles and I'm happy with the results. Certainly it has greatly enhanced certain aspects of my sound, in particular the drums and vocals.Finally, the graphic images are of a very high standard, which is refreshing, compared with other expensive audio production books with dreadful photocopier quality images.The not quite so good:The book only has 128 pages and there is a tad too much unnecessary waffle and duplication. For example, I would argue it's not necessary to use half a page to say that the settings for a channel are identical to the previous channel, just panned hard right instead of left. That's a heading and a sentence at most. The book feels padded.Another exanple of this padding is some of the graphic contant. It's great quality, as I mentioned before, but some of the images are unnecessary. For example - the discussion on mixingbeing like painting includes two pictures of someone else's paintings, taking up about half the page. The section on time based effects has a picture larger than half the page with the words Delay, Reverb, Chorus, Echo etc, randomly strewn across it, in different sizes and colours. The book feels padded. I'm not surprised, though. If you took the unnecessary stuff out you might only end up with a 75 page book and that might raise eyebrows with a £15 price tag.If the author had wanted less padding, perhaps he could have included a little insight into how to capture good quality recordings that would work best with the template. I know this is a book on mixing, but perhaps a description of what makes him smile when he gets a new set of stems to work on, and what makes him shudder would have been helpful.Summary:Recommended. Despite the few misgivings I have about this book, I have found it useful and I am not complaining about the price/content ratio. I prefer concise wording and decent quality images to 400 page bore-a-thons with rubbish pictures. I recommend the book as an interesting insight into a producer's process, whether or not you end up using the template.Edit after re-read:A couple of other points that came to light after a re-read.1. Many of the specific plugins that Decker uses are extremely expensive - to won them all would be an investment of thousands. He suggests that if we don't already own these plugins we should shop around and try and find equivalents that sound the same or offer the same features. It would have been helpful for a couple of suggestions to have been offered. I suspect they weren't offered because the author is only knowledgeable about the plugins he specifically uses, but for the book to have been even more useful, he could have done some research and offered some options. Appendix B would have been a useful place for that information.2. A master routing grid would have been a help, rather than just the breakdowns.3. The author assumes we are using live drums. Many of us are not. In that instance - do we need the trigger/drum replacement software? I assume not, but is he suggesting we layer multiple kick drums anyway? Some clarification would have been helpful.4. Appendix A shows the channels in a table - but the table on its own is less than helpful as in many cases it uses abbrevations for channel names - eg 'HT06' or 'DS 11'. A full name would have helped, as well as a link to the page in the book where this channel is discussed.5. Appendix B would have benefitted from another column that included the page number that each instance of the plugin is mentioned on.Again, individualy these are minor points, but collectively they would have made the book a five star read.Oh, and I found a couple of typos, lol!

If you are using Pro Tools with the same plugs-ins Decker uses (and helpfully lists in detail) this could well be a blueprint to copy for a quick, efficient workflow producing on-the-money mixes - just import your audio files to the template and adjust seasoning to taste. It’s unlikely though that you will have that exact combination of resources but it is here that the real value of Decker’s book shines through. For Decker does not simply give you his blueprint, he explains - simply and clearly - what he does and why. If you don’t have the ‘how’ (the DAW/plug-ins he uses) you need to dig a little, research a little, and develop your own template towards the same result. I don’t use Pro Tools, I use Logic Pro X, and I only had one of the plug-ins Decker lists. After much research, I found my own setup to achieve ‘Deckeration’ and only needed to purchase one additional plugin (though I did have a lot to start with). Adapting Decker’s workflow to my kit has been the most intense and positive experience in my mixing education. Expect to work hard and research in depth, but knowing what you are after and why. You won’t agree with everything he suggests, but that’s a part of the learning process too.

If you work in ProTools and happen to have the same plug in suite / tools as the author then this book is for you. If you work in any other DAW using stock plug ins ( due to financial restrictions?) then you’ll have some work to do in deciding alternatives with uncertain / unquantifiable results. For me, not the long term fix I was hoping for

A really good book full of insights in new ways to record and mix music.It’s definitely a learning curve but well worth the application in the end.Interesting.

It has pages in it too