https://www.corvin.music/blog daily 1.0 2026-09-15 https://www.corvin.music/blog/opinion-mixing-is-routing-clip-gain-phase-alignment monthly 0.5 2026-09-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69c1a85bf62d034331eca209/e7af8e1e-a603-4268-950f-28462c04015d/Screenshot+2026-09-03+at+23.56.15.png Blog - OPINION - mIxing is routing, clip gain, phase alignment - Make it stand out Before a single plug-in gets opened, most of a mix is already decided: how the tracks are named, grouped, routed, gain-staged and time-aligned. That’s what this post is about. What you’re looking at is my session from 2024, when I recorded and mixed friends of mine from uni. The band broke up and they won’t let me put the song online, so you only get the screenshots - which is fine, because the way a mix gets built is largely universal. You’re looking at the Edit window. This is where clip gain lives, and where you do time alignment, phase nudges, polarity flips (everyone says phase invert) and commits. Fancy jargon for very simple actions: moving audio around, and deciding how loud a piece of it is before anything else touches it. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69c1a85bf62d034331eca209/5150cb3d-1278-4f16-a60a-52910d3782f0/Screenshot+2026-09-04+at+00.05.06.png Blog - OPINION - mIxing is routing, clip gain, phase alignment - Make it stand out You’re looking at the Mix window, which lays the session out like a console: a channel strip per track, inserts at the top, sends under them, then I/O, pan, and the fader. Pro Tools didn’t invent that layout and it’s not the only DAW that uses it, but it landed early in professional studios, and between its editing workflow and the hardware built around it, it became the default in a lot of studios and in post. That’s habit and infrastructure as much as merit. You’ll notice tracks named BUSS (I shorten it to B) and tracks named VCA, and faders sitting at all sorts of levels. Those two are not the same thing: a buss - an aux input - actually sums audio, so the drum tracks feed into it and you can process the sum. A VCA passes no audio at all, it scales the faders of every track assigned to it, so the balance you set inside the group stays intact. Setting the level relationships across all of that is what balancing means. Pro Tools mixes in floating point so the internal sum won’t break, but the output has a hard ceiling and anything modelling analog gear cares about level, so I leave headroom anyway. Some tracks sit far below the rest and still do work - notice the two GTR DI tracks pulled way down but still active. I liked what they added underneath the amped guitars, so I kept them. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69c1a85bf62d034331eca209/304cc547-3269-4d24-8cea-bd231d803b61/does-anyone-know-fabfilter-pro-q3-like-what-and-how-v0-thu53lynpwwc1.jpg Blog - OPINION - mIxing is routing, clip gain, phase alignment - Make it stand out A ridiculous EQ configuration. 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