I was on Pro tools for the whole session this week. We started by selecting every track and routing the outputs to 1+2 as we will be mixing “in the box” without the desk. Then we created a master fader, selected the “ALL” group and turned all of the tracks down so as to give ourselves enough headroom to work with and prevent the master fader from peeking. Before moving on we made sure that every track was named appropriately. After this we set our panning on each track (overheads hard left and right, toms left and right according to matching overhead, rhythm guitars hard left and right, backing vocals hard left and right and we slightly panned the dry solo mics against the room mic).
After this it was just a matter of listening to the piece and adjusting the volume faders to get a rough mix. The guitars and keyboard were much too loud so we made a group for them and turned them all down while also turning up the kick and snare as they are driving parts in the song. We also had to give the lead vocals more volume and adjust the backing vocals slightly quieter. Lastly we gave the bass and lead guitar a small boost. After everything was at an acceptable level we were able to turn the master fader back up to zero without it peaking instead it peeked around 10db.
Next we edited out all of the silence in longer tracks to avoid unnecessary noise in the mix. Then we found all of the tracks with punched in or edited recordings and subtly crossfaded the every adjacent take to avoid clicks or unnatural transitions while at the same time avoiding hearing both takes. Lastly we saved the project, closed pro tools and made sure that all of the project files were organised hierarchically and in the same folder.