The ninth Yule Lad to come down from the mountains is Bjúgnakrækir.

The English translation of his name is Sausage-Swiper and he "would hide in the rafters and snatch sausages that were being smoked."

If you've missed the previous 8 Yuletide Tips, here are some links to get you up to speed:

• Yuletide Tip #1 – Preparing for a Session

• Yuletide Audio Tip #2 – The Importance of Arrangement

• Yuletide Audio Tip #3 – The Gift of Microphones

• Yuletide Audio Tip #4 – How to mute arrangements to fit around your vocals

• Yuletide Audio Tip #5 – Get Groovy at Editing

• Yuletide Audio Tip #6 – The Power of Performance From Comping

• Yuletide Audio Tip #7 – Play With Your Room (And Use Your Acoustics)

• Yuletide Audio Tip #8 – Preparing Your Mixing Session

Sausage-Swiper is such a weird translation but I'll let it slide because I don't know how to explain his name any better...

So let's just get on with the meat of the matter (no pun intended...)

By now you've prepared your session and you have an idea of where you're trying to go with your mix. So why not take a shortcut there and simplify your mix?

Use groups and busses to make your mix easier to handle. Buss multiple kick and drum tracks together to one bus, then route those to a second drum bus with your other drum tracks. Keep a guitar bus, vocal bus, keyboard bus and an "other bus" handy as well for when you want to group various instruments together to make it all easier for you. Then, route all those busses to a master bus that's separate from your master fader so you can easily use reference mixes without needing to deactivate any 2-buss processing you have going on in your mix. Simple mixing is all about bus mixing. If you can use mix-fader processing and plug-ins on the groups to make your mix better with less plug-ins, all the power to you. You've saved yourself a ton of time and you've taken a smart shortcut to greater sounding mixes.

If you're interested in knowing how to really speed up your mixing workflow by watching a mix get finished in under 2 hours with every step explained along the way, take a trip with me inside Quick Mixing where I show you my exact workflow for getting quality mixes in a tiny amount of time.

Learn things like:

• How to use amp simulators and parallel processing to breathe life into your bass and guitars (while also making your mixes sound wider)
• How to use tape delay and EQ to create a 3-dimensional sound that doesn't add too much space to the up-front instruments
• How and when to have fun with compression to level out a guitar-solo and using a side-chain to get the guitar out of the way of the vocal
• How to use my absolute favorite reverb trick, the "3-Verb" blend to create natural space and depth in all your instruments where they all have a separate spot in the mix but they all sound like they're playing together in the same room

See you in there:

www.QuickMixing.com