Never Start Your Session on Bar 1
The rule
Fab Dupont, mid-session, four minutes into building a beat, stops and says it flatly:
Never start your session on beat one. That's a crime against humanity.
He's exaggerating for effect. He's also giving you one of those pieces of advice that costs nothing to follow and quietly saves you three separate disasters.
The rule: your first downbeat should never land on bar 1. Leave at least two empty bars, four if you have the discipline, before anything happens.
Here's what those empty bars are actually buying you.
Quick answer
| Problem | What the empty bars do |
|---|---|
| You want an intro later | Space exists. No dragging the entire session right. |
| Bounces glitch at the start | Plugins get pre-roll to settle before audio arrives. |
| Fades have nowhere to live | Room for a fade-in from silence. |
| Count-ins and pickup notes | A place to put them. |
| Your mix engineer opens the file | They don't hate you. |
Reason 1: you don't know what the song wants yet
Fab's version:
You never know when you're going to have an idea to have an intro to the intro.
This is the argument that actually matters, and it isn't technical. It's about not making irreversible decisions on your worst-informed day.
At the moment you create the session, you know less about the song than you will ever know again. Bar 1 seems like the obvious place for the first kick because there is nothing else in the session yet. Three weeks later there's a filtered pad swell, a vocal pickup that starts an eighth-note early, and a reverse cymbal that needs 1.5 bars of tail.
Now you have to select everything (every region, every automation point, every tempo marker) and drag it. In most DAWs that's a coin flip on whether the automation and the tempo map come with it.
Two empty bars at the top is the cheapest insurance in music production. You will never regret having them. You will absolutely regret not having them.
Reason 2: the bounce glitch is real (and here's the actual mechanism)
Fab's version:
If you start on beat one, when you export, there's always going to be a glitch somewhere on beat one.
"Always" is generous. But the phenomenon is real, and understanding why tells you how much pre-roll you actually need.
Three separate things go wrong at the very start of a bounce:
1. Plugins haven't settled. Analog-modelled compressors, saturators and tape emulations carry internal state: envelope followers, filter memory, hysteresis. At sample zero they're in a default state that has nothing to do with your music. It takes them anywhere from a few milliseconds to a second to converge on their real behaviour. Bounce from bar 1 and you capture that convergence.
2. Lookahead and delay compensation need audio to look ahead at. Limiters, transient designers and linear-phase EQs read forward in time. At the session start, there is no forward. Some handle this gracefully. Some produce an audible tick.
3. There's no zero-crossing. If your first sample isn't silence, you've built a step function into the file. That's a click, by definition, and no fade-in can exist in a region that has no space before it.
Practical takeaway: two bars covers case 3 and most of case 1. If your mix bus chain has a slow opto compressor or a tape emulation on it, give yourself four. If you're bouncing stems, give yourself four regardless. Every stem inherits the same problem, multiplied.
Reason 3: the person who mixes this has to open it
Fab, on sending a session that starts on bar 1 to a mix engineer:
He will hate your guts, but kindly.
The mixer needs pre-roll for the same reasons you do, plus one more: they're going to be looping the top of the song forty times, and every loop restarts every plugin's internal state. A mixer who can't hear a clean first downbeat can't judge the first downbeat.
If you're sending files out, the empty bars aren't a courtesy. They're part of the deliverable.
How to actually do it
- Set your session start marker at bar 3. Not bar 1. Make it a template.
- Bounce from bar 1, not from your first region. The empty space is the point; don't trim it off at the end.
- If you print stems, print them all from the same start point. Otherwise they won't line up when someone drops them into a new session.
- Keep the tempo map's first event at bar 1, even if nothing plays there. Tempo events that start where the music starts are a nightmare to move.
- Put your count-in there. Two bars of click, permanently. It costs nothing.
If you've already built a session on bar 1: duplicate it before you fix it. Then select all, including automation and tempo, and move right. Check the tempo map afterwards. Check it again.
FAQ
How many empty bars should I leave before the song starts? Two bars minimum, four bars if your mix bus has slow-settling analog emulations or if you plan to print stems. Two bars at 120 BPM is four seconds: plenty for plugin convergence and a fade-in, short enough that nobody scrolling the session notices.
Does this apply if I'm working entirely in the box with no plugins? Less so, but the arrangement argument still holds. The intro you haven't written yet needs somewhere to live. And the moment you add a single reverb, the technical argument comes back.
Why do bounces sometimes click at the very start? Three overlapping causes: analog-modelled plugins with internal state that hasn't settled, lookahead processors with no audio to look ahead at, and a first sample that isn't at zero amplitude. Pre-roll addresses all three at once.
Should I leave space at the end of the session too? Yes, and for a related reason: reverb tails, delay repeats and mix bus compressor release all extend past the last note. Bounce to the last musical event and you'll chop the tail. Leave four bars and let it decay.
Is this a Pro Tools thing or does it apply to every DAW? Every DAW. The plugin-settling and zero-crossing issues are properties of digital audio and plugin design, not of any particular host. The arrangement argument is a property of songwriting.
Watch it happen
This is a two-second aside in the middle of a longer session where Fab builds a track from a beat, an arpeggio and a bass, and it's the kind of thing that never appears in a manual. That's the whole reason Puremix exists: to show you the ten thousand small decisions that separate a session that works from a session that fights you.
- Fab Dupont's updated mixing template: see how a professional session is structured before a single note goes in
- Fab Dupont's mixing template: the original, still one of the most-watched videos in the library
- More from Fab Dupont
Watch the full session on Puremix
Written by Puremix.
