What Actually Goes in a Pro Tools Mix Template (An 80 Track Teardown)
The short answer
A working Pro Tools mix template contains five layers: track presets with plugins and routing preloaded per instrument family, subgroups for every family, VCAs feeding a master VCA, a permanent effects return rack, and a master bus with reference monitoring built in. Chris Shaw's template runs roughly 80 tracks, sized to handle two drum kits, percussion, horns, strings, acoustics, electrics, loops, samples, lead and background vocals. Anything unused gets deleted at prep time, so the template starts large and the session ends lean.
Why 80 tracks is not madness
The most common objection to a big template is that you will never use all of it. Correct. That is the design.
Chris builds for the worst case so nothing ever arrives that the template cannot absorb. Two kits? Covered. A horn section nobody warned him about? Covered. Then a script sweeps through, finds every empty track in the template and deletes it. On the session in the tutorial that removed 41 tracks in one action.
You start with a session that has a place for everything, and you end with a session that only contains the song. That is the trick. Everybody focuses on the 80 and misses the delete.
If you have never built a template before, the useful mental model is not "a session I reuse." It is a set of permanent addresses. The bass always lives here. The overheads always land there. Once every instrument has a fixed home, everything else, automation included, becomes possible.
Layer 1: navigation, or how not to lose your mind
Before any audio, the template solves a problem most people just tolerate: finding things.
Chris uses empty tracks named with rows of dashes as visual separators in the track list, a trick he lifted from a 250 track Carlos Santana session that predated folders. Scanning for the bass means scanning six separators, not 80 names.
VCAs all begin with a percent sign, so on a control surface anything starting with % is instantly identifiable as a VCA. Under each separator sits a folder, so any instrument family can be soloed and bounced as a quick stem when a client asks for one at 11pm.
And the DSP heavy UAD plugins, Ocean Way Rooms, the EMT plate, the AKG spring, Capitol Chambers, sit at the very top of the session. Pro Tools loads top to bottom, so the expensive plugins claim their DSP first.
Layer 2: track presets, the starting point
Every instrument family has a Pro Tools track preset that loads inserts, sends, output routing and track colour in one action.
The common shape across almost all of them is the same three things:
- A Studer A800 tape emulation. Nearly everything arrives recorded digitally, and Chris grew up on tape. The A800 puts a consistent blanket across the whole session before you do anything else. Bonus: tape speed becomes a tonal control. 15 ips for a thick, gooey kick. Drop to 7.5 ips when you want it properly lo-fi.
- A console channel emulation, matched per family. British console flavour on drums, the API style channel on guitars, SSL on vocals, background vocals and keys. This is not nostalgia for its own sake. It is a mixer who spent years on consoles trying to bring the same colour into the box.
- FabFilter Pro-Q, with a specific and very reusable curve. A high pass, a low pass, and a tilt in the mid band. Because nine times out of ten the note is not "cut 340Hz," it is "more bottom and less top," or the reverse. Set the tilt, move the centre frequency, done. Ninety seconds to a usable tone, then move on.
Bass gets one extra: an Ozone Exciter sitting bypassed at the end of the chain, in three band mode with the high and low bands off, waiting for the moment the arrangement gets dense enough that the bass needs to growl its way through.
Sends are in the preset too, and they are all inactive by default. That is a deliberate and underrated move. Glance at a track, see nothing lit, and you know instantly that nothing is being sent anywhere. When you hear something you do not like, you are not hunting for a mystery reverb.
Layer 3: subgroups and VCAs
Every track feeds a subgroup. Every subgroup has the Slate Virtual Mix Bus on it for a bit of console glue. Kick sub, snare sub, drums, bass, guitars, keys, vocals, background vocals.
Subgroups feed VCAs, and every VCA feeds a master VCA. So when the two bus is getting hit harder than you want, you do not go hunting for gain staging problems. You pull one fader and the entire mix comes down with its internal balance untouched.
Simple. Almost boring. Saves an enormous amount of time on the day.
Layer 4: the effects return rack
This is the part of a template most people underbuild. Chris's returns live permanently at the bottom of the session, ready before the first fader move:
- Reverbs: a dedicated snare verb, a Pro Tools Space instance, a PCM60 emulation on large room with the shortest decay and a little pre delay (his hip hop years talking), a chamber, an EMT 140 plate fed through an EQ that rolls off the bottom, and Valhalla VintageVerb for general vocal ambience.
- Pitch and width: a MicroShift dedicated to the bass, a second for everything else, and a pair of H910s with different delay times, roughly 15ms and 7.5ms, which is glorious on acoustic guitars.
- Delays: an SDD-3000 style guitar delay, mono, fed into a stock mod delay with about 7.5ms on one side and zero on the other purely to widen it. Bypass that second plugin and it snaps back to mono. A SuperTap slap and an H-Delay for vocals.
- Replika XT in diffusion mode. Every repeat picks up more reverb until the delay dissolves into ambient wash. Chris uses it on every mix for what he calls the gauzy curtain behind the record, something you do not hear but would miss instantly. It also doubles as a repair tool: when a band stops dead on the last chord and there is nothing to fade, throw guitars into it and use ten seconds of wash as your fade.
Layer 5: the master bus, and the reference trick
Master bus is restrained. A VSC2 stereo bus compressor (SSL flavour, chosen partly for its sidechain filter), an Abbey Road Mastering instance that is almost entirely bypassed except the widener at around 0.5, and Ozone.
Then the clever bit. MCompare from MeldaProduction sits on the master bus, fed by two sources: a reference mix that lives on a dedicated track inside the template, and an aux called iTunes that is fed back into Pro Tools over Dante. So Chris can flip between his mix, a previous version, the client's reference, and literally anything playing on his computer, without leaving the session.
Better still, source switching is mapped to MIDI triggers from a QWERTY keyboard, with an on screen notification confirming what he is listening to. No plugin window open. No mouse. Just A, B, C.
If you want the full logic behind reference monitoring, we broke it down separately in How to A/B Your Mix Against a Reference.
One warning about templates
A template is a set of decisions you made when you were not under pressure. That is its value and also its danger.
Chris is blunt about it: these are starting points, not gospel. The preset gets you to the moment where you can hear the song and make a real decision. If it is doing the deciding for you, you have stopped mixing and started assembling.
Steal his. Rewire half of it. That is what it is for.
FAQ
How many tracks should a mix template have? Enough to absorb your biggest realistic session. Chris uses around 80 and deletes what the song does not need during prep. Starting large and trimming is faster than building up mid mix.
Should subgroups or VCAs control levels? Both, for different jobs. Subgroups carry the processing, VCAs carry the level control, and a master VCA lets you pull the whole mix without disturbing the balance or the two bus relationship.
What plugins belong in a mix template by default? Colour and shape only: a tape emulation, a console channel, and an EQ. Corrective and character processing gets added once you have heard the song.
Why keep sends inactive in a template? So you can see at a glance what is actually being sent somewhere. Active by default means every troubleshooting session starts with an audit.
Can I use a mix template in Logic, Cubase or Studio One? Yes. The routing logic is DAW agnostic. Track presets and the automation layer are the parts that change.
Keep going
- Watch the full series: Chris Shaw: The Mix Template on Puremix
- Related: How to Prep a Pro Tools Session in 5 Minutes
- Related: Why Kick and Snare Need Their Own Parallel Bus
- Get the full library: Puremix Pro
