Chris Shaw's template

46m • 2026

Every mixer knows the dead zone. The transfer lands, and before you touch a fader you burn half an hour labeling tracks, setting outputs, colour coding, building busses and dragging things into place. Chris Shaw got sick of it, and then he did something about it.

In this two part tutorial, Chris opens up the Pro Tools mix template he has been sharpening for years, an 80 track monster built to swallow anything a client throws at it: two drum kits, percussion, horns, strings, acoustics, loops, stacked background vocals. Then he shows you the Soundflow automation that fills it. One button on a Stream Deck applies a track preset, instantiates the plugins, sets the routing, builds a folder, moves the track into the right section of the template and cleans up after itself. A 24 track transfer goes from raw WAVs to mix ready in about five minutes.

But this is not just a workflow video. Chris walks through every chain in the template and explains why it is there. Studer A800 tape emulation in front of almost everything. Console emulation matched per instrument family, Neve flavour on drums, API on guitars, SSL on vocals and keys. A tilt EQ move on FabFilter Pro-Q that roughs in a sound in seconds. A vocal channel strip running three compressors blended at 40 percent rather than one being slammed. And the routing decision that changed his drum sound: a dedicated kick and snare parallel crush bus, so the compression that gives you attack stops flattening the rest of the kit.

Then the full tour. VCA architecture that stays readable on a control surface, the effects return rack from EMT plate to AKG spring to Replika XT diffusion, the sidechain trick borrowed from Andrew Scheps that ducks a dense arrangement under a lead vocal, and a master bus with reference monitoring wired straight into it.

Chris is also making the session available so you can open it, take it apart and steal whatever works for you.

Whether you mix on a control surface or a trackpad, this is a masterclass in getting the boring part out of the way so you can spend your hours on the only thing that matters: the mix.