Few names in modern mixing carry as much weight as Andrew Scheps. His credits read like a walk through pop, rock, and soul history: Adele, Green Day, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, Beyoncé. Now, the Grammy winning mixer opens his brand-new 2025 Updated Template to the public, revealed in his latest Puremix Pro exclusive series, giving you exclusive insight into his process. Andrew thinks that mixing is not just about technical perfection, but about understanding the emotional impact and creative intent behind every decision.
It’s not about having more. It’s about having less, but knowing why every single thing is there. Andrew Scheps' minimalist approach is designed to help you focus on the core idea behind a track, ensuring that the mix always serves the artist and their vision. By centering the artist's intent, his template empowers you to create an awesome record that feels right and truly fulfills the original inspiration.
Pro Tools: Where Chaos Meets Control
For Andrew Scheps, Pro Tools is more than just a DAW... it’s home. The central hub of his mixing workflow. His 2025 mix template showcases how he leverages Pro Tools’ powerful routing, grouping, and automation features to maintain complete control over complex sessions while preserving creative flexibility. The session is organized with clearly labeled folders and VCA groups that allow Scheps to move entire sections of the mix with a single fader, streamlining his workflow and speeding up decision-making.
Scheps uses Pro Tools’ advanced session management tools to keep everything tidy and accessible, minimizing distractions during the mixing process. His template takes full advantage of Pro Tools’ routing capabilities, enabling parallel processing chains and complex signal flows without cluttering the interface. This approach helps him focus on the music rather than getting bogged down by technical details.
The 2025 template also incorporates extensive use of Pro Tools’ automation and recall features, allowing Scheps to experiment freely and make precise adjustments that can be easily revisited. By designing his session as a flexible yet disciplined environment, Andrew Scheps demonstrates how Pro Tools can be used to balance technical control and creative spontaneity, making it an essential tool for professional mixers seeking an efficient and effective mixing template.
The Mind Behind the Mix
Andrew Scheps opens the video with the kind of deadpan humor that long-time Puremix fans love:
“Hi, I’m Andrew, and today we’re going to walk through my mix template. There’s no audio in it. So this will be… fun.”
That self-aware chuckle sums up Andrew Scheps’ world perfectly. This isn’t about showing off shiny plugins, it’s about showing how a master stays grounded in the process.
In an era when producers overload sessions with endless chains and color-coded chaos, Andrew Scheps’ approach feels almost rebellious: a template built on intent and organization, not on sonic gimmicks.
Every track, folder, and aux in his session has a purpose, and most of them start inactive.
He’s not chasing hype. He’s building a space where he can listen. Andrew Scheps wants to hear the music as it truly is before making any changes, ensuring his decisions are based on the actual sound and feel of the track. Andrew Scheps emphasizes listening to the full mix rather than solo instruments during mixing, as this approach helps maintain the overall balance and emotional impact of the music.
The template is designed to help keep the emotional impact present in the final mix, so the record feels complete and alive to the listener.
The point of Andrew Scheps’ approach is to focus on what truly matters: creating a mix that connects emotionally and leaves a lasting impression. Andrew Scheps states that the feeling of a mix is more important than its sound, emphasizing the emotional connection over technical perfection.
Industry Recognition
When it comes to shaping the sound of modern music, few names resonate in the audio world quite like Andrew Scheps. As the Grammy-winning mixer behind legendary records for Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jay-Z, Adele, and countless others, Andrew’s mixes have become the gold standard for producers and engineers everywhere. With over 30 years of experience in the music and recording industry, his expertise is unparalleled. The audio world pays attention to every move he makes, so when Andrew Scheps updates his mixing template, it’s not just news, it’s an event.
His exclusive Puremix video offers a rare opportunity to step inside his Pro Tools session and witness the exact system he uses to craft some of the biggest records in history. In this behind-the-scenes look, Andrew Scheps explains his mixing process with the same clarity and candor that have made his tutorials essential viewing for anyone serious about music production. Released in September 2025, this updated template provides a fresh perspective on his evolving techniques. Whether he’s breaking down his approach to the low end, demonstrating creative uses of plugins, or sharing tricks for getting vocals to sit just right, Andrew’s philosophy is always front and center: keep it simple, keep it musical, and always listen first.
Producers, mixers, and artists have adopted Andrew Scheps’ techniques, inspired by his ability to make every song sound amazing, whether it’s blasting through headphones or filling a stadium. His evolving drum and vocal chains, his mastery of Pro Tools, and his willingness to share the art behind the science have made him a true developer of modern mixing workflows. Each new template or video he releases is met with excitement, as the audio world knows it’s a chance to learn from a master who’s still pushing creative boundaries.
For those looking to level up their own mixes, Andrew Scheps’ tutorials and videos are more than just lessons, they’re a window into the mind of a guy who’s helped define the sound of a generation. His influence can be heard in studios around the world, and his passion for teaching ensures that the next wave of producers and engineers will be just as creative, thoughtful, and fearless. If you want to create records that stand the test of time, there’s no better place to start than by listening to Andrew Scheps, because when he speaks, the audio world listens.
Philosophy Over Plugins
Scheps has said it before: “Templates don’t make mixes, decisions do.” In this 2025 update, he’s taken that mantra to its purest form.
The first thing he tells you?
His template has no active processing. Everything that could color the sound (from compression to distortion) starts turned off.
Why?
Because he wants to mix with intent, not inertia. Scheps has also moved away from using a master bus compressor, opting instead for a limiter at the end of the chain to maintain loudness and control dynamics. The master mix bus processing typically features only widening, subtle EQ, and modern limiting, avoiding compressor usage. As a producer or mixer, making deliberate choices at every stage is crucial to ensure the final mix serves the vision of the project.
Parallel Passion and Controlled Chaos
When Andrew Scheps does dive into sound, it’s with the surgical curiosity of someone who’s spent decades at the console.
His drum architecture is a masterclass in both control and chaos. Each element (kick, snare, toms) is treated individually, with careful processing before being combined in the Drum Kit aux, then onward to his mix bus. This approach ensures that every element sits perfectly in the context of the full mix, and the same philosophy applies when balancing other instruments, such as guitar, to achieve clarity and cohesion.
But here’s where Andrew Scheps gets playful: his “Drum Parallels” folder.
Inside live three beloved personalities:
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PuigChild 670 (his long-time friend, the vintage glue)
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Empirical Labs Fatso (the punch and grit)
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SoundToys Devil-Loc (the mad scientist in the room)
Waves plugins, like the Scheps 73 EQ and preamp, are also key tools in his parallel processing chain, providing signature sound shaping.
Andrew Scheps laughs as he explains the Devil-Loc:
“If you’ve used it, you know, it absolutely destroys things. But sometimes that’s good.”
He even jokes about setting his sends to a mythical level of “-33.9 dB”.
“You’ll find that in your How to Mix textbook. There’s no such book, though. Maybe I’ll write it.”
It’s the kind of humor that only someone completely at ease with his craft can pull off. Underneath the laughs, though, is precision, everything in the session is designed to make him listen first, tweak later.
From Complexity to Clarity
What’s striking about Andrew Scheps’ updated template is what’s missing.
Every bit of processing, from compression to reverb, is deliberate. It’s a distillation of decades of workflow into something quietly radical:
Andrew Scheps sometimes admits he does miss the tactile, hands-on feel of working with analog consoles, but he also values the creative freedom and flexibility that comes from mixing entirely in the box. This shift has changed his approach, allowing for more experimentation and efficiency. By exclusively using digital plugins for mixing, Andrew Scheps demonstrates that high-quality results can be achieved without relying on traditional analog gear. Mixing in the box does not diminish the quality of mixes, as demonstrated by many successful engineers who prefer this method.
If you’d like to explore a contrasting approach that blends hardware and software, check out Hybrid Digital / Analog Mixing with Fab Dupont on Puremix.
A Grammy-winning engineer admitting that the best tool is clarity. The clarity of his template ensures that the final sound is produced to the highest standard, regardless of the methods used.
Andrew Scheps is not afraid to laugh at his own evolution, either. He admits to keeping old plugins “just because removing them isn’t a reason to open the template.” That small confession says a lot about creative psychology: progress doesn’t come from deleting the past, it comes from understanding what still serves you.
And sometimes, that means keeping a plugin you don’t even use anymore, like Pusher, which Andrew Scheps left in the session “because Tchad Blake used it once.”
There’s respect, humor, and humility in that, the quiet recognition that influence is part of the art.
The Human Side of a Technical Genius
Andrew Scheps doesn’t hide his quirks. He jokes about his OCD, about getting “sick of the same compressor,” and about how testing every plugin in his system would “take so long I’d die before I finished the mix.”
It’s funny, yes, but it’s also deeply human.
Behind the jokes, what emerges is a portrait of someone who has learned to trust his instincts over his tools. Andrew Scheps relies on his ears to evaluate his mixes, listening in different environments to make sure the sounds work together and the mix translates well. Checking mixes on different speaker setups is crucial for ensuring the mix translates well across various listening environments, according to Andrew Scheps. His template isn’t about showing perfection. It’s about creating a framework where intuition can thrive, letting the different sounds in a mix interact to create a compelling experience. He focuses on the stuff that gives a record its feel or vibe, beyond just the technical details.
That’s the real lesson.
Mixing as a Philosophy
In part 1, Andrew Scheps walks through his entire drum structure, explaining not just how things are routed, but why.
By part 2, that philosophy comes full circle, revealing:
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His complete vocal chain and routing flow
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His dual mix bus design (for both processed and clean signal paths)
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The different stages of the mixing process, from initial setup to creative work and final delivery
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His approach to mix referencing and print tracks, which keeps every revision organized and intentional, and how he prepares to deliver the final mix or stems to clients with professionalism and clarity
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The critical role of masters in achieving the final sound quality and polish expected in professional releases
