5.1 Surround Sound Mixing
This trimester for my solo major project I had to complete a 5.1 surround sound mix in the C24 at SAE. I had never done anything like this before so it was a new experience, I was apprehensive about doing it on my own so I asked my class mate Lucy for some help setting up and she was happy to oblige in return for some help setting up her mastering session. There are a few things you must do before you can start mixing, and it is important that you at least have a rough mix done before you get in there, luckily I had a finished mix to work with so all I had to worry about was panning, divergence and my master level.

When setting up you must first position the monitors in the correct location around you, this is not difficult as the Center, front right, front left and the Sub maintain their position, it’s the Left Surround and Right Surround speakers that must be positioned. Once that has been done it’s time to calibrate the speakers. Set the SPL meter to dbc and set the Lo to Slow. now solo each monitor one at a time and calibrate each one to around -79 db, and for the sub set it to around -85 db. Once you have done this the speakers will be calibrated correctly.
Open up a new session in Pro Tools selecting a 5.1 session type and make sure the sample rate and bit depth are the same as the previously prepared mix. Import the session data into the 5.1 session, delete your stereo master and add a 5.1 master track and you’re ready to go.
The song I was working on was perfect for a 5.1 mix because it had heaps of different guitar tracks of overdubs and ambiences. It wasn’t like a typical rock song session with one guitar track going the whole way from beginning to end, so it was primed and ready to be panned in all different directions. I usually work with drum bus compression and because all of my channels were going to a stereo auxilery track I couldn’t individually pan them without taking them out of the bus, so I decided to pan them to the back left and right speakers, because I wanted to focus on the guitars using up the space I had in the other monitors.

I also used some automation on the divergence of one of the guitar tracks, at one point a guitar that had been panned right was the only track playing while everything else had stopped, so i automated it to center at this point. I personally am not a huge fan of panned guitars when they’re solo’d in the mix, I find it hard to enjoy when i’m focused on what my right ear can hear but my left can’t or vice versa. After I was finished mixing I made sure the peaks hit no higher than -13db and my mix was complete.