Right. So here's what the process looks like for me:

1) Listen to song. Determine where the pigfucks are going to be.

2) Open pro tools session. Build out about twelve busses and move your insert effects to bus effects. Replace janky effects with better effects.

3) Play whackamole lining up everyone else's tracks. Because BC rocks audacity he's kind of helpless to make this easy; the first thing I do is import his whole track and his naked track, solo them and try and get them lined up. This means listening to flanging and moving things literally sample by sample. As that rarely works I give up and move them 64th note by 64th note until I no longer hear delay. Then I solo your main track and his main track and both of BC's tracks by the same amount so I don't hear flanging anymore again. Then I mute both main tracks and hope the bass lines up with your stuff. Which, since BC does a lot of counterbeat stuff, doesn't always.

4) Start mixing.

Of the 3.5 hours spent, 45 minutes were Step 4. Probably 30 were spent trying to find a tempo whereby I could actually make cuts and edits and have them on the grid and failing. Probably 45 were spent trying to find an arpeggio that didn't emphasize how badly the timing drifts.

So yeah, it's a drag. And yeah - the bass is probably outta whack. The problem is, it's in whack in one place and outta whack in other places and again, without getting all liquid audio on it, that's what it's gonna be.

QUESTION: Have you built out a template for this? Or do you just sorta rock on it however you feel like? 'cuz empty tracks beat the hell out of random tracks.