Ps I Still Love You

The Pro Tools Template That Changed How I Mixed Everything

Ps I Still Love You is a Pro Tools template file that Brian Gardner designed for mixing hip-hop, R&B, and pop tracks. It ships with a fully routed session: drums, bass, vocals, aux sends, bus processing, and a pre-configured mix bus chain. The whole thing is just a .ptx folder you drop into your Pro Tools templates directory and open every time you start a new project. Most people look at it and think it is a magic button. It is not. It is a starting point that saves you from rebuilding the same signal path thirty times. I stopped building templates from scratch around 2016 after realizing I was spending more time routing aux sends than actually mixing.

How Ps I Still Love You Actually Works

When you open the template, you get a pre-made bus architecture. There is a drum bus with compression, a vocal bus, an aux loop, and a master mix bus with multiband compression and saturation. Each track type has its own insert chain already loaded. You import your audio files, set fader levels, automate a few things, and you are already sitting inside a mix that sounds coherent. The template relies heavily on aux tracks and subgroup busses. Every drum mic routes to a drum group bus. Vocals route through a pre-delay send before hitting reverb. The master chain uses a specific order: clipper, EQ, multiband, saturation, and limiter. It is straightforward if you know how Pro Tools signal flow works. I first downloaded it from Reddit years ago when a mixing engineer named Kevin Grainger posted the original pack online. The file includes the standard instrument templates, the vocal chains, and the mix bus. It also comes with some factory plug-ins from Waves and other bundle packs that came bundled with certain Pro Tools packages back then.

Setting It Up Properly

You need Pro Tools installed and a folder named Templates inside yourDocuments/Studio One directory or wherever your home drive points. Copy the entire Ps I Still Love You folder there. Launch Pro Tools. Go to Setup > Session Settings. If you want to use the template exactly as intended, create a new session and select the template from the list. Here is what most people get wrong. They open it and immediately start laying down tracks without checking their sample rate or bit depth. The template was originally built for 44.1kHz and 32-bit float. If your project is running at 96kHz, everything still works but some of the latency compensation shifts slightly. Not enough to break anything, just enough to notice if you are comping vocals and flipping between sessions. Another thing nobody tells you about Ps I Still Love You is that the pre-fader and post-fader send states matter a lot. The template sets most effects to post-fader by default. If you want to automate reverb throws during a chorus lift, you switch those sends to pre-fader. Simple change, huge difference in how the mix moves.

Where Beginners Mess It Up

I have seen too many engineers skip the bus processing entirely. They mute the mix bus chain because they want a clean signal path. That defeats the point. The template is built around the idea that your mix bus does heavy lifting. You should leave the multiband and saturation active and work your faders against them, not around them. The other common mistake is ignoring the drum bus sidechain. The kick drum is sidechained into the bass bus in this template. It creates that pump effect that makes the low end tighter. If you remove it, your mix sounds loose. I learned this the hard way on a trap record where the sub bass was clashing with the 808. The sidechain was the only thing keeping them from fighting. There is also the issue of plug-in versions. The template uses specific versions of Waves plug-ins like the L1 Limiters, C6 Multiband, and the CLA Vocals bundle. If you do not have those exact versions installed, Pro Tools will ask you to replace them when you open the session. I ran into this once on a project where I opened an older template on a new install. The C6 plug-in version mismatch caused a CPU spike that made the session nearly unplayable. I had to go through every track manually and update the C6 instances. Took about twenty minutes.

What Makes It Different From a Stock Template

Pro Tools ships with its own templates. They are clean, simple, and mostly empty. The Ps I Still Love You template comes loaded with processing chains that reflect a specific sonic aesthetic. That aesthetic is modern pop and hip-hop: loud, punchy, saturated, and heavily compressed. It is not neutral. It is a sound. That is both the strength and the weakness. If your genre matches, you save thirty minutes on routing and another hour tweaking EQ curves. If you are mixing folk or classical music, the template fights you. The master bus multiband is set for aggressive low-end control. The drum bus compression is fast and squishy. Those settings will wreck a jazz piano session. Another counter-intuitive thing: the template encourages using less automation. Because the processing is already baked in, you often only need fader moves and volume automation rather than detailed EQ and compression curves on every track. That changes how you approach a mix. Instead of editing every parameter, you let the bus chains do the work and focus on arrangement balance.

A Specific Edge Case I Encountered

Last year I was working on a vocal-heavy R&B track where the lead vocal sat right in the same frequency range as the piano chords. The template's vocal bus EQ was cut around 2kHz to reduce harshness. My piano had a lot of energy there. The vocal disappeared in the mix even though the faders looked fine. The workaround was simple but not obvious if you do not know how the bus chains interact. I created a second aux track, routed the piano to it, and added a dynamic EQ that only carved 2kHz when the vocal was present. The template's existing send architecture made this easy because the aux routing was already set up. I did not have to redesign anything. I just layered on top of what was there. That took maybe five minutes once I understood the flow.

The Honest Limitations

This template is not suitable for everything. It is optimized for vocal-forward, rhythm-heavy music. Acoustic instruments, orchestral arrangements, and ambient soundscapes will sound wrong if you use it straight out of the box. The saturation and compression on the master bus add color that you cannot fully remove. It also locks you into a particular workflow. The drum channels are grouped and colored a certain way. If you prefer working with individual channel strips and no pre-routing, you will fight the template more than help from it. Some engineers strip it down to just the mix bus chain and rebuild the rest manually. That is valid, but then you are using half the template. There is also the licensing question. The template bundles Waves plug-ins that require iLok or plugin subscription access. If you do not have those, you will get errors on every insert slot. I had a client once who copied the template onto their system and could not open it because the C4 multiband and F6 multiband keys were not active on their iLok. We ended up replacing the Waves multibands with FabFilter Pro-MB and the template still worked fine. Just had to reroute the bus inserts.

Download and Access

The original Ps I Still Love You template is available through various music production communities and forums. Brian Gardner released the initial version publicly, and over the years several updated versions have circulated. You can find it by searching for the full name along with Pro Tools template. Some forums host direct download links, while others share it through file-sharing platforms. If you cannot find the original, there are fan-made recreations that replicate the bus chains and routing structure. They are not identical but they come close enough for most genres. I have used a recreation once when the original was corrupted and it worked well, though the EQ curves were slightly different on the vocal bus.

When to Use It and When to Walk Away

Use this template when you are starting a new mix in a genre that fits: hip-hop, pop, R&B, trap, dance-pop. It cuts setup time from roughly forty minutes down to maybe five. You skip the aux creation, the bus routing, the initial EQ placements, and the master chain design. You open the session, drag in your stems, and start mixing. Walk away from it when you are working on music that demands neutrality. Mastering sessions, live recording projects, acoustic ensemble pieces, and anything where tonal balance matters more than Loudness. Also avoid it if your studio setup relies on analog summing or outboard gear. The template is designed for in-the-box mixing and assumes all processing happens inside Pro Tools. I still use it today on most of my vocal-centric projects. I modify the drum bus compression settings per song and adjust the reverb pre-delays. The template gives me a foundation. I build on top of it, not inside it rigidly. That is the practical way to handle it.