Doing multiple-track projects

[Ermz]

Hey guys,

I'm just wondering what your preffered way of working is when dealing with albums or EP projects that have multiple tracks, some requiring quite different treatment from others...

Do you keep them all in the same DAW session or in seperate ones?

I've found keeping them in the same one makes it easier to do that whole 'blend one track into another' on the CD, but you tend to get pretty screwed if they need different treatment as you need to automate different plug-in settings, and that takes ages... this is my experience with Nuendo anyway.

 

[Zombietakeover]

good question wondering myself

 

[unsilpauly]

if its a quick demo or preproduction on a tight budget with only a few songs, ill sometimes have them in one project. its fast and easy, especially if everything was tracked in the same session(drums same session, guitar, etc.). if its an album or ep project ill have each song as its own project. once you get a bunch of songs in the same project, it gets pretty crazy like you said with the automation and cpu load. easier for me to split them up for sure. i suppose its personal preference though. interested to hear what other people do as well.

 

[JeffTD]

I've found keeping them in the same one makes it easier to do that whole 'blend one track into another' on the CD....

Actually, the easiest way to do that is just with a burning program that specializes in it - WaveBurner (mac only, but comes stock) sets up two "tracks", you put the tracks you want to burn, alternating 1st and 2nd track in WaveBurner, and then line them up/fade as you please.

 

[AStacy2]

Different sessions... for sure.


Wavelab has a feature like that as well to fade tracks into one another with track markers and such - it works great.

 

[carl@laruso.com]

definatly different sessions... DEFFO! You can get in to all manner of problems doing it in one.

The trick is to keep an eye on things for continuity - so it sounds like a record but to make sure you still mix each track accordingly.


C.

 

[Jackal_Strain]

Different sessions. No doubt.

 

[brandy]

Well,

that is not an easy question.

Everything has advantages and disatvantages.

In 9 out of 10 scenarios i have all songs in one project. I have no problem to deal with 150 tracks and heavy automation. I usually have crazy routings and dozends of groups etc, as well as i usually tweak some small "overal" details even in the end. For example +0,5db @ 1,3khz on the snare or stuff like that - it would drive me mad if i have to do that in 10 projects individual.

Having everything in one project can turn out very complicated and you have to be very organized to NOT mess it up. But when you do sessions with SAME drums, SAME guitars etc (typical metal/rock project) i am a lot faster then when having to safe/load mixer settings all the time.

I tend to track/edit drums in seperate projects because Nuendo slows down when the project contains thousands of edits.

I think if i would mix "outboard" i generally would have everything in seperate projects because you have the basic setup on the mixer.

brandy

 

[brandy]

P.S Tempotrack edits are a PITA when you have 10 songs in a row... so no change to "just move the song" when trying to create blending overs. I do that in the mastering stage later.

But because you might like to set everything up while clients are there and you are dealing with seperate projects or a project with a fixed tempotrack - here a little trick:

Just render a premix of the beginning of the "next" song, tweak the fade out/samples/sounds/outro/intro whatever up to taste and then import the rendered "next" song to a new track - now you can fiddle around until everything sounds cool. Then you can mute the imported track. Later in the mastering you can rebuild that setup very easy with the final-mixdowns.

 

[Deus.exe]

Why don't you do them in different projects and just import / export the mixer settings? This is absolutley no issue in Nuendo /Cubase.

 

[madbutcher]

I always did everything in one big session, until the last project where I encountered HUGE problems. Never again! 1 song per session only now.

 

[everybody's x]

Well,

that is not an easy question.

Everything has advantages and disatvantages.

In 9 out of 10 scenarios i have all songs in one project. I have no problem to deal with 150 tracks and heavy automation. I usually have crazy routings and dozends of groups etc, as well as i usually tweak some small "overal" details even in the end. For example +0,5db @ 1,3khz on the snare or stuff like that - it would drive me mad if i have to do that in 10 projects individual.

Having everything in one project can turn out very complicated and you have to be very organized to NOT mess it up. But when you do sessions with SAME drums, SAME guitars etc (typical metal/rock project) i am a lot faster then when having to safe/load mixer settings all the time.

I tend to track/edit drums in seperate projects because Nuendo slows down when the project contains thousands of edits.

I think if i would mix "outboard" i generally would have everything in seperate projects because you have the basic setup on the mixer.

brandy

That is exactly what I do

 

[Kazrog]

Why don't you do them in different projects and just imoprt / export the mixer settings? This is absolutley no issue in Nuendo /Cubase.

To my knowledge, you can't do this in Digital Performer, Logic, or Pro Tools. I ended up making printouts of screen grabs of my mixer in DP to transfer mix settings for our album. Very frustrating.

 

[musickey]

Why don't you do them in different projects and just imoprt / export the mixer settings? This is absolutley no issue in Nuendo /Cubase.

No shit! i couldnt imagine recording an album in one project

 

[JeffTD]

To my knowledge, you can't do this in Digital Performer, Logic, or Pro Tools. I ended up making printouts of screen grabs of my mixer in DP to transfer mix settings for our album. Very frustrating.

You can't save mixer settings in DP? I could've sworn you could.


But you can in Logic, actually. It's a weird way of doing it, as it exports it to the offline sessions from the online one, but you can do it. The more I use that program, the more illogical it becomes.

 

[Kazrog]

You can't save mixer settings in DP? I could've sworn you could.


But you can in Logic, actually. It's a weird way of doing it, as it exports it to the offline sessions from the online one, but you can do it. The more I use that program, the more illogical it becomes.

You can save infinite numbers of mixes inside one song, but you cannot export/import the mix settings into another song. You can turn a song into a template, and then copy and paste all your audio and midi into the new template, but that is also cumbersome and not quite the same concept.

Ultimately I think the workflow of all the current DAW software needs some major re-examination. None of the software is anywhere near where it needs to be from a UI perspective. I have some very specific ideas about this, but I should probably be getting paid for them. A product with my ideas would probably end up stealing significant market share from the Pro Tools regime... or it would get ignored because it's "not Pro Tools."

 

[Daunt]

I'm not a PT user, but I know that you can copy the mixer settings in it. It's called "Import Session Data" or something like that.

 

[Ermz]

It's not too hard to run a template project. Last project I did, I used my first reference track project and just imported the files for all subsequent projects in after it. So as well as having everything on its own session, you can always reference the new tracks back to the original to see how much uniformity you have. Worked for me. Also ended up doing the track-blend during mastering too.

Will stick to doing it that way! Cheers for all your input guys.

I suppose that means if you want to do any track blending on the CD, you have to co-ordinate yourself well with the mastering engineer.

 

[nuclearass]

I'm not a PT user, but I know that you can copy the mixer settings in it. It's called "Import Session Data" or something like that.

yes. but this feature still sucks in PT LE because it's limited. it imports the data as "new tracks", so you have to move the audio of the current session to those tracks... TDM version has the "full version". There you can replace the track data of the current session with the imported data and you can also choose seperately which settings to replace (volume/panning/plugins/automation/etc etc...).

In Logic 5.1.3 this was done really well IMO (assuming that the sessions have pretty much the same amount of tracks and they are in the same order). You just needed to open the "audio configuration" window, then ctrl + c . After that open the other session and its "audio configuration" window and press ctrl + v. voila. settings copied.