Question on tracking a full band and saving sessions...

[Blake Long]

I've been tracking a lot of bands lately and I was just wondering how everyone else goes about dividing their songs and sessions and audio files and whatever.

Here's what I do- I make one session and track all the drums, guitars, vox, and bass. When that's done, I save the session a number times, depending how many songs we tracked, and name them by the song title. then I trim all of my audio files and run them through an audio suite plug that is in bypass. I then name them by the track name and delete all the used audio files. This way everything is nice and neat I didn't have to create new tracks for every song while I was doing all the tracking.

So am I going about this the hard way or is this pretty typical?

[ecalcagnino]

Hey there,

Maybe this isn't the best either but what I do is setup a session with the tracks setup the way I want with whatever plugs and everything. I save that as Mediocre Band Tracking Template.pts.

Once that is done, whenever we are ready to go for a new tune I just load the template, save it as Mediocre Song 01.pts and roll. Next tune, load the template, save as... ad nauseum.

Seems like it would save you a couple steps doing it this way. It works well for me.

Eric

[davemc]

I will track all to the same session.
Overdub and do the flat mix in the same session.

Once more important mixing changes start, I will split the sessions into one per song and remove(not delete the other songs and theier playlists from it).

I find it gets some unity with band recordings to start the mixes and eq's on one session first.
With overdubbing it saves opening and closing and watching plugins load.

I do have a session template, with eq's/comps assigned and hardware insterts loaded and inactive. I do try to have no presets loaded when I start tracking...

[O.G. Killa]

I don't think there is any one right or wrong way to do this. That's one of the beautiful things about PT and DAWs in general. There are always at least 2 or 3 if not more ways to go about your work.

Here's what I do since you asked...

Similar to Eric I create a Template file before the band gets there. Setup the I/O, track names, track order, etc...

Save the session and close it. Then click on the template session file and hit 'Command' + 'I'. There is a checkbox near the bottom labeled "Stationary Pad" (in OS9. Not sure if it's there in OSX). Check that. Now whenever you open that template file it will ask you to name it and give it a location to save it. Everytime we start a new song, I just double click the template, give it the name of the new song and which hard drive I'm saving it too and I'm ready to record again.

then I'll add/delete tracks that are song specific, like if one song uses Two different Keyboards but none of the others do. Create a Tempo Map or import any midi tracks if I need to. Stuff like that.

The reason I do this is because it will keep all the audio for that particular song together in it's own audio folder. If you record all the songs into the same session and then just do a 'save as' a bunch of times you aren't really moving the audio around. All the audio for all the songs are in one Audio Folder. Yes you rename all the regions and audio files by the name of the song, but then when you do overdubs they are still all going to be put in the one gigantic audio folder. Then you'll have to rename the overdubs and so on.

Also, it's easy for me to backup, archive and restore projects because each song is separate from the other.

Anyway, that's just how I do it and why. There isn't anything wrong with the way you are working. If it works for you then that's all that matters!!!

[Natural Sound]

Yes, Mr Killa hit it on the head.
If you do one big long session- even though you cut it up, all the audio is in the same folder. 6weeks later when the client wants to make one little change on only one of the songs and you've already deleted their project from your HD, you must now reimport all the songs just to work on the one song. (painfull when it's spread accross several Drives or DVD's or CD's)
Or worse, you get that call from another studio that's doing additional work on your client's project and they want to know which files go with which songs (gasp!)
By cutting, deleting,removing,save as-ing, you increase the possibility of make errors.
Templates seem a bit more logical,tidy, and much quicker. Plus with the new import data routines it's easy to move stuff from one project to another.

[Jeff D.]

I have yet another method: I create a session and we record the first song. When we're ready for the second song I create a new session and import the tracks from the first song into the new session, importing everything EXCEPT audio.

That way the previous song's fine tuning of headphone mix, reverb send levels, click track, etc. becomes the starting point for the next tune.

With the improved track import in PT6 this goes pretty fast.

Jeff D.