Project Organisation

[JD01]

Just wondering how everyone else does it really. Any of you similar to me? Anyone do anything wildly differently? Anyone got any tips on how you think I could do things better.

Basically, Track 1 is my room 'verb - this is set 100% wet, 0% dry. Its also hi-passed at over 200hz - I don't want anything really deep getting much verb.
Track 2 is my drum buss - the various kit parts in here all have a send to the room 'verb
Then I have my bass - this is on its own, its not sent to reverb.
Then I have my master guitar buss - I call this my "all guitars meter" there's no effects on this - its just a way of me monitoring the guitar levels as a whole so I can see volume jumps between sections of a song. Its basically completely passive.
Within this I have all the sub-busses for the different guitar parts.
The Buss tracks are just for levelling and EQing as a whole, balancing the levels of the various guitar tracks against eachother - when I have them right I can balance them against the bass and the drums using the "All Guitars Meter"
The panning and individual levels of each track are set on the tracks themselves as you can see. Also, each track has a send of a varying amount to Track 1 - the room verb.

I do the same for vocals, there's an "All Vox Meter" with similar sub-busses. There's just no vocals on this track yet!

What do you do?

Project Organisation.JPG

A complex vocal buss would look like this:

Vocal Buss.JPG

[WhiskeyJack]

Found the guitar player.

Truthfully i sort of do it roughly the same except my drums are at the bottom / end and i try to make use of colors. I'll take a snap when i get a break here.

[JD01]

Found the guitar player.

Truthfully i sort of do it roughly the same except my drums are at the bottom / end and i try to make use of colors. I'll take a snap when i get a break here.

Cool. I just thought of this cos I just sent a whole project to [mention]liv_rong[/mention]. Was thinking that maybe he opened it and thought "What the fuck is this fiasco!?!"

[musicturtle]

Wow that is a lot of stuff going on there.

I guess cutting my teeth on 4 and 8 track magnetic tape has me more geared towards a simpler approach.

Especially with the vocals. I usually do 3 takes or so through the whole song comp a final from that.

I do that with lead and backing tracks.

Although Cubase does make that process pretty simple with something they call Lanes for repeated takes.

[liv_rong]

It looked "normal" to me. I didnt really think too much about it honestly, I don't get into the weeds much with this. Maybe I should a little though.

I dont use any folders or route anything, I should at least create the folder for my drums so I can adjust the volume of all those tracks at once. All my effects are on each track. I know its not the "right" way but I am lazy and stuck in my ways. Like the overheads can be routed a compressor. I usually copy my snare and add different plugins and mix it differently and I know there is some way to route the main snare to get the same results. But again, I am lazy.

I, like [mention]WhiskeyJack[/mention], like colors.

Here is a screen shot of the last thing I posted here, the cover of a cover with the heavy sounding guitars.

[JD01]

Wow. Not having any subfolders at all would destroy my OCD!

[SweetDan]

That's a "yes" for colors (see an older thread), and folders usually if I've got more than 2 of a given instrument (background vocals are a good case for that) or multiple mics on things (like drums). I don't know if Studio One actually does folders/sub-folders, or just lets you get 1 level deep....

[Tadpui]

I still haven't gotten into doing colors. I probably should, because as much as I use folders, I still lose track of what's a parent and what's a child in the mixer view in Reaper.

At what point in your project do you guys start introducing colors? Right when you create the track, or once you sit down to start mixing it?

[SweetDan]

I've gotten in the habit of picking the color on a track when I first add it to the recording session. Since I'm primarily recording myself and on my own, it's one track (or one group of related tracks, like drums) at a time anyway, I'm not really wasting anybody's time if I take a few extra seconds to set the color of the track. It may be specific to my DAW of choice (Studio One), but I also have to choose other track parameters: audio/midi/automation? interface channel? mono/stereo?

Having the colors there as I work through both tracking and mixing just feels right for me at this point. [mention]Tadpui[/mention], you work in IT, right? (I do.) Well, if I pull up an old session from when I was first getting into using a DAW and see that I didn't used to assign the colors, it just feels wrong, like if I opened the source code for some program in Notepad and not an editor or IDE that has syntax highlighting.

[JD01]

I still lose track of what's a parent and what's a child in the mixer view in Reaper.

Uh... I'm always fucking this up and I hadn't thought of colours.
I knew I'd learn something from this.

[Greg_L]

Found the guitar player.

[liv_rong]

At what point in your project do you guys start introducing colors? Right when you create the track, or once you sit down to start mixing it?

I have a template saved with all my tracks; click, guitar, bass and each drum track. If I add more I’ll just give it a new color but I keep the guitars the same color as long as it’s the same part. But once I add a second guitar part I’ll give it a new color but in the same shade as the other guitars. So it’s basically set it once and done for me.

[WhiskeyJack]

There is my latest and greatest workflow from the last project. My guitars are broken down by Microphone. I picked the colors for the left and right guitars as the nautical port & starboard combo. So witty i know. Other than that the colors have no meaning.

Like [mention]liv_rong[/mention] i have a basic template set up with guitars bass vocals and drums that are all preassigned and as i add stuff or random wongo things like guitar accents solos or vocal thingies the tracks/colors/icons get added as well.

My work flow could be way better but this works for now.

[Greg_L]

Man you guys use a lot of tracks!

[JD01]

Fuck a duck! WJ, No wonder it takes you ages to complete a project.

[WhiskeyJack]

[mention]JD01[/mention] those guitars are all mics on the same cab. One performance and whatever over dubs. Same with bass. I dont do layers of different perfromances. Just lots of mics on one thing.

[mention]Greg_L[/mention] yes it seems like a lot but that is as stripped down as i can get. I dont know any other way to get good gang vocals when it is just me. Hahah

[paulman]

I have nothing to contribute as far as organization goes. My dumb ass tries to reinvent the wheel every time I record a song. Just like when I was designing websites for a little while, I tend to do things in a way that would be very difficult for someone else to take over if I sent it to them, and not a walk in the park for me either. My recording methods and my HTML/CSS coding could be case studies in ADD. I'm hoping I can pick up some tips from you guys in this thread.

[vomitHatSteve]

When I'm tracking, a project can be any kind of disorganized shenanigans. When it's time to mix, I render everything down to mono stems then organize them in a new project (usually) as follows

1 - Master drum bus - has a (disabled) transient controller. Towards the end of the project, I'll enable it for the "drums magically sound better" effect
Inside the MDB there is...
one track for every single channel I can get out of the VSTi - much like JD's setup but with more separation
One track for miscellaneous crash samples for emphasis
One track with fuzz that the kick and snare are routed to

2 - randomized drums - stereo channel. No effects. The only thing I do to this is raise or lower the volume. Anything else needs to be fixed in the programming

3 - randomized synths - same as the rand drums

4 - Bass bus - contains usually 4 distinct bass chains that are blended and panned to taste

5 - Lead vox bus - contains the raw track, a 'verb track, and a compressed track

6 - supplemental lead vox - contains 2 alternate takes of the lead vox, on left one right. Automated on and off to emphasize lead

7 - rhythm guitar bus - contains 2 takes, hard panned, usually routed through 2 chains (one clean, one distorted) blended to taste

8 - Abomination 1 bus - contains 2 takes, hard panned, routed through 3 chains (bass, guitar strings tone 1, guitar strings tone 2)

9 - abomination 2 bus - contains 2 takes, hard panned, routed through 2 chains (both distorted)

10 - lead guitar bus - usually 2 takes of each part, hard panned

11 - BGVox bus - usually no fewer than 3 separate parts, 2 takes each.

And this is why I sometimes push 100 tracks! I have a system. An incoherent system, but a system nonetheless.

[rayc]

Interesting. I don't use folders but I do create buses. When I've sorted the mix out pretty well I then automate the buses, which by then I've migrated to the top & left, to get a final mix sorted.
IF I've using lots of tracks, as in Joan of Arc, I'll use the freeze function to combine everything that went to each bus and then update the project as just those tracks for final mixing.
THIS is what it looks like before I freeze...

Tracks ALL.png

FULL MXR.png

Afterward it's down to just the buses so about 5 tracks.

[SweetDan]

Guys, we're going backwards...





(Not that I mind; I love the sound of orchestral movie scores, and I play string bass in a local community orchestra. The rest of this season is cancelled due to the coronavirus, of course...)