I have recently recorded with my band. To quickly summarise, there are ten Cubase projects, one for each song. Each track has 10 or so tracks for drums, six bass guitar takes and 12 guitar channels (I’m still yet to track vocals).
I have started mixing the first song and I have it how I want it. I have all the plugins set, my group tracks going and everything is great.
Now for every song, every instrument was recorded at the same time, take by take. So the original sources are all equal sounding respectively between the projects. So for example, when I recorded a rhythm guitar, I kept the same set up and settings and opened each project one-by-one to do the recordings.
What I want to do is make the project I have already mixed my overall master. I’d then like to import the song data into this project from each of the other projects so the mix that I have done on this master is the same for all the rest. It really has no differences to do. So for example, on the channel I’m using for my snare, I want the snare channel to appear after this. That is, transplant all the data from this project into my new master project. Thankfully I kept all channel names the same in each project so I know what can go where.
The only ways I can figure out in doing this have their share of problems. They are:
- Copy and paste between the projects: There are different tempos on each track; all of the song data seems to move in bad ways and everything is out of time. Even the original master track appears to go weird.
- Waving down each individual track in my other projects and manually importing the waves one-by-one. This is time consuming and not ideal as it doesn’t have all the separate takes on each channel nicely split up. For example, one of my guitar tracks is just a few clean guitar sections which are nicely split up; they would instead appear as one massive wav file making it difficult to find those again.
- The only other alternative is to lay each project out the same way, use some track presets and apply the same to every project. Again this is time consuming and it means any single change I make, I now need to do ten times. That’s a bit of a pain…
So lesson learned, I should have just used one project for the entire recording. We’ll put that down to “Advice I didn’t listen to!”. But that doesn’t help me now. So my questions are:
- Is there an easier way to do what I want to do? I’m currently on Cubase 7 Artist edition.
- If not, does Cubase 9 Pro do this easily? I have no problem upgrading if it solves the issue as there’s a few other features in C9Pro that I would find useful.
Thanks in advance. While I’m sure there’s a few good reasons for keeping the project separate, I’d suffix by saying I’m mixing a five piece metal band; there really isn’t much variance in the instruments so far as they are all the rhythm pieces. It wouldn’t be desirable anyway for anything to be different. Vocal takes and guitar solos I will most likely keep separate but they have not been recorded yet anyway.