Workflow for multiple songs in single recording session

Hey y’all.

Sorry if this is a redundant question (search didn’t find anything close that I saw) but I’d like to see opinions on how to handle this situation:
I frequently record 16 track live sessions with a bunch of musicians where I am also playing (so don’t have time to manage the recording while in progress). Basically, it is:press record and go for upwards of 6-7 hours. When it’s done, I have a single CPR file containing all of these songs. 30+ songs usually. Each song needs different mixing treatment/handling than the others - tunes and tweaks and such. This is where it gets difficult to manage since there’s not one mix for the whole project. What are some good suggestions for workflow here? Most of the songs are going to use a very similar starting point for the mix, but it would be more manageable to have each song in a separate CPR file. Or would it? The solution may be very obvious and/or simple and I’m missing it.

Thanks for any feedback/tips!

I often record that way in the studio if I have a band in who want to cover a lot of ground fast.

There are plusses and minuses. It’s fast to set up subsequent mixes after the first song, but I find the best way to handle it after that is to save each song under its own .cpr name. That means you’re back to opening and closing projects once the mixing starts, but that’s no worse than starting off with each song as a separate .cpr.

You can delete the other songs in each project but of course DON’T EMPTY THE TRASH!! (Or at least, use "Remove form Pool)

Sadly, I don’t think there -is- a good all-purpose answer. The problem, having fought with this many times, is that you get 4 songs into such a project, with a template that you intend to use for all songs to have a cohesive sound and then on song 5 discover a different way of doing things that you realise should be applied to all songs in the batch. OOPS.

OR, you can go old school and just decide that you’re going to stick with your original template come heck or high water… hey it worked for Elvis, right? Limitations are good, right?

I drool over video/photo editing software which have dynamic presets. ie… you create FX/layer presets that you can update and they auto-magically migrate to all documents that utilise them. I get hot just thinking about it. :smiley:





I would look at arrangertrack and make different versions of the project based on timespan.
Then you can save these as separate projects if you like.

So create an arranger track, define ranges as full songs - and off you go.
Then you get full control of each song separately if that is what you want.

Thanks y’all. The Arranger track sounds interesting and of course it goes just like suntower said: get to the 5th song and realize that you want to change something on the previous four. LOL. It is a very difficult workflow and I appreciate any and all suggestions and comments. Thanks!

Here’s what I do when I need to do a unique mix for each song - similar to ffg.

  • I record onto a dedicated drive for recording sessions and I use one song template for the entire session. I back up often using a program called SyncTwoFolders (a really great shareware app, simple and fast incremental backups).

  • after the recording session I do a “save as” for each song on the recording drive.

  • then I open each song, delete everything except the tracks I need and then I export that song with only referenced files to a drive dedicated to mixing. Now you have a clean, autonomous project and don’t have to worry about managing the pool with all the other song files.