Best way to handle multiple takes of entire songs.

Hi,
  I'm recording my full band this weekend. I haven't recorded a full band at once in a long time. 
  My question is, if we do multiple full takes of the same song, should I use a single project file and use the take lanes function, or is it better to do a separate project file for each take?
 We are not going play to a click track, so the takes won't line up.  I'm curious if you can "select all" in a project and ctrl,click on a take lane and have every track in the project switch to that take.
  Thanks 

I would think it would matter more what your workflow is for editing and mixing.
 
If you want to use the lead guitar track from the 3rd take and the lead vocal track from the 2nd take and the drums from the 1st take, then you're much better off using 1 project and just putting everything in take lanes.
 
if you want to choose one project as a whole over another to do your editing and not use takes from different instruments then put them in separate projects.

Thanks guys,
  I plan on taking the best entire take from each song and using that as the foundation. 
I'm leaning toward Beepster's idea. I'm going to be the guitarist and engineer at the same time. 
The less I need to do between takes, the better. 
  I'm so psyched about this project. For years I've been writing guitar parts to a click and then overdubbing the other parts. I want this project to have that cool, tight, musicians feeding off each other vibe.
  It's the first time I'm running 16 tracks at a time in my home studio. There's a lot of prep time involved, but it's a labor of love. 

joeb1cannoli
Hi,
  I'm recording my full band this weekend. I haven't recorded a full band at once in a long time. 
  My question is, if we do multiple full takes of the same song, should I use a single project file and use the take lanes function, or is it better to do a separate project file for each take?
 We are not going play to a click track, so the takes won't line up.  I'm curious if you can "select all" in a project and ctrl,click on a take lane and have every track in the project switch to that take.
  Thanks 

Make a project template for your band. If you are diciplined you can make track templates for each instrument as well.

In it's current state I personally can't get my head around takelanes, I like the idea but it's not good enough yet, it's real purpose is for comping multiple takes on the same track (overdubs on one song).

I do this at least once a week these days with my "mobile studio".  Here are a few suggestions:

• Use one project for all your takes
• Store the takes "linearly", one after another in the project
• Use markers to delineate the start of each take
• Use headphones to get a rough mix of your levels before you initially start
• Arm only the tracks that you need to record before you initially start and leave them armed
• If it's necessary to enable/disable arm (or input echo) for different takes, use groups
• Make sure you let the band know when you are starting to record before each take
• Make sure to let things "ring-out" before stopping after each take
• Use a remote keyboard for starting and stopping the transport (I use a Frontier Tranzport but a remote keyboard will work too)
• Periodically do a "Save" during the session

Hope this helps,
Paul

joeb1cannoli
 I appreciate everyone's input. It looks like I'm going the one long project route. 
 Thanks for pointing out what a laborious day I'm gonna have. Being of Italian heritage,I'm gonna have to feed them all too. It's a good thing we love this stuff so much.   

That is actually a great idea. The hardest part of recording a lot of the time is the bloody musicians and keeping them around, happy and focused.
 
They start getting hungry or bored or (if you have drunks/drug weirdos in the band) jonesing one (or all) of them try to scurry off to do whatever. Then you have down time, the other members start getting their own little itches, someone else wanders off and the original person who left comes back but you still can't do anything because now someone ELSE is gone. Even if it's 10-15 minutes here, there or everywhere you can lose half a day easily.
 
A ton of finger food, sandwiches and maybe a bigger meal later on (nothing too heavy so everyone gets burnt out wants to take a nap), a steady stream of coffee/tea/pop/juice, a fridge full of beer (but no hard stuff and no GUZZLING), a baggie of chronic for those who partake and working crapper leaves no real excuse for anyone to bail.
 
Really to me getting everything set up and ready to go was a huge pain because I ran other bands out of my room so I could not leave things set up. If I did all that work setting up (and then tearing down) and ended up only getting a few good tracks down because people were constantly wandering off or moaning it would really tick me off.
 
It's like all of a sudden everyone's a rock star and need to be pampered lest you lose them to distractions.
 
Me? I just needed a bag of tall boys, a full pack of smokes and I could go all day. The music was my food. If anything eating would burn me out.
 
I'm a spazz though.

Doktor Avalanche
 
I feel like I could have written this myself...  This is exactly right.
The only thing I would add is getting them to turn up on time is more or less completely impossible. If you tell them to turn up at midday, they will all start piling in around 2pm and recording will start at 3pm, that's if they haven't double booked an appointment with the dentist.

That's why on recording day I would aim for a sunday (or whenever nobody was at their jobs) and depending on the band try to "start" around 10am or as early as I could push them into. The first hour is usually totally lost to people just showing up. The next hour would be everyone mucking around, which is fine... get your coffees, shoot the pizz and I could interject little bits of stuff to individual members or the group as a whole like "I want to get this this and this done today" and sidebars like "okay so I want you to try this when I'm doing this" and maybe little small noodle sessions to work out specific parts while others were doing their own thing. Also do little mic level checks. Essentially as everyone's having a laff I'd zip around sorting things out with everyone and the gear.
 
Then a clap of the hands, everyone with their rig on and ready to go and you can get a good hour or so session in before everyone wants to take a break. Take 30, everyone does their nature calls, lines up a few more beverages or has a snack, more sidebars for things to be done, double check levels and back at it.
 
Rinse repeat until people start having to leave. Then I'd usually hang on to whoever was sticking around for as long as possible to work on other stuff for next time or do any overdubs or just hang out.
 
I kind of really enjoyed that life and want it again but more structured/less frantic on my end. The thing with my rooms was everything always had to be ripped down quickly, they weren't the greatest set up gear/room sound-wise, I didn't really know WTF I was doing (as far as recording stuff) and I always had to cram it in when I wasn't working (which was a LOT).
 
Now that I've had about five years off of all that to think, learn and calm the frack down I think I could run a really epic demo studio. That's one of my goals now. Back to what I was doing before but better and without being completely tied to daytime obligations.
 
Meh... may never happen but it's a nice thought.

Sanderxpander
Seriously, are these professionals we're talking about? If so I'm pretty happy with the ones I work with!

Nope.... "rockstars" 

Sanderxpander
It sounds to me like you guys need to hire me :p
I show up on time and am always prepared, bring all my own gear down to good quality DIs and my own coffee and lunch.

Seriously, are these professionals we're talking about? If so I'm pretty happy with the ones I work with!

Punkers, metalheads and various other miscreants.
 
I did work with semi casual "pros" near the end and it certainly made things easier but they were very busy people so I only really had access to them on occasion. Loved that particular band. Well I loved all the bands but they were, in general, the easiest to work with.
 
The punk stuff however really was my most important and lasting musical contribution to the world as of this writing. I wasn't even the button pusher in that act though and it was still a bear to deal with.

 Thankfully it's my own band and we're all seasoned professionals. 
 Kinda ironic Beepster, It's scheduled for 10:00 Sunday morning. 
   I'm amazed at how time consuming it is setting up to record 16 tracks at once. It's been pretty tedious just setting up the audio interface routing.
     I have an old Furman HDS6 headphone distribution system that I'm setting up so we can have separate mixes. Anyone familiar with the Focusrite pro40 software knows how mind numbing that can be.
  Then it's off to setup a template in Sonar. I hope one of the Sonar updates includes renaming the audio interface input names. 
   The upside is, once I get it all done and save the templates, I'll never have to do it again.
 
   Thanks again to everyone for your help. This forum is the best.