Getting started on lengthy live recordings. A Good Practice to follow
Mine paid off just a second ago.
So you have invested all that time getting everyone together, setting up the band, mic'ing everything, doing what spillage/bleed control you can manage, getting all the mic cables protected, setting up the DAW, Interfaces and mixing boards, submixed what you couldnt cram all into the interface and got all those levels good so that take will sound mixed fairly well. Then you power up the computer and start killing anything running outside of Sonar and get your template loaded and ready to hit [RECORD]. All goes well throughtout the entire night of recording with plenty of pauses and saves. Come back the next day to load it all up and get back to the mixing desk and start the real work.
My very first move is to create a couple of MASTER Projects (Emergency Backup Copies) from what was recorded so I have a safety net of un-touched backups ready on different storage devices. I then start a new Project and before I do anything I find the beginning of each song and insert a Marker and title it so I can jump directly to the song when I break them out into individual projects. I do this by saving that initial project, close out and reopen it, delete everything that is not part of the song Im going to work on then hit [SAVE AS] and title it to the name of the song. With that done its close out time again and then reopen the Song Project. Then I start to break out the individual tracks and analyze what I would like to try to do with each one depending on the song, then start cutting out any unwanted bleed/spillage, any silent parts, etc...Then start inserting plugs as needed for each Track or Buss. And so on the project goes......
Tonight in all the messing about I worked for quite sometime forgetting that I was on one of my master tracks and kept going like it was one of the song Projects. Time came to take a break for a bit so I hit save and went about relaxing. After returning I reopened the Master project to see how many more songs I had to work on and this is when I was thankful for the Master Backup Project seeing that I deleted all the songs off the master project except for the one I had previously been working.
Long story short-Keep a few Master Projects saved on different drives so you dont have to ask the band to do an entire redo of the recording session.
