Looking for advise on final mix filing

Hi Sam,

You'll get quite a few different methods from people on this, and all of them will be pretty cool as the people that will chime in here usually do what they do for a reason. As for myself, I'm a "save prostitute". LOL! When I work on a project, with each major change, I'll save the new version with a different name. For example, say I record a little midi drum part to keep time, one guitar track, and some midi bass. When this is all done, I'll save this as "name of song scratch". From there, I'll keep working in that project, archive the midi drums and bass and play real drums and real bass. Then I'll record a few more solid guitars and maybe a vocal line or something.

When this is all done, I'll save this as "name of song FR" which means "full recording". The reason being, I want to keep my original idea but in case something gets corrupted along the way, I have that very first scratch template to go back to. As I go through all the motions of recording this song, there will be a few other save titles along the way. This way I can always revert back in the event something horrible happens.

When all is said and done and I have the mix exactly where I want it, I will save it as "name of song mix". If there are a few more versions of this mix, "name of song mix" 2, 3, 4 etc. When the final mix is ready to be mastered, and I know this is the one, "name of song final mix". Now, I'm not one that likes to master inside of the project I'm working on. The last thing I want to do is mess with a bunch of instruments all at once for the mastering stage. So I will export out at this point and save the wave file as "name of song final mix" and put it into a song folder I created. This is just the entire song exported out as a 2-track stereo file.

Next, I open the file up in an editing program to check for artifacts, pops, clicks, hums, killing dead space in the beginning and the end of the song etc. I'll also control all my peaks here and do my best to keep things as close to -3dB as possible and manually level the audio using my ears (riding the fader so to speak if need be) until I like what I hear. When this is done, I save it as "name of song PM" which stands for "Pre-Master". Again, if you look back over all these "name of song" saves, I can easily revert back to anything to make any changes I may need.

When the PM is done, it goes into Sonar for mastering. When this is done, I export out and save it as "name of song Master24". From there, I bring it into another editor where I do all my limiting, DC offset removal, convert sample rate and dithering. When I'm done here, the save is "name of song DZL 16". DZL is my studio name "DanziLand" and when I type that in, I know this is the final finished version. The "16" means it's been dithered from 24 bit to 16 bit and has also been sample rate converted from 48 to 44.1.

I know that's a lot of file saves and stuff, but like I said, it allows me to always go back and listen to something if I need to as well as recover from a possible disaster where I will have little to no work to do to get back to where I want to be. Of course during all of this each night, I auto-send my work to two back-up drives just for some extra protection. Anything that is mine that I'll save for life will also be burned to DVD's. All project files as well as all the saves. So this way, I'm totally covered, I never worry about things that may have gotten changed, settings that may have been altered or messed up...it's all there from the start to the end. I know it's a bit anal, but that's how *I* do it and Ive had excellent results this way. Best of luck and I hope this helps a bit. :)

-Danny

Danny - nice process. I'm spending time now thinking through my work-flows, setting up folders and processes and stuff. Sometimes I enjoy the workflow more than the final result.

Herb, I see what your saying.. The way you save the project is the way to save your final mix settings. So I think I'll file those "finished" project files in a special place so I know that if I mess with them I'll be changing the final mix of some song somewhere, (probably not on the radio or in anyone's iTunes list).

Thanks much,
Sam