Wondering how you more experienced types manage your tracks on larger projects.
Not being the greatest guitarist on earth, I have to do quite a few takes of each section of a song for the harder stuff to get it right. 3/4 of the way thru a song project, along with an already-in-place 30 tracks of drums, bass and vocals, I may lay down 10 takes for each guitar song section for one type of guitar, then later do the same for another type. 
So I may add 40 - 50 takes (partial tracks) for one type of guitar to get exactly what I finally want for the whole song, and perhaps string them together (bounce it) down to one or two tracks. 
How do you go about managing all these tracks ?  Do you throw away all the tracks you don't want initially and just keep the best one? Do you keep all of them on this project version and save to a new project version, with only the final bounced guitar track added to the already-in-place 30 tracks?
Anyways, any light you can shed on "how to do it right" would be appreciated.
Also wondering about the number of tracks that Sonar and my system can be happy with at any given time...  most of the "unused" takes are muted of course, but still show up on the display.

Hi Chevy,
 
No real right or wrong. A lot depends on your workflow and how much your system can handle. You could try some of the following to help clean things up a little.
 
Create a separate track and bounce edited parts to it so you have 1 take of each instrument to mix.  You can archive the unused takes and create a folder and place them there and collapse the view of the folder so it doesn't take up too much space. but you'll have the other takes available if you decide you want to use them. Just un-archive and you are good to go. Archiving will also lighten the load on the CPU as they are not processed.
 
Use the Track Manager to adjust the view so it's not as cluttered.
 
Create a folder and place relavent takes etc in it, then collapse the folder. Muting the folder will mute all the tracks in it also.
 
Try using the comping feature. You can do multiple passes and edit each part. There is a video on this in Cake TV. I use this often for more difficult parts or when I want to try a differrent approach for each pass. You can combine parts from different passes or just choose the one you like best.
 
Just a few ideas off the top of my head. Hope this helps and Happy Recording!
 
Yours in Music
Rip
 
 

Ripwolf is right, there is no right or wrong way, but I hear your question.
Myself, I often find that after a long recording session I have sometimes 20 to 30 takes of piano, or vocal, parts and wonder how I'm going to manage it all. Most of the time I'll 'comp' the best takes, bounce them to a new track and hide the rest. Then, if the project is getting too large, I'll 'save as' to a new project with only the acceptable takes.
I always keep all the takes, HDD space is fairly cheap these days and I have no qualms about keeping everything I've done.
My only advice is to make sure everything is clearly labeled so it's easy to find when and if you need it again. And make sure it's backed up, and backed up again.

For me:

• If a take is clearly flawed, delete it straight away. Exceptions are where I know I'll be comping a solo or vocal line together and might want to keep the best bits.
• Use layers/take lanes for takes. One track per take becomes a mess very quickly. With layers I would rebuild them often so that there is rarely more than a single-digit number of layers available. (With take lanes, this functionality still exists but it's hidden somewhere and I can never find it.) The fact that there may be 40 or 50 clips for an instrument in the project doesn't matter - there would still only be 1 track to manage.
• I piece together the full track by auditioning each take, keeping the best one and deleting the rest. Sometimes there is a 2nd best one that is significantly different (eg. a different melody) so I just mute that and keep it for later, or move it to an archived track for future consideration. I crossfade the adjacent best takes together, so it plays back as one contiguous take.
• I don't bother bouncing the final comped version to a new track. There doesn't seem much point. If the layers/take lanes are collapsed, it looks much like a single file and sounds exactly like one too. I have no attachment to the traditional way of working so I like to have the fine control over clips right up to mastering time.

You can also put track groups into Track Folders, and collapse them to save on how many tracks are showing at any one time, and then expand any of those track folders as needed to edit or view tracks within them.
 
Bob Bone
 

Folders and Lanes +1. If it's one part, I use lanes and then use either the comping tool or manually edit them together into one part using the Mute Tool.
 
If you want to keep the discards you can move them to a "GTR 3 - Unused" folder (for example) and then archive it (which totally pulls it out of CPU usage) and hide it. Or just move it to the bottom of the stack.
 

Thanks for the tips, guys...   I haven't been using take lanes due to a problem I ran into with Melodyne long ago:   when I used take lanes, Sonar would just flatten the waveform (null audio) when I tried to bounce the Melodyne'd take (the Region FX).  Took a long time to figure that that was the problem, and haven't used it since. But, that bug was never explained to me by  Melodyne support, and I wasn't sure if it was just on that project or not. 
Question:  did anyone else experience similar issues with Melodyne and take lanes?
 
So, it now seems so logical to use take lanes, and only ever have "one track" visible for, say, bass guitar. Many many takes perhaps, but only one track to manage. Plus the tools for comping there are great..., saw that video. 
Question:  I don't see an Archive feature for each individual take lane, though...  so does that mean the CPU will have all these tracks as a processor load, even if muted?

There's not going to be any extra processor load to have extra take lanes, but there could be extra disc access to read those clips (in case you wanted to unmute them during playback).
 
If disk access time is a problem for you then a workaround is to move the muted clips to a backup track and archive that.