How to manage mixing an album: common patterns across tracks vs differences

How do you manage mixing albums? In an album, you usually have a common part across tracks, like maybe acoustic drums have a similar set of tracks and you might want to mix them a similar way. But there are some things that must be different. For example there might be different sets of microphones from different sessions and you can’t just have the same tracks.

What I did was first making a decent mix of one of the tracks, then saving it as a template, then using that template to build the remaining tracks. But then if I made an improvement that could be shared across all the tracks, I wouldn’t know how to propagate it to the remaining sessions.

I forgot to fill in the metadata in the session template so now I have to retype all the same stuff in every session. And if the artist decides they want to change one letter in the album name I have to go and and edit it in each session separately.

So generally the qestion is:

How do you avoid re-doing the same work for each track?

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I don’t have an answer for you, but your questions are very similar to some of my own challenges.

Like in your other thread, I’ll mention session snapshots. Depending on how much is shared between your songs, perhaps it’d help? (My use case is live classical recordings, so it’s a little easier to go that route due to all the shared tracks.) It seems like it could help with metadata, depending on which data you’re talking about.

But it doesn’t help with getting mix decisions to propagate, so I’ll be interested to hear what others suggest. I find myself duplicating my work once I’ve separated the pieces into snapshots.

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