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

Getting Stuff Done How do I .... ?
#1

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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#2

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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#3

Hey,

I love questions like this. :slight_smile:

For context, I am currently editing and mixing a full-length (±75min) album of recorded physical instruments (-no midi use), -e.g. a drum-set, multiple guitars (-both electric and acoustic), bass, piano, organ, violin, vocals of all kinds (-large choir-like sections, singing, screaming), samples (-of different people talking, ‘nature’, etc.), –all of which change dramatically from song to song.

Now, to answer your question(s), it really depends on:

  1. What is the intended variety/diversity of the album in terms of layering, instrumentation, etc.?
  2. And are you writing songs first, then turning to Ardour to record them? -Or are you using Ardour as a ‘playground’ to create the foundation of songs directly into it?

In my specific case, I already had ±90% of the recorded material ready to go (-via another program from about a decade ago), and thus the track (and bus) structure was already more-or-less implied, –I just had to painstakingly create each routing structure in Ardour accordingly. So for me, really the only immediately-shareable thing (-from song to song I mean) was the drum-set track and bus organization, which leads me to…

In a nutshell, if the intended diversity throughout the album you’re working on is fairly limited, then yes, making and reusing a Session Template is one reasonable starting point. However, as the potential song/instrumentation variety increases, I’d suggest thinking more about what chunks (-of tracks/buses) could be shared instead, then taking advantage of Ardour’s built-in "Session → Import Mixer Strips…" feature (~thanks again, @x42).

For example, I created a project that I saved as “TGK Drumset Template 1” where I carefully refined exactly how I’d like my drum-set routing to be (-which I think has something like ±15 tracks/buses in it). From there, I then went into each relevant project and used the Import Mixer Strips… feature to copy just those routes into each.

Similarly, you could do the same for certain common guitar setups, vocal routing, etc…

Some degree of manual effort will be required for any desired, universal change, yes, and this just comes with ‘the territory’ of album work…

So again, say you’re mixing song A and you’ve added just a new, parallel compression bus to your drums that you’d like to also now use in songs B and C. As before, just open projects B and C and use Import Mixer Strips…, selecting just the new bus you’d like to add (-then proceed to update its direct connections and/or Aux Sends as required). Which leads me to pretty much the ‘the main takeaway’ here…

All in all, no matter what workflow you arrive at over the years, you will always be left with a hefty amount of manual labor all throughout the process. -And the more ‘interesting’/diverse the album you’re working-on gets, the less you will be able to ‘get around’ this fact. :woozy_face: :grin:

Now, as for metadata, I honestly didn’t even know you could manage/manipulate metadata using Ardour until you mentioned it just now, haha. But my response is still the same: You might just want to postpone adding (or amending) metadata for later, and via another application designed specifically for adding/manipulating audio-file metadata. I’d imagine that batch-processing is possible, but I haven’t yet looked into this myself, so I don’t know what software to recommend, if any.

However, can’t you just manually change the metadata for one session, then use the “Session → Metadata… → Import Metadata…” functionality in every other project to get the new info.? (-Just discovered this too, of course, so I’m not entirely certain if it’d work for you.)

~Always fun to write/talk about album work. :grin:

~Cheers, :wave:
-J

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#4

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve tried to ‘do things in the right’ order to avoid having to do anything twice, only to find out that I changed my mind about step 3 of 10, and then duplicating everything to my other mixes/versions/songs/whatever.

Part of me wants a DAW where I can copy anything from one session to another (or ‘share’ it between sessions). But such flexibility would come at a cost, I think; where would it end?

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#5

I agree with you, and the ‘share it’ idea would be really cool indeed. However, I’d bet that merging and/or sharing session data would become very complicated very fast… E.G. what tracks/buses/routing/tempos/positions/regions/file-relationships/metadata/etc. to preserve and/or keep unique, and what data to share and/or supplant? :face_with_spiral_eyes: -Too wild to consider, haha.

(For now, at least things like routes can be shared relatively easily via the Import Mixer Strips… feature, as mentioned.)

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#6

It’s pure audio mixing in my case. Tracks were produced in a different DAW and I’m just getting WAV files.

Exporting and importing channel strips turns out to solve a large portion of the issue. The main problem with importing channel strips is that while it lets me update the correct channels easily, it drops sends and the related routing. But I can at least copy sets of plugins and settings between sessions.

When I say “share”, I don’t necessarily mean keeping things automatically in sync real-time. Propagating settings selected groups of channels is already a big win. The routing is a problem though, because if I have a complex routing in my session (happens to be my case), I have to carefully restore that routing and in some cases there are sends that I need to write down the values of to restore correctly. It’s also error prone, if I forget a channel or mess up send levels.

About the metadata, some sort of a XML editing tool would do it. I can’t be the first person who ran into the question of reviewing cross-session metadata, someone has surely developed a tool for that. Is there a user contrib tool place somewhere around here?

#7

A quick update, current workflow is, when I want to import some channel strips from one session to another without damanging sends and routing, assuming my track is called FOO:

  1. Duplicate the FOO track I want to import settings into
  2. Go to Import Channel Strips
  3. Clear the mapping
  4. Select my FOO 1 channel on the left and FOO on the right (assuming they’re called the same in both sessions, they generally are in my case, I’m trying to keep names consistent)
  5. Press + (this was a little confusing)
  6. Import the settings
  7. To to mixer view and manually drag plugins from FOO 1 to FOO.
  8. Delete temporary track FOO 1

I wish it involved fewer steps. For now I prefer to perform those additional steps rather than having to remember what routing I lost and redo it.