Album recording - create individual song projects or put all in one 'album' project?

M

musicdavid

Member
I am about to set out recording a whole album at home.

Normally, I set up individual projects for every distinct piece I work on. However, I'm wondering if it'd be better to record all the intended songs within the same project, each time putting the instruments on the same labelled tracks.

It seems to me, being able to simply scroll from one song to another within the same project would facilitate getting an overall unifying sound and character to the album during the mixing process.

One downside I can think of would be that it would take up a lot of processing power each time I open the file.

What do you think?
 
I'd have a really exceptional back up routine going before I attempted that.

Depending upon how your DAW works that could get very complicated in terms of assigning tracks to effect sends and what have you..

Strikes me it might be something you'd do with the stereo tracks, but I wouldn't try it for the individual mixes. YMMV...
 
I would always use a new project for each track, why not make a template and use the same template for each song thereby keeping stuff on the same tracks.

Alan.
 
My thought was that if you know you're going to want to assign the same effects to each track for every song, it would make sense to record them all in one project. However, I see that if that's not the case you might as well record the songs in separate projects.

What gave me the idea for putting them all in one project was this...

My recent album was recorded on tape and then transferred to digital for mixing. Each instrument was pretty much always recorded on the same track on tape, so the result on the transfer was, for example, a whole track of bass for all the songs, and the same for drums etc, it made sense to leave it as it was and mix 'selections' as we were going along, rather than chop it all up and save as separate songs.

This made me think, when recorded in an album digitally, why not use this as a basis by which to approach the whole album.
 
I've done that but I end up splitting the project up into individual song projects because there's always enough stuff that different that one project becomes unwieldy.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top