Orginizing your songs music files
In today’s recording craft it happens most often than not that a song is recorded in different places, you may have recorded the base with one musician at their studio, but then you may have recorded the drums at another professional studio and so forth, so Orginizing your songs music files is a very important topic.
Nowadays the Financial access to big studios is mostly by a large record labels so the model of every musician having their own independent home studio where they record the instrument that they are prolific at has been becoming much more common in the music industry and in recordings so when the time comes to put all the files together you really need to have order in how you’re are bringing all the elements into one place.
the first step is to make sure you have all your Tracks under the same sample rate of recording as the other tracks for example: if your songs recorded at 44 kHz you want all the tracks of all the sessions to be in 44 kHz because if you have a file that was recorded at 44 kHz and others that were recorded at 48 kHz then when you put the tracks together they’re going to sound different one Against the other in a ProTools session so the first thing you have to have is everything under the same recording “page” in referance to sample rate. The second thing you want to have is to make sure your files are starting at the same point because an engineer may be working in logic or maybe working in ProTools or in another recording system so the best thing you’ll be able to send is wave or audio files but you want to make sure your whole session is sounding where it should, so one of the most important things is, as I mentioned the bit sample rate of the song of the project and the second one is that all the wave files are exported or bounced from the same initial point, so that way, when when the engineer imports the tracks it’s easy to organize the session for him, if one track starts at the beginning and another simply plays somewhere else then the engineer will not have a way to know where what’s playing actually goes like for example a guitar solo or some other arrangement, so to avoid all these problems and to save a lot of time in the mixing process for other engineers is to have your session very organized, once you receive all the tracks from the musicians
Something what will save time is when you’re working in the same platform with all the people who participated in the recording and also with the engineer that is going to mix the song because if you recorded in ProTools for example, then you can also export the ProTools session and it will automatically open all your files in in the correct place and at the same sample rate.
Another important aspect that you want to do with files before you send them to mix as I mentioned in one of my other blogs is to have the names of the tracks abbreviated in the right way so that it’s not confusing in the mixing board in reference to what is playing, for example a common exercise is to eliminate the vocals out of the certain track so let’s say guitars would not be named “Guitars” but rather “GTRS” or “AC GTRS” for acoustic guitars “KYS” for Keyboards “ETC GTRS” for electric Guitars “SNR” for snare “HH” for hi hat etc. By abbreviating the names it also makes it simpler for the mixing engineer to identify what is playing on each track so that way he has a better view of what he’s going to do with the song when he receives the tracks.
So these are just three of the basic button important factors that you really want to keep in mind before you send your tracks to a mixing engineer there are many other things that I will mention another blogs but I think these three are very important I hope this has been a good article and please do not hesitate to leave your comments below