At the beginning of every year I tend to write an article about some sort of organizational skills needed to make your studio, and sessions run more smoothly. After all, if the sessions are running smoothly, you're making more music. And that's a good thing! This year shall be no different. This year's topic is about track control.

Have you ever noticed that on a session, you may want to keep this or that take "just in case", or "That take was really good, but let's get one more"? It happens all the time in the quest for a great performance, which is fine, but sometimes this can create quite a list of extra tracks on your hard drive. One solution is to be very certain about which takes you want in that very moment, and most software programs give you the choice of just removing the file from the arrange window, or removing the file completely from the hard drive. If you know you don't like it, erase it from your hard drive right away. This can usually be done right from the main screen with a mouse click and delete button. Make sure to read the "Are you sure?" screen to be certain that you're erasing the correct file. Accidentally getting rid of the perfect take is a real drag.

A second solution is to record the audio into different folders on your hard drive. In Logic Pro, for example, I can just hit the "a" key to pull up a screen for destination of the recorded audio. If I had two folders say, for vocals. One called "Vox" and the other called "Vox Alt Takes", I could record my best takes into the "Vox" folder, and the "That take was really good but let's get one more" tracks into the Alternate takes folder. This is a little more cumbersome, but I have seen it used. Because at the end of the day, it can be pretty interesting in the audio files window to see which are which, leaving you to actually PLAY through each file. Drag.

Yet another approach is to let the software do the work for you. At the end of the session just the "Select unused tracks" selection, or equivalent in your software, and delete anything that's not actually used on the screen. On this option, keep in mind that any alternate takes not on the arrange window will be deleted as well. This function will typically get rid of any tracks you can't physically see on your main play window.

The last version of track sanity I'd suggest is to actually have a track called "Alt Vox" and record the alternate vocal takes there. This way you can see which are which. I'm a big fan of color-coding tracks, so you could color them differently. For me, drums are red, keys are green (different shades for different types of keys, like Rhodes and B3 Organ). Bass is blue, rhythm guitars are shades of purple, back-up vocals are shades of brown by pitch, lead vocals are orange for doubles, and yellow for the lead vocal and lead guitar. This makes my life exponentially easier when it comes to editing. If you set-up a template, or "autoload" song with these colors predefined, it's even more simple to look at the screen and know what is what at a glance.

The second part I'd like to talk about when it comes to track efficiency is bouncing. Bouncing tracks is often associated with the end of the recording process where you bounce your whole mix down to two tracks. Those of us that have lived through the years of tape recording are more used to running out of tracks, and having to bounce tracks just to make room for the new tracks. With computer track counts being very high, there is a temptation to have lots of tracks. What this also does though, is it puts your processor under a lot of pressure to perform. So you may get more errors or crashes. This is bad.

I would suggest using the "Save as…" function. I'm working on some tracks now that I recorded live in the studio with drums, bass, percussion and acoustic guitar. That was about 24 tracks alone. I brought the files back to my studio where we wanted to add percussion toys, additional guitars, backup vocals, and lead vox. The additional toys on percussion were ten tracks. Back-up vocals are up to 12-16 tracks in some places. My computer was ready to go on strike.

What I've done for years is to use the "Save as…" function. I made a version of the song with just the studio tracks and called it "Song 1 raw tracks". Then I made a bounce of the live studio session tracks to a two mix (stereo mix). Opened a new song, and imported the two mix. That was now the reference track to lay the percussion toys against. I saved this song as "Song 1 raw Perc". Then I recorded, mixed and bounced the percussion tracks (without the reference track) to its own two mix, then aptly called the audio file "Song 1 Perc 2mix".I did basically the same for the back-up vocals, and the extra guitars. On the original "Song 1 raw tracks" I even bounced the drums to a two mix of their own.

So what I do next is create a blank song that I call "Song 1 Production". I then import all of these two mixes into this new song. Now I have a stereo drum 2mix, percusssion 2mix, back-up vox 2mix, I brought the bass, acoustic guitar and my extra guitars over on their own. So now I have a song that has 10-12 tracks before I start lead vocals, this is much easier on the computer and also much easier to manage for mixing. If ever I need to adjust the originals I can either go back to the "Raw" version of that part and remix, or bring those tracks into the Production song for manipulation. Either way, I've gone from perhaps 50 tracks to 15. Nice. Now everything is manageable, musical, and easy to work with. Try it.

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