Quick Tip: 5 Ways To Stay Organized In The Studio

Quick Tip: 5 Ways To Stay Organized In The Studio

on Oct 25th 2012 with 2 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Difficulty: Beginner/Intermediate
  • Time: 10 minutes

Keeping organized in the studio is hugely important. If you’re recording a client, time spent fumbling around will reduce their satisfaction and if you’re recording yourself you don’t want to waste time sorting through cables or figuring out what track is what. Here are a few tips on how to keep your sessions in the studio organized.

1. Keep Notes Of Your Setup

Keeping notes in the studio may seem a little tedious and uptight, but it’s fantastic when you want to reproduce the tone you got on a particular track or just for comparing the results you get with different microphones and placements. I always make a note of the microphone I used, where it was placed, and any outboard equipment (preamps, compressors, EQs) and their settings. Many recording programs allow you to take notes within the session itself, but using a paper “track sheet” such as this one works just as well and even allows you to make a quick sketch of the mic placement.

2. Color Code Your Cables

A quick and easy way to stay organized in the studio is to color code your cables at both ends using colored zip-ties or electrician’s tape. Then, when swapping cables in the studio you can see at a glance what cable goes where rather than needing to follow each cable to its end.

3. Keep Your Tracks In The Same Order

When you’re working on a project with a lot of tracks, finding the track you want to adjust can take a moment. It may seem like a small thing, but over the course of the whole session it can really suck up a lot of time. Keeping your tracks in the same order every time can save you time and frustration. Personally, my tracks always go in this order from left to right: kick drum, snare drum, toms, cymbals, overheads, other percussion, bass, rhythm instruments, lead instruments, lead vocals, backing vocals.

4. Use Logical Track Names

When labeling your tracks in recording software or on your track sheet, choose names that will be easy for you to identify if you go back to the session months or years later. By this I mean rather than labeling the tracks “guitar 1”, “guitar 2”, choose a more descriptive names like “rhythm guitar” and “lead guitar”.

5. Carefully File Your Sessions

If you do a lot of recording, particularly for clients, you can end up with hundreds of session files in no time. An easy way to keep your session files organized from the start is to use a clean hierarchy of folders. I keep folders for each client, with a files inside for each project (e.g. “demo” or the album title), then I have the session folders for each individual song inside those. If you’re recording for yourself or you have clients that do a lot of work with you, you may want to also file them by year or month, in which case your file path would look something like this: recording sessions>client name>dated folder>project>individual song.

Tags: Tips
 
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Mark Garrison is a recording engineer and multi-instrumentalist from British Columbia, Canada. For the past decade he has taught recording through classes, workshops, and writing. He focuses on teaching how to create better recordings through a greater understanding of the tools and techniques of the studio. He is also the author of <a href="">The Encyclopedia of Home Recording.  

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  • Albatrossy

    I think all of these are pretty essential tips but I don’t write down what I have done to tracks nearly enough as I should. At the bare minimum, I think you should take note of what you’re EQ’ing or analyze what parts of sounds you like in a sound so you can respectively cut/boost frequencies on other strips.

    In EDM, I find it hard to logically name all of my tracks though. I end up having quite a few basses, stabs, arps, effects and other stuff which can be really hard to name.

  • Solarbird

    Photos! Photos are awesome. I not only measure and note microphones and placement, I take pictures. It’s a great help for when you don’t think of everything you could want to write down – like mic angle, and such. You don’t need a good camera – cellphone camera will do fine.

    Also, if you’re in a larger project, having artist pages in your notebook helps too. It saves a lot of redundancy, and when working on a new track, you know where to go to mic that artist in their default preferred way, and any other relevant notes on working with them.

    A couple of months ago, I wrote a lot about this on my own blog – I was detailing my Big Board/Big Book DIY project-management system. That’s at http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/blog/2012/10/the-big-board/ if anyone is curious. I’m pretty happy with it, as a system.

    In general, I like book-and-whiteboard solutions, low-tech tho’ they might be, because you don’t have to scan anything or redraw anything – your quick notes _are_ your record, just tape ‘em down and you’re done. So even though my DAW does let me take notes inside projects, I don’t use it – I hate the little windows for notes, I hate the non-visibility/non-rediscoverability.