Best practices- Saving and Back up'ing projects

[edmondredd]

I'm wondering about your practices you have in regard to saving and making a backup of your sessions.
I use almost exclusively virtual instruments, and do mostly orchestral cues with, on average, over than 40 tracks per session.
I was thinking of printing the midi tracks to stems, so if one day one or many of the other libraries become obsolete, or if I move to another computer or so on.
Is it better to bounce all the "raw" stems, or better to group them say for example string section, brass section and so on, and bounce them as group stems
Should I also print the "effects" as in EQ, compressor? Should I include the volume automation and the pan settings?
What about the sends to the reverbs? Should they be printed separately?
Once you have all of these, how do you back everything?
I'd love to hear how you guys do that.

My catalogue is still "manageable" for now, but I guess it would be a good thing to have the habit of automating the process, or at least do it once a track is done. Or maybe wait for it until it's signed, and then print it?

Thanks a lot,

[andygabrys]

Hi Edmond,

this is my perspective based on the particular genres of music that I work on:

I don't typically convert much MIDI to audio, and I usually leave all my tracks with effects "uncommitted". Assuming I have all the same plugins the session fires right back up where I left it. I stick to mostly large plugin manufacturers that are obsessively updating their wares to match current versions of my DAWS and the operating system I am using, and I know my computer has more than enough power to resurrect any session I might work on.

In most cases, the deliverables for a particular track are:

full mix
narrative / underscore or instrumental mix for vocal tracks
acapella vocal
reduced mix (less activity, percussion, etc. - a different flavor or underscore)
bass and drums
60 sec cut
30 sec cut
15 sec cut or bumper
Sting

If you have all of that already bounced out, the chance of having to go back in and make any other mix is low and so in most cases I leave it be at that.

However: if you fall into one of the following categories you might need to do more.

1) Your tracks are destined for advertising, and maximum flexibility is needed by your client to remix and omit or change any part of the track. This might be for product ads, or for movie trailers.

This applies to my experience writing music for ads - such as the two Taco Bell ads i did this year. I supplied a complete breakout of stems by instrumental category: drums, basses, guitars, synths, vocals, etc. and if there was a specific instrument that was a "lead" that was broken out separately as well and it was omitted from the group stem. Like a synth lead would be omitted from the general Synth stem and bounced on its own.

All these stems were created with all volume and pan settings and automation ON, compression and eq plugins ON, reverbs and delays ON, and with master effect (limiting etc.) ON so that a mix engineer could call up a new session, drop these stems in, and after pulling the level down of each a few dBs to prevent peaking the mix bus would have a total recreation of your track. They would apply their own master effect and limiting as need be.

2) You have your tracked signed to a library that does its own mastering

Here you would want to bypass all your own master effects and bounce each stem (or in some cases individual tracks) with its own track effects and reverbs and delays ON. Asking questions and experience in this game will let you know what you need in any particular situation.

3) you do a particular type of orchestrated material that will be mixed by a top $$$ mixer who might have outboard hardware reverb units like the Bricasti M7

Here you would likely not print additional reverbs as the whole point would to be utilize the contract mixers "better" hardware or real room effects.

IN GENERAL (in my experience) its an A or B situation:

A) Bounce tracks with only VI's committed to audio. Raw tracks which would be more appropriate if you and I were collaborating on something, and you provided me an orchestration to which I was going to add a bunch of things and then mix from scratch.

B) Bounce stems (with some individual tracks as needed) with all VI's committed to audio, compression, eq, reverb, delay, volume and pan setting and automation.

If somebody is asking you for stems so that they may make a few tweaks to go around Voiceover or so that they may master themselves, you really need to have everything mixed with all effects, comp, eq, volume and pan setting and automation and everything save for master compression eq baked into the tracks so that you can save them time.

since you asked specifically about orchestrated pieces, check out this video by Alex Pfeffer and how he organizes his Cubase project template, and how he exports various groups of instruments (low strings, high strings, low brass, high brass etc) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QEH8dztDRI and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PQBn6DCVgs - keep in mind this are pretty old video at this point but gives one perspective.

As for backing up:

I use a mechanical audio drive and hourly backups to a second drive. Then final projects are saved to a mirror RAID drive.

many other people backup to a cloud based service like Carbonite etc. in addition to having it on one or two drives in their studio.

In my case, as I usually don't commit the track to a complete set of stems, I put the entire session folder on my backup.

If I were always printing stems, I would consider just making a folder for each project that included the 10 or so mixes I might do, and a folder of complete stems, and then delete the original project folder and all associated audio.

Hope that makes sense. Once you have more tracks with publishers you will see exactly who needs what and in what cases you need to go back and break out extra stems or tracks.

[edmondredd]

Thank you Andy for taking the time and detailing all your process..
I've actually never thought of the edits a library could ask for.. that's maybe because I'm still starting, but that's a good point to keep in mind.
I'll surely pin this post for future references, when hopefully I'll get some deals.
Will check the videos,
thanks again for all of this, I really appreciate