Best practices for processing live recordings in Ardour5

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ericjmcd
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Best practices for processing live recordings in Ardour5

Post by ericjmcd »

I'm new to Ardour 5 and have been recording some friends jamming on my garage with 2-3 vocal tracks, stereo drums, keyboard, guitar, and bass. I'd like to mix the 2-3 hour recordings into individual mp3's to share.

Is there a preferred way to do this? e.g. make new regions for each song and then export individually? Somehow split the session into multiple sessions for each song?

Thanks for any help!

Eric
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Michael Willis
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Re: Best practices for processing live recordings in Ardour5

Post by Michael Willis »

I have been playing with a small jazz band, and started recording recently. I try to keep the workflow really simple while recording, since we only meet during lunch time once a week. I wire up the mics, create an Ardour session with corresponding tracks, hit the record buttons, and then leave the laptop alone for our whole session. Afterward I listen to the whole thing, decide which pieces sound good, do some minor processing (mostly just reverb), and export each piece by setting the start and end markers.

Ardour won't directly export mp3, but follow these instructions to make it use LAME to do so:
https://discourse.ardour.org/t/looking- ... p3/88716/4

Either that or load your exported WAV or FLAC file in Audacity and export to MP3 from there.

You can listen to some of my recordings here: https://soundcloud.com/user-201997735 - anything with "improv" in the name is a recording of the lunch time jazz band.

Edit: I can't necessary claim that this is "best practices", I'm still learning, but I think it would work fine for simple garage band recordings.
finotti
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Re: Best practices for processing live recordings in Ardour5

Post by finotti »

ericjmcd wrote:I'm new to Ardour 5 and have been recording some friends jamming on my garage with 2-3 vocal tracks, stereo drums, keyboard, guitar, and bass. I'd like to mix the 2-3 hour recordings into individual mp3's to share.

Is there a preferred way to do this? e.g. make new regions for each song and then export individually? Somehow split the session into multiple sessions for each song?
I am not expert, so probably not the best person to give advice. But I guess it depends... If you think that you can mix all songs with the same settings (same EQ, compression, plugins, volume, pan, etc.) for each instrument for all songs, it would make sense having a single session (with markers and regions defined for each song). If you would like different controls for each song, so you can tweak each one individually, then break into different sessions.

Also, even in the former case, if there are too many songs, it can be a bit too much to handle... I would probably do different sessions for each song. After doing the first song's mix, you can export the session as a template and use it for all other songs. I am pretty sure that the plugins will all be part of the template, but I am not sure about their individual settings... If they are not copied, you can save each plugin setting in the first song section, and then load them in the other sessions.

Just some ideas to think about...
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thumbknuckle
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Re: Best practices for processing live recordings in Ardour5

Post by thumbknuckle »

This is what I do when recording a live session:

- get everything set up and just let the recorder run the whole session. It's digital, tape is free now.

- get a ball park mix that more or less works for all the songs, save as a snapshot.

- get to work on the first song, making any adjustments specific to it. Save as a snapshot and export using the 'export range' function.

- repeat for all the other songs, starting from my initial session snapshot.

- If I need the material in mp3 form I navigate to the 'export' directory and run:

Code: Select all

for nam in *.wav; do lame --preset extreme "$nam"; done
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ericjmcd
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Re: Best practices for processing live recordings in Ardour5

Post by ericjmcd »

Thanks for the responses. I've got a template for the basic setup and just been letting it run for the whole session and then doing individual song mixes with export range (converting in Audacity to mp3, will definitely setup the post export call).

I'll have to look into saving snapshots as I don't want to have to re-tweak plugins for different songs. Guess I'll try breaking the big session into per-song sessions too so I can easily mute parts for my own practice and maybe do no-vocal mixes for the singers.

Anyone have a good way to create new sessions with just the included range? It feels like a save as and then delete everything but the desired song is cumbersome. Maybe there's an export range to new session?
Eric
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ericjmcd
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Re: Best practices for processing live recordings in Ardour5

Post by ericjmcd »

I tried out snapshots and it seems to work really well. For pretty much every song I needed to add or adjust plugins and even did some punch in/outs to fix my solos.

Super easy and nice.
Eric
Ubuntu 18.04, Jack, Tascam us-16x08
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