Old School Rock, Indie, Americana & Blues
Music Production, Engineering & Development in Los Angeles

Session Naming/Organization

Believe it or not, this is one of the most important windows in Pro Tools. Session management is an essential part of recording music, and I thought I’d share a little of how Halftone usually manages some of the basics. I work with a lot of engineers/producers on the side and I’m constantly amazed at how disorganized major label, platinum selling sessions are. It can be a major headache, and waste massive amounts of time and money.

The General Idea

One of the most important pieces of advice I can give is to save your session as a new session EVERY time you open it. The session file that you end up mixing from should not be the same session file that you tracked drums to. This is a powerful lesson I learned a while ago and it has saved me a tremendous amount of frustration. It’s really powerful to be able to pull up old sessions and reference edits, mixes, etc as they were originally heard. Imagine you’re in a mix and your singer says “Hey remember 6 months ago you had that weird effect on the vocals? Let’s use that same setting.” Unfortunately for you you’ve been using the same “Mysong.ptf” for the last 6 months. Figuring out that setting is now impossible.

Initial Setup

I’ve used a lot of session naming conventions over the years, but I’m really happy with what we use these days. The formula is NUMBER.SONGNAME.DESCRIPTION, OR 03.MYSONG.VOXTRACKING. For a while I added a date here, but I soon realized that it was worthless, since you can always reference a creation date. Why the number? Two reasons: 1) It gives you an easy way to sort by name (01, 02, etc). 2) It shows you the order that things were done in. It’s really great to be able to open a session folder and see this:

It’s incredibly easy to see what has been done on this, when it was done, what’s left to do, etc. Now I know what you might be thinking: That could grow to be a TON of sessions sitting there. That’s where the “Session History” folder comes in handy. You can put all of the currently out-of-use sessions in a folder within your session folder, and leave the last used session file in the root folder.

Auto Backup

Let’s face it. Computers crash, the power goes out, things happen. Most DAWs have an auto-backup system in place, and it has certainly saved my ass more than a few times. In order for the autobackup to work though, you need to save. I recommend saving as soon as you create a session file, even if it’s an empty blank session. That way the autobackup will at least start kicking in. You can tweak this in Pro Tools in the “Operation” tab of preferences.

I like to set it up for 5 minute backups and a maximum of 10 backups per sessions. Now because we are organized about renaming sessions every time we open them, that means there are 10 backups for 07.MYSONG.VOXEDITS and 10 backups for 10.MYSONG.MIX1. That’s pretty cool.

Wrapup

Basically what I want to express is how important organization should be with recording sessions. The more organized you are, the more time (and ultimately money) you save. I highly encourage you to take a look at the recommendations of the Producers and Engineer’s Wing of NARAS. While I don’t fully agree with everything they recommend, I think they have a lot of great points.