Really long project and Arranger

[jkoseattle]

Hey, with the new Arranger feature, I'm wondering if there's any reason I can't just build my entire frickin' album in a single CW file. This way, it's trivial to adjust levels and effects etc for an instrument that propagates through every track. I'm thinking I'll just put each track in its own arranger section, and also put a few minutes of space between each one. 

Is there any penalty to doing this? Most of the album is only two instruments (with a few more dummy tracks, so maybe 5-6 tracks in total). Is there any reason I can't open a single CW file and use arranger sections they way I normally have separate projects? I would have a project over an hour in length, I'm wondering if that's ok.

[Glenn Stanton]

why not set up a project with majority of instrumentation and use it as a template. then each song has roughly all the same settings without the risk that you f*ck an entire album worth of material because of a single big mistake in one song... and if you run through each song project to track everything for a given instrument, then whatever your instrument behavior (temp, humidity, sunlight or lack thereof, etc) will also be consistent.

[jkoseattle]

4 hours ago, Glenn Stanton said:

why not set up a project with majority of instrumentation and use it as a template. then each song has roughly all the same settings without the risk that you f*ck an entire album worth of material because of a single big mistake in one song... and if you run through each song project to track everything for a given instrument, then whatever your instrument behavior (temp, humidity, sunlight or lack thereof, etc) will also be consistent.

at's how I've been doing it, but what invariably happens of course is that halfway through a project I'll realize some effects or levels or whatever need to change across the board for that instrument, meaning going back through every tracks I thought I had finished. Not to mention the reality that I will make tweaks to tracks in individual songs that I will neglect to "globalize".

Maybe the middle ground is to do that just at the end when all the individual songs are essentially finished.

[Glenn Stanton]

i save fx (and other) presets as well as track templates etc for projects and sometimes songs - this way if i find something (usually drums or bass) that i want to change across projects, i just load the new preset (best when using Pro Channel because the FX rack + PC effects all come in) or i insert the track template and move the clips into it. then if the presets or templates aren't something i'm likely to reuse elsewhere, i zip them up and stick them into the project folder in case i need to revisit it.

i think it would be way worse to have an hour of material trashed because of a ripple edit or a template (or other) insert/delete (without ripple edit) or push the arranger "make it happen" button... and just having backs ups of the same project over and over... for me, it's like OO - encapsulate to decouple something that "thing" really well...

[scook]

If the projects maintain the same track/bus layout, mix recall scenes may be shared between them.