Methods for Copying Mix From One Song to Another

[mlefevers]

Hi - first time poster, so I hope I’m doing this right.

When I’m mixing an entire album, my usual procedure is to choose one song, get it all the way mixed to completion, and then copy those levels / plugins / settings to the others. That way every subsequent song on the album starts out half mixed already, and the album is consistent across all the songs.

But for the last four albums I’ve mixed, the way I did this was: grab a spiral notebook and write down, by hand, every fader position and plugin setting and bus send. With pen and paper. Then open each song and recreate them from the notes. Yesterday I spent eight hours doing this.

Is there a better way to achieve this in CbB?

I know in other DAWs you can sometimes import a template and ‘assign’ the incoming tracks to the tracks that are in your project… or something… I didn’t really follow it. I even tried exporting the finished song’s tracks as a Track Template — thinking I could then import it and just drag all the plugins over to the next song’s tracks — but I kept crashing Cakewalk. Maybe a track template of that size and complexity is too much, I don’t know.

TL;DR: what is your process for mixing a whole album and making the levels and plugins consistent between songs? Is there a fast/efficient way to do this?

[John Vere]

Mix recall can sort of do this and I have made it work.. BUT,  the songs have to be identical in layout and tracks. So it works great for multiple live recordings which will be all the same. 

As far as a bunch of songs that are  different I will use pre sets in my VST's. Both instruments and Plug in effects.  I make sure I always set the VST instrument level the same. The pre sets don't always do that. 

I then I have a system of making sure all my audio tracks peak levels are very close target level. Then  will use sub busses and try to carefully match levels. Example I want my Bass sub buss at -4 and my drum buss at - 3 etc. I use the You Lean loudness meter to determine all levels and LUFS. I also use SPAN to keep an eye on the frequencies.  

[David Baay]

Assuming the track layouts are the identical (which seems like a necessity for this to work at all), I would save the 'model' project as a Project Template (audio will be automatically excluded), start a new project from that template, set the tempo to match the raw project, and copy-paste all the audio clips from the raw project into the new project in one go. Then Save As into the same project folder as the raw project with a suitable name so the new project references the audio file from the same place.

If you really want the raw and mixed projects to be totally independent, Save As to new project folder, and enable Copy All Audio With Project in the Save dialog. But having them share an audio folder is not a problem.