9 Tips for Managing a Large Session in your DAW

In our current epoch, large sessions are unavoidable. You know the kind I’m talking about: a hundred tracks — and maybe more — of drums, ancillary percussion, literal bells and whistles, keyboards both analog and synthetic, and piles upon piles of background vocals.

Perhaps you’re just getting your first large session, and you’re swearing at the sheer number of elements you have to deal with. Maybe you’ve been handling them for years, but aren’t happy with your (dis)organizational results; your CPU tends to conk out, your sessions crash, and your data management is so chaotic that you don’t know where your last viable session lies whenever you get the dreaded beach ball.

If that sounds like you, then this article will give you some hope. Not just hope, but concrete tips for managing today’s larger sessions in your DAW.

1. Decide which tracks are necessary upon import

Often times, producers or musicians will send you more tracks than you’d ever need, regardless of the genre of the song. Take your usual rock, country, Americana, or indie mix: you might get three mics on a guitar cabinet—say an SM57, a Sennheiser MD 421, a ribbon, and/or a condenser. Sure, the producer covered the bases, leaving it to you to blend the tracks in post. But this can hog real estate, both in screen space and processing power.

I’d advise in this case to give a quick listen to the guitar parts, as well as the rough mix (one is usually supplied) for comparison; you’ll note you might not actually need all those mics. If the arrangement is dense, the 57 or 421 close miked on the cab might give you all you’d ever want to use.

The same is true for programmed, synthetic elements, but in a different way: a producer might’ve programmed a mono kick or snare drum, but bounced down all the tracks as stereo. However, you don’t need the stereo stem; it serves its purpose in mono.

I would make sure to import the audio as mono in this case, or else you’ll wind up instantiating stereo processing every time you add a plug-in. If you do this, you’ll hog extra processing—which you don’t want! So audition the track outside the session, before actual import, to see if it’s truly stereo. If it’s not, dump one side, or bring it over it as a mono file.

This also helps you avoid needless menu diving through the realms of stereo or dual mono plug-ins, which can sometimes be found in different places within Pro Tools, and can be annoying to track down.