I was helping someone out the other day and something the guy did suddenly shocked me a bit. He was working on a piece at his home studio and he called me to ask my advice on something. I was close to his house and instead of trying to explain over the phone I called on him. He took me to his studio and there was his Cubase system running nicely with a comprehensive looking arrangement, about 15 tracks of audio with plenty of automation going on. As I stepped closer to the screen he was telling me that he´d been inspired in the middle of the night and and dashed downstairs to start work on this track. Now, almost 7 hours later I was staring at his screen and to my horror at the top of the screen the word “Untitled.cpr” was looking back at me. I was horrified and told him to save his song NOW. He told me he was using auto save and that he always saved his songs as names after he´d thought up a name for it. Fair enough, so how long did that take? Could be up to a year in some cases. So here was a guy with a large number of songs on his hard drive called Untitled.cpr. I didn’t ask what he called early reference mixes
Now, I know as much as anyone what its like to be un-organized - the word was invented for me -but the logistical nightmare of this type of -well laziness? I´m not sure of a word for it, but it is a potential mine field. And one that could so easily be avoided.
Cubase, when opening a new project, always asks for the destination folder. In this dialogue box it asks you if you would like to create one. At this point I always have in mind at least a coded reference for the song like - “Mikes Documentary Intro Idea 1″ and as soon as the project opens I always do a “Save As” and name the song in a similar if not the same way. Then when my auto save is saving along side my many saves, I know its going to be easily found, stored, backed up and returned to cubase.
The naming of individual audio files i do tend to leave until they look like becoming a permanent fixture but I ALWAYS name the tracks that are going to be recorded to, so “guitar solo”s audio files will at least be called “Guitar solo 00-03.wav” and the time stamp would give you a clue should a surprise happen. My very last save before mix down (export) will always be “Save Entire Project To New Folder” and even then this is a little habit I´ve developed that is a tad unnecessary as I rarely throw any of the other audio files away for fear of someone asking “do you remember that guitar solo we did on such and such a day - that was better than the one that got in the mix . I´d like to use it for a special edition remix version, can you mail it over?”. Now, imagine trawling through gazillions of folders of songs called Untitled.cpr to find that.
Using cubase has very much simplified the way we work but we sometimes then make things much harder for ourselves by getting into these sort of bad habits. I miss using track sheets and sometimes on a complex mix or recording will make one up. A little used feature in cubase is one that I have to force myself to use as its a bit easier to pick up a paper and pen and thats the notepad. It appears in every version and can be a life saver as its contents are saved along with the song so even after a heavy session, valuable paper work cannot be lost or have coffee spilt on to it or be stolen to use as a roach for the end of session “herbal relaxant”. Forming good habits is much harder to do than forming bad habits but worth the effort. My default template song now opens with a notepad window that says SAVE THIS SONG NOW AND USE ME. I do, and I try to.