I’d decide on your track listing and order as soon as you can, so you can focus your energy on the tracks you’ll actually use. Maybe plan on one or two more you could have as backups if something goes awry with one of the other tracks.
What are your release plans? If you think you might want to release vinyl, you have to be pretty conscious of how you group and order the songs (length of each side, loudness of the earlier tracks vs later ones) because of the limitations of the medium. For
this album we put a lot of effort into figuring that out, but never did release vinyl because it’s really expensive, and we didn’t have any immediate plans to tour in support of it.
Sounds like you’re already thinking about flow and variety, thinking about the energy and smooth transitions, not putting too many similar-sounding songs together, maybe you don’t want five songs in a row in the same key or at the same tempo, etc.
Some of those track order decisions might need to be revisited later if your recording doesn’t come out great for a certain song, although if you’re recording everything yourself at home, you’re less constrained by that, I guess. For every album I’ve been a part of, we’ve tried to get the drums tracked in one session for consistency (and since mic’ing drums sucks) so if we realized later they weren’t fantastic we wouldn’t go back and redo, we’d just live with it, but might not lead off the album with that.
This might be more detail than you want, but the project manager in me can’t help it
—I’d also think about what you really need to track in your Excel tracker—is every cell there really serving you, or are you spending unnecessary overhead updating the chart for stuff like “automate dobros” when broader categories like “fix levels” will do? Is there a reason you want to have everything on one sheet and not broken into one tab per song?
Is it worth the effort to do any of the mix yourself if you plan to give it to someone else to finish the mix? You might save yourself a lot of time and effort by just throwing things over the fence as soon as you have your raw comps together. I’d think the person doing the mixing, if they’re a professional (which I assume they are or you’d just do it all yourself anyway) would not really want to receive EQ’d/compressed/etc tracks to work with.
Do you know who you want to work with for mixing/mastering? What are their lead times like, how far are they booked out? Do you know what they’ll need from you on a technical level in terms of file types, levels, alternate takes, etc? What’s the process for approvals and revisions? You may not like what they come back with—then what? Do you have to pay for more than a round or two of edits?
How about album art? How are you releasing the album? How are you publicizing it? I have little to no experience working with labels, agents, publicists, tour managers, etc so I can only offer advice from the DIY side of things but it doesn’t sound like that’s the way you’re leaning.
