What's Best Approach for Multitrack Classical Music?

Question

Can someone suggest the best approach for recording classical musicians onto
four tracks? In this scenario, they play until they make a mistake on, say,
measure 24, stop, then (take 2) go back to measure 20 and play until the next
rough spot, and so on. Ultimately there may be 15 takes that all need to be
trimmed and stitched together.
In the old (tape) days, this was pretty basic editing. I would use a blade and block
to cut out all the bad stuff on the multitrack tape, then I could mix. But how do I
do this in Audition? (I use version 1.5.)
I can't do the cuts it in edit view because the tracks would get out of sync
Assuming all the takes are in one session, in multitrack view, this most basic of
functions seems to elude me. What am I missing?

Answer 1

Al the Drifter wrote:
If you follow Steve's advice, and after doing the edits you discover
that one instrument should come up 1db, you are screwed.
I could be wrong about this in the classical music environment,
where things are not close-mic'ed but if I am, I am confident Steve
will correct me.  Ha.
You always run the risk of small changes between takes - and that's where Audition 3 and the new improved crossfades score rather heavily. You won't notice 1dB on a single instrument across a fade though - it's hard to spot this as a jump, even, unless it's on pure tone. No, I very rarely close-mic stuff at all, although I did with a clavichord recently - it's seriously too quiet to mic any other way.
jaypea500 wrote:
 when recording classical music, any engineer worth anything has the mix down pat as it's being recorded. 
That's the way they used to work, certainly - but not nowadays, especially if it's done on location, which most classical recording is. What's more likely to happen is that you'd use decent mic preamps feeding straight into a multitrack, or even some software on a laptop. I generally record like that - but I also feed the multitrack outputs to a Yamaha mixer via ADAT, do a mix on that and record it back to a spare multitrack pair. I don't actually need to do that - but having a mix available from the multitrack that's pretty much there is good as far as being able to play back takes to conductors is concerned.
Of course, one of the other reasons that classical sessions recorded on location aren't mixed on the spot is that the monitoring conditions are invariably far from ideal, and I'd have it that no engineer worth anything would ever risk a final mix done on location.
But I only get paid to do all of this on a regular basis, so what would I know? Must be something though - my customers come back for more...