Most DAWs allow lots of characters for labels. I wouldn't worry about learning some shorthand. If you do need to abbreviate then make a cheat sheet with Word Pad to send along with the tracks.

Yes, its a good habit to label your tracks and take notes on your settings for your analog gear so you can make reference to it down the road.

As for standards, you would be professional to have them. Just taking notes helps for the future. I would think the more description you use the better.

Often times I have just done the old "set and forget" and often wonder how I got the particular sound later on.

I suppose when you have musical ideas and the tune is fresh in your mind the settings have little worth. Live and learn or Live and fail to learn I guess.

I fall in the fail to learn category far to often. With digital devices it takes away the need to remember since you create a patch and can recall it, or simply saving a session. That does not help out my analog engineering skills when recording a tune. I guess when you do everything yourself its quite overwhelming, isn't it?

I'm pretty good at labeling tracks (definitely not the "Audio 1, Audio 2" type person). I was hoping to understand more what they (AES?) meant. I'm curious to see what they consider to be the 'right' way.

Thanks for the responses!

AES (American Engineering Society) standard is primarily a standardized protocol for transfering digital audio data across different types of electrical connections. It has allowances for different bit depths and sampling rates. It's brother/sister society is the EBU (European Broadcasting Union).

It is not a standard for how to label a mixer or how to order your sticks on your mixer or how to hang your mic's in an auditorium.

True, but I was referring to the AES organization. They (I've been told) has a specific way to label tracks to make everything flow easier between engineers. I suppose it was adopted because there were too many people either not labeling or improperly labeling tracks.

If that is indeed true it is not something that is standardized within the audio industry as a whole. If it were it would be a simple matter of looking it up in a book or website because EVERYONE would use.

http://www.aes.org/publications/standards/search.cfm

I'm guessing your friend read something and inferred incorrectly the subject detail.

Use a camera to document settings of outboard gear. Quick and Dirty.

I dont know really BUT..

This is how I do it for live sound and/or recording

K for Kick
S1 for snare top
S2 for snare bottom
T1,T2....
HATS - hi hats
OHL overhead left
OHR overhead right
RML room left
RMR room right
BASS
GTR1, GTR2 with arrows indicating stage left or right
KEYS
SAMPLE
V1,V2 with arrows indicated stage location of vocal mic

Sometimes I might label things differently when recording, just to indentify the track better like: SpaceGTR the guitar with lots of delay on it perhaps

Thanks for all the ideas. As I mentioned I've always been good at clearly identifying tracks, but I was just curious about this 'standard'. I heard Jay Franze speak about it, but didn't get a chance to ask him more after the lecture.

I did check AES's website before posting, but wasn't able to find anything. So I'm thinking if it were a true standard, you're right John, it'd be published somewhere. Or at the very least be something of common knowledge.