Session Recall is an application designed to save the settings of analog devices without memories. It will allow you to save complete configurations of one or more devices into sessions that you can recall at any time. Whether you are a musician, a composer, or an audio engineer, Session Recall will flawlessly integrate into your workflow and will save your precious time.

Homepage:
https://www.session-recall.com/en/

 

I take pictures for recalling vintage kit. Used to take polaroids but they fade horribly.

 

This is an excerpt from liner notes of the original LP Magnetic Fields (1981) of J.M. Jarre with some synths params (see AKS, Fairlight, Oberheim, ARP).
Also, at the time, polaroid pictures were used a lot, writing on the white space the name of the patch.

Now much easier in digital age, in case, just smartphone.

 

Pics and notes are key. One of the first mixing assignments in school was about (aside from mixing a song) writing detailed recall notes. It didn't matter if we only used plug-ins - everything had to be in the notes!

Been writing notes in Excel (mostly for the analog stuff), taking pics/screenshots, saving plug-in presets and saving a consolidated version of important projects ever since. All of this goes into a project folder and gets saved both to my IDrive cloud storage and to external SSD drives. I probably should try to set up a NAS, but I'm too cheap and lazy atm. I don't do all of this for every Reaper project I have ofc, but I do it for mixes that clients have sent me. When I record jam sessions with some friends or just record some song ideas myself I am much more lazy with these things.

I don't have enough analog gear to warrant using Session Recall really, but if I had I would probably use it 3-4 times and then forget about it. I use Excel every day for a bunch of stuff so it just feels much more natural and pretty quick to use in parallel to mixing in Reaper. I could probably make better use of Reaper's built-in notes, but it doesn't feel as organized as Excel is since it's more like writing in Notepad.

 

it looks very nice, graphically. But after dealing with music software companies (especially librarian, editor, utility software) for years, and seeing even the ones with the best products go under anyway; there is no way in hell I would ever trust this sort of thing.

I would be too paranoid with anything important enough to actually need it for; and it would be overkill for my uses. Like already mentioned. But I'm also not a big believer in the "super secret important" patch settings. If I can't make the same thing again, so be it.

 

I think it's great that musicians pass on their knowledge. Some no longer live but has written down his creative ideas and he or someone else has published a book.In my opinion, writing is still the best. No hard drive crash, power failure, server crash, company bankruptcies and hacker attacks. The other day a director forgot his notebook on the train and he had to write the whole script again.

I write a lot and back up my work though, because nothing is worse than file loss and work for the trash can. I once drew lists for my drum machine and painstakingly drew in all the styles - rhythms etc. by hand and now I have a whole folder full of them. Examples attached.

 

This software is from 2018.

For those who wonder how it works, it simply graphically reproduces the aspect and knobs, buttons etc.. of the hardware. Then you put these in the same settings as your hardware and save it.

In this video it's clear how it works:

With a a bit of effort, I could do the same with Gig Performer, creating racks with the same controls as my hardware. Good idea... It will certainly not look as pro, but it will make the job.