Never ever ever start your project on measure 1.
I always start on measure 3. This is especially crucial if you're recording human players. Don't just rely on a "count-in" record measures DAW feature.
There are many many reasons for this. But a few important ones are:
------------------------------------------ Not everyone plays on the literal measure 1, tick 1. Humans are sometimes a little early and that's part of the feel. You risk truncating the start. ------------------------------------------ If you need to nudge a part back a hair, you have no where to nudge to if your recording starts on the exact measure 1. Let's say your player came in a little late and you want to bump it back. Now you have to make multiple edits to get it pushed back. And you might still run into issues with the first issue. ------------------------------------------ The first 2 bars of silence give you a noise print (room tone in the film business) which you can use to denoise later on. ------------------------------------------ Not all DAWs clear their audio engines on transport stop. So when playing back, you might have reverb tails in your initial play back. 2 bars of spaces gives it some room to clear them out later if that ends up being in your bounce. ------------------------------------------
These are just off the top of my head. The only benefit I can think of to starting on measure 1 is that you don't have to trim the bounce as much later. But it's really not a big deal to open a bounce in an editor and trim the leading silence. I use RX. I also use that moment to do a quick MP3 export of the perfectly trimmed file.
Just my thoughts. If you agree / disagree, discuss!
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