After taking plenty of time to digest all of these recommendations and others, and after waiting more than a week for my Media Mail delivery of a book I purchased on Cool Edit Pro, this weekend I finally opened all of these tracks and started playing with it for the first time. It took nearly an hour and a half to open them all, but once they were open I was surprised how little affect the open session had on my system (which functions as my Plex server). I was a little concerned that my 16 GB of RAM would be stressed right from the start.
My initial observations and questions (in bold):
1. I have mixed enough board feeds with my mics to be pretty comfortable at hearing time-alignment issues and resolving them through shifting or stretching (depending on whether the sources were captured with the same or different recorders). I've spent a couple of hours listening to various parts of this show, playing with the mix, including plenty amounts of the house mics, and I can't hear any time alignment issues. Should I trust my ears on this, or is it impossible for there not to be any necessary adjustment?
2. I considered both viewpoints on whether to start with panning or end with it, and I like the argument that the perception of relative levels is affected by panning, so one of the first things I did was to move things around a little bit. Keys are 30% right, drums 30% left. When those musicians step to the front of the stage to play mandolin and bass, they're a little closer to center, so I panned those inputs (vox and instruments) only 20%. The house mics (on-stage shotguns) I have panned 40%, and I currently have the center mic turned off because it seems to me to be a little more polluted with stage noise. Whether this is a sound observation and reaction/judgment, I don't know. But that's what I'm working with for now. This sounds good to my ears, but I'll certainly consider tweaking it as the project evolves.
3. I've played with the levels a lot on different songs, and have settled on some pretty variable levels depending on the song, which underscores how much automation is going to be required to get everything just the way I want it. Which is fine -- I have the time and patience to work my way through it.
4. It took me a while to figure out all the effects terminology, especially in the multitrack workspace. I think I'm figuring it out, but I'm wondering if I should be applying any of these in the track edit view (destructively to the source files) rather than layering them on top of one another in the multitrack. Are system resources a consideration here? Should things like the 100-150 Hz high pass just be applied to the source files?
5. On the topic of effects, it took me until the end of the weekend (late last night) to realize that I seemed to be a little crippled using Cool Edit Pro 2.1, in that it appeared that it was going to prevent me from using a lot of VST plugins. So the last thing I did last night was to find an old free version of Audition 3, which added a lot of VST compatibility. All I've done so far is open a few tracks to ensure that the interface was close enough to Cool Edit Pro to look familiar to me. In the process, I discovered that the tracks that Cool Edit Pro took 2.5 to 3 minutes each to open were each opened by Audition in 30 seconds or less. I'm not sure if there's a good reason for that, or if it just means that Audition, by default, monopolizes more of the system resources and it's going to cripple my Plex server when I open all the tracks and resume work on the session.
Are there any particular amp sims that I should consider for the DI tracks? Are these free plugins?
Thanks for all of the advice so far. I think this is going to sound incredible when it's finished.