What is the best way to do vocal comping on Ardour? Is there a better way than creating one track per take?
Some people use Playlists.
Here’s how I do it:
(1) record the first full-length take onto track “A”
(2) create an overdub/retake track “B” (which can be muted)
(3) record retakes on track B (creating a new layer on top each time), and if you get a good piece, cut out a region and drag it up to track A. The region will have a short crossfade on each end, cutting out/in from the original take.
(4) when you are done, disable B. It will be stored in the session if you need to go back to it, but it won’t use up any disk throughput or dsp resources.
The best time to make a decision is right after the take, when you remember what the good parts were. If you make 10 retakes, then try to choose among them, you’ll waste a lot of time.
If you can’t get a good take within 3 or 4 tries, then do something different. Practice more, try to manually tune/fix the first take, or get a new singer 
P.S. The overlap/crossfade may differ slightly between A2, A3, and Mixbus. I use Mixbus.
-Ben
Stacked layers is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!
Thanks for posting this, i never thought of doing retakes this way.
In some projects sometimes ive redone say 1 chorus on a seperate track then cut the original out on the original track and then had to copy the plugins.
this is a much better solution.
thanks