Within this work, an adapted bending resonance method is presented, which is especially suitable to determine the elastic and damping material properties of composite materials. Since the properties of these material group depend among others on frequency and reinforcement direction, a large number of individual tests are required for a sufficient characterisation. Therefore, a new approach for an automatic data acquisition and analysis is developed and presented in this paper.The presented approach bases on a measurement sequence combining different methods like decaying free oscillations and frequency response functions and thus minimises the uncertainties of the damping measurement and enables a test stand automation. The directional-dependent material properties of carbon fibre-reinforced epoxy were determined to demonstrate the proposed resonance bending method with adapted measuring sequence.