wax&wires

7 Quick Tips To Speed Up Your Workflow

We all want ways to crank out better music, and faster. Here are a few tips I’ve employed to help with just that.

1) Set time limits on sessions.
I know this seems counter-intuitive, but force breaks upon yourself. If you’re trying to nail a particular part, or find some new creative mojo, working yourself until you’re exhausted is only going to belabor the process and get you nice and frustrated in the process. Take an hour break, come back fresh and ready to kill it. Your brain will inevitably continue working on the song while you’re away from your desk, and that’s great. Some of my best creative ideas have come when I left the studio to go wash dishes or water the lawn for an hour. Some part will pop in my head that completely transforms the vibe of the song.

You could put a quick bounce of your song on your iPod and go for a drive too, though I usually find it best to avoid hearing anything during that time. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, if you listen to a song too much, everything starts to sound right. That’s bad. Get out of the studio. Don’t get stuck in tunnel vision.

2) Recycle your old stuff.
There’s nothing wrong, or creatively taboo, about using your old stuff again. This goes two ways.

Sigur Ros used to reverse vocal tracks and such from older albums and put them on their newer albums with tons of reverb to help create a nice ambience behind the newer tracks. So the first way is to actually use things you’ve released before, modify them beyond recognition, and reinsert them into your new material.

The second way is to create a folder on your computer for sounds and ideas you like, that might not sit well with the particular song you’re working on at the time.

A few months ago, I was working on a track in Ableton, and for some reason, when I went to export it, the computer glitched and gave me this really funky, bit-crushed, slowed down digital pattern. I loved it, so I dropped it in a folder. By the same token, I’ve stumbled on sounds I liked before that didn’t fit the key, mood, or timbre of a particular song, so I saved the clip to a bin on my computer. Every few months, or if I feel like I’ve hit a wall with a song I’m working on, I’ll dig through that bin of sound clips and get a nice creative shot in the arm.

3) Organize your files.
Develop a naming convention that works for you so that you can find songs and samples quickly.

Several years ago, when I was working in a pretty big studio down here, we used to have to label our DAT tapes and files with the format “yyyymmdd-sessionName”. I ended up adopting that format in my personal projects as well, because it makes so much sense. It takes up just 8 characters to name your files in such a way that the computer will always have them in chronological order. If you name them with the day or month first, the computer would sort them by the day or month, and files become harder to find. I’m not saying that’s hands down the best way to do it. I am saying that you should find something that works for you and stick with it.

Along with that, keep tabs on your favorite samples and patches (as mentioned above). That way, when you need a particular sound that you’ve used before, you can recall it quickly, rather than digging through thousands of samples and patches to find it again.

4) Keep your tracking materials handy.
If you don’t have a dedicated space in your house for your studio stuff, do your best to compromise. It makes such a difference when all I have to do is open up a program and hit record to lay down a new idea, rather than digging mics, cables, instruments, interfaces, etc out of the closet. By the time you get all that gear set up, you’ll have lost your train of thought, inspiration, and the energy to perform well. This includes keeping 9V batteries on hand for guitar pedals and tuners, strings on hand etc. When creativity strikes, you need to be ready to lock it down.

5) Use Templates.
This is an extension of the previous step. Just as you need to have your hardware ready to go in a moment’s notice, do the same with your software. If you have a great idea in your head, the last thing you want to do is spend 10 minutes adding tracks, arming them to record, adding the appropriate virtual instruments and plug-ins before you can even record. Figure out what you use on a regular basis, and have those tracks and plug-ins preloaded in your template session.

I noticed a few years ago that just about every song I make in Reason has piano, a big fat bass, some form of Dr. Rex and tight acoustic drums. I set up a template so that every time I open Reason, my favorite piano, drum kit, and synth bass get loaded up automatically, so I can jump right into making the music. Don’t give yourself enough time to forget your idea!

6) Use Multiple Monitors or Spaces.
You need enough space in the physical world to make your music, the same is true of your computer screen real estate. I used to use a 20″ and 24″ monitor. I could keep my soft-synths and mixer open on one side, and then have my audio editor open in the other. That helps you work quickly between programs that might be rewired into each other, as well as helping you see the big picture of your song and what all you’re using. I recently moved to a laptop as my main computer, and my production slowed down a lot since I have to use spaces to jump between windows and such rather than seeing everything in front of me.

7) Collaborate.
Work with artists that you know and trust. Trade sessions with each other to bring new ideas and views of your songs to light. The drummer in my old band and I used to work really well together. I would come up with some melodic idea on guitar or piano and bring it to him. I would be completely stalled out, and he would start laying down drum parts. A lot of times he would lay down a part in double-time, or half-time from what I was hearing in my head. That was exactly what I needed to find the heart and life of the song though. That simple spark would let the rest of the song simply fall in place.

Not only does this off load some of the creative work to give you a break, but it gives you a great opportunity to network and get some time in on other people’s tracks for new inspiration too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 8:51 pm. It is filed under wire tips and tagged with mixing, recording, studio, tips, workflow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.