Evaluate your progress

Want to move in the right direction for 2018? Evaluate your success over the last year, then scrutinise that info and set fresh goals for the next twelve months! You might be a serial ‘loop maker’ who can’t finish tracks – if that’s the case, then 2018’s mission could be to simply complete X number of tunes. Equally, you might feel that lacking certain skills in the studio (such as music theory or synthesis knowledge) has held you back in 2017, so it’s time to knuckle down and improve those skills once and for all. To make your goals less daunting and easier to stick to, we suggest you break them down into smaller chunks for individual months, weeks or even days.

For example, if you struggle to turn sketches into finished tracks, try to complete just one or two tracks a month over the year. It might not sound like a lot, but by the time 2019 comes around, you’ll have an album’s worth of material which might have never left your DAW otherwise!

To aide motivation, write all this down in a luxury notebook or diary, or even on a whiteboard in the studio – ie, not on a disposable scrap of paper that you might easily discard. This’ll reinforce your goals and give you the satisfaction of ticking completed tasks off the list.