Time management and workflow
Unless you’re in the lucky position of being a man or lady of leisure, you’ll probably have less time available for creating music than you’d like, so it pays dividends to manage your studio time to get the most from every session. Work out your allotted time in the studio for each week, then come up with a rough schedule for learning, gathering sounds, composing/writing and mixing that fits well with your other commitments. By breaking up all your musical endeavours in this way, you can keep things interesting while making the most of your precious studio time.
Another great way of being more efficient when you’re working on music is to improve your workflow. There are lots of ways you can do this: a good start is to change your DAW settings to ones you work with best. For example, if you’ve decided to take up Studio One for producing but have a deep knowledge of Cubase, it’s simple to change Studio One’s keyboard shortcuts to Cubase’s letting you keep things moving rather than constantly getting stuck looking for certain functions. On the same theme, if there’s a function you use a lot that doesn’t have a shortcut assigned to it, why not make your own? This’ll speed things up no end, and make your time in the studio more efficient.
It’s also really important to keep your enjoyment levels as high as possible when creating music, and to help with this, we suggest having a few projects ongoing at once that are at different stages of completion. If you’re not feeling inspired to mix down the track that’s nearly finished, just jump onto another one that needs sound design or arrangement instead. Working on one piece single-mindedly can be great, of course, but breaking things up into smaller tasks is always better for workflow.