Work Smarter
Although a comment like ‘work smarter’ might appear to state very little, this approach can influence many areas of your day-to-day production tasks. It’s all about taking a step back and considering whether you’re doing things in the most logical way or just making life hard for yourself by absentmindedly following the same inefficient process each time.
The most obvious way to speed up the creation of new tracks is to save DAW templates for common production scenarios. This could be something as simple as configuring a few tracks with a selection of instrument, effect and master output settings, or could be as involved as taking an existing track, removing all the MIDI and audio, and then saving the project ready to be populated with your creativity at a later date. If that sounds like cheating, then consider that being able to work quickly on the compositional side – without worrying too much about EQ, compression and other processing – can be extremely liberating. You can even go as far as creating a bespoke collection of channel strip and device rack presets to call from when inspiration strikes.
If you work with samples, organise your sample collection by types of sound: a folder full of kick drums, for example, split into subfolders of acoustic sounds, subby hits, processed sounds, and so on according to your personal preferences. Most importantly, throw out all the excess. Do you really need that library of 3,497 snare drum sounds? Whittle your collection down to the hits you know are going to sound good in your tracks.
Whittle your sample collection down to the hits you know are going to sound good in your tracks.
Backing up your work may be just about the most boring thing you can do in the studio, but there’s no doubt it’s important. Online backups make a lot of sense these days since cloud storage and specialist backup provision are easily available and usually quite cheap. If you keep your projects well organised, saving different versions as you go, you’ll not only ensure that you never lose a project to a corrupt hard disk again, but you’ll also find it easy to go back to older projects if you need to remix, rework or plunder elements for a new track.
07.59 PM
Thanks a lot for this very usefull article.
08.59 PM
Great article : one doesn’t need lots of stuff to achieve great ideas.
Always focus on the ideas, not on the gear.
I would also add that a few cheap tricks can strongly improve your listening accoustics. Read SoundOnSound articles in their archives on that matter (Studio SOS). I lost so many many years working in poor acoustics. Now that I solved this problem is like if I had a new pair of expensive speakers.
09.16 PM
On a 24bit system, you have to have your master at -72db to mix at 12bit, I frankly doubt anyone mix at those levels.
11.14 PM
finally someone’s addressed the reality of the situation. some much needed pragmatic advice
12.29 PM
Nice article that addresses many things that I have stumbled on. Such as when I adjusted my seat to my keyboards high enough caused me legs to hurt above and behind the knees because my feet didn’t touch the floor well enough. The solution was to lower the keyboard stand.
Few hints and my learning experience:
The modern computer master volume is outside the bit domain of the soundcard. and won’t cause degradion Use that if you have nothing else. Even the most basic built in audio chipset is at least 24 bit nowadays anyway.
The german Beat magazine has several free plugins that are excellent.
drumMic’a is a good free drum plugin.
I spent around 9 days in selecting a DAW few years ago. A one called Energy XT was by far the easiest to learn in my opinion. but deceptively powerful. The drawback is that the looks are dated and until recently not in much development.
I own now couple of other DAWS, but it is still my favorite.
Cakewalk has often excellent sales on their synths and their entry level DAWs at great discounts.
Isotope Nectar Elements is often on sale and powerful and easy to use plugin for voice.
Today I mainly use 3 commercial synths. The reason is that I invested time in studying them (as this artivce recommends and found that I could do virtually anything that I need). One is sample based, one a hybrid and the third is analog.
I found out I was spending to much time in checking out free synths. Don’t do the same, select rather few and stick to them.
I use mostly free effects or the ones that come with my DAW’s, (apart from Nectar Elements). I find it sufficient and think it will suffice most people (non pros).
I found creating a whole song a bit overwhelming. By sticking to smaller pieces but doing them well increased my confidence.
My other weak point was lack of experience with drums. Using and studying midi drum clips and modifying them rather then creating new beats, helped a lot in the beginning.
Also realizing that I spent too much time in tweaking sound of the beat in the beginning as I had wrong ideas of how it would sound in the final mix.
02.48 PM
Yup – even though on a 24bit system, using only 12-bits is theoretically down at -72db and Javier Z mentions that people don’t mix at that level, you’d be surprised at the way some people set their gain structure in a DAW – especially when using buses/groups, and then use the DAW’s output level as an overall monitoring volume control.
So 12-bits isn’t necessarily common, but i’ve seen it.
12.21 PM
Speaker placement:
” NOT TOO NEAR THE REAR WALL, ”
Well, Genelec recommends to keep the speakers either on the back wall or over 1 meter from the backwall. Backwall being as good as one meter. For most homestudios it’s better to have speakers on the backwall for most controll over the sound.