Time Management/Worklfow questions

[SabalSounds]

Hi all – I’ve chatted with some of you here and elsewhere.

I’m hoping for your best strategies with time management and/or workflow enhancements that helped you get more songs completed. I’ll include all aspects like mixing,mastering,metadata, etc in the scope of my questions. Anyone finding Composer Catalog, or tagging software helpful?

I’m 9 months into my music library journey and have set some lofty goals for 2016. I have a full-time job and a long commute so I keep ideas recorded in my smartphone and work on them nights and weekends. It seems a long way away but I would like to hear my music in TV/Film so I appreciate the collective experience here. Before anything else I’ve got to have usable tracks to offer 🙂

Thanks in advance!

Steven

[Paolo]

I’m hoping for your best strategies with time management and/or workflow enhancements that helped you get more songs completed

Hey Steven,

Everyone of course will have different preferences for workflow. I share a couple that helped me and it stems from analyzing the songs that are paying well.

So if I wrote 10 garage rock tracks, 10 tension tracks, 10 acoustic roots and 10 ethnic tracks, some of those 40 tracks will be paying well beyond what the others have paid (at least that’s my experience).

So then I look at what’s similar/different – the instrumentation, the usage, the ratings, the feel, and how much or little I varied from the stereotypical sound of that genre. And then I’ll write less of what didn’t sell as well.

Hope that helps and best of luck to you in your journey.

[paolo]

PS
I see you’re not yet in a position to use that tip so here’s one that might help as you build your catalog.

Make templates. After you create a song, save that song structre, instruments, plugins, setting etc. as a template. I label my templates by genre.

After you save your template I would recommend deleting the automation data.

Now when you want to create more songs in that genre/style all the set-up work is done and saved as a template 🙂

[SabalSounds]

Great stuff paolo!

I’ve saved a template for mastering for sure. When creating I don’t stick to templates for an entire session per se but instead with Cubase I can archive tracks with all inserts /eq etc. So if one combination of plugins sounds great for a shoegaze sound and another for a country sound etc. I can import those tracks loaded and ready to create depending on what the cue calls for. I’m beginning to build drum templates too as that seems to be where a majority of time is spent tweaking.

[Author]

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