10 Tips for Speeding Up Music Production

Ever wonder how some producers churn out a track a day while it takes you months to finish just one? Guest-blogger Melvin Rijlaarsdam shares his top ten tips for speeding up your music production workflow without compromising the quality of your tracks.

#1. Use Templates

A DAW project template is basically a preset that you can use as a starting point. From instruments and effects to groups and samples, a template can include everything you like to use for every project. You can save even more time by colour-coding and naming all of the tracks in advance.

#2. Create a Folder For Your Go-To Samples

Have a tendency to use the same samples a lot? Then it can be worth creating a dedicated folder and sticking your favourite samples in it.

#3. Make Your Own Presets

You can easily save sounds that you like to use. Practically every synthesizer plugin has the option to create and save custom presets, and the same goes for most effect plugins. Some DAWs even allow you to save entire tracks as presets, including effects like Ableton’s Instrument Racks. Revisit your old projects and turn those old sonic nuggets into presets!

#4. Set a Deadline

Without a deadline, you risk working on projects that are never going to be finished, forever improving little things here and there. Also, according to Parkinson’s Law, ‘work will expand to fill the time allotted for its completion’. In other words, if you have two weeks to finish a project, you’ll most likely use the entire two weeks to work on it. If you literally have forever to finish a project, you’ll most likely work on it for a long, long time. So, set a soft deadline for yourself even when there’s no hard deadline. This will help you with time management.

#5. Bounce to Disk

Back in the days of tapes and tape recorders, musicians and producers rarely had more than eight tracks at their disposal, yet they still managed to record complex and interesting music. They would, for example, make a live mix of eight drum microphones and record the sound to just two tracks (left and right), leaving six tracks for other instruments. These days, there are no such limits, which can make endlessly tweaking things really tempting. My advice? Don’t waste any time and bounce audio as soon as you’re happy with it so you can continue working on the rest of the song.

#6. Impose Restrictions

The more choices you have, the harder it is to make decisions. This is why it’s not a bad idea to limit your choices so you’re forced to get creative with the tools that are available to you. Writing a new song? Try writing it without a rhythm, or write it using nothing but vocals. Having a lot of options makes it tempting to try every last one, which can be really time consuming.

#7. Set a Timer

Deadlines are great for the long term, but you also need a solution to save time in the short run. This is where the timer function of your phone can come in handy. Set it to 60 minutes and try to finish a specific task within that time. This can be writing, recording or mixing a song. It’s also a fun challenge to do with fellow producers and musicians since you can keep tabs on one another.

#8. Use a Reference Track

Most songs within a given style have a fixed or standard structure, like the verse–chorus structure of a pop song, or the buildup-drop structure of an EDM track. Go ahead and import a track into your DAW. Now, even out the tempo and create markers to label the various parts. Save this structure as a DAW template and you’ve got one less thing you need to spend time on.

#9. Mix Effects In Early

If you already know you’re going to add a certain effect to a certain instrument, why wait until the mixing phase when you can add it during the recording phase? You can easily record a guitar with stompboxes mixed in, or activate the low-cut filter of your microphone if you already know that you don’t want those low frequencies in the mix. The better the raw recording sounds, the less time you’ll need to dedicate to the mix. The only thing you have to bear in mind is that you can’t undo these decisions afterwards, and it can take some time and practice to learn what you should include and what you shouldn’t.

10 Tips for Speeding Up Music Production

#10. Differentiate Between Sound Design and Production

Finding the perfect samples can be a long and tedious process, and when you’re in a flow, you don’t want to stop and scroll through an endless list of samples. That’s why it can be worth dedicating a few hours to sound design every week. Spend some time getting to know that new synth plugin and record everything you do, then save the best bits and stick them in a folder. After a few months, you’ll have created a custom sample pack full of 100% original sounds that you can bank on whenever you’re ‘in the zone’.

Ever get stuck when you’re writing new material? Or got your own tips to share? Drop a comment below!