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How has your process evolved?


mickomoo
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Figuring out a production workflow really helped my speed and direction when writing, and I accomplished that by watching and reading tons of tutorials on production, talking to producers who are more skilled than I am, and analyzing .flp files included with FL Studio. You can't really have a good production workflow unless you have a good background in production theory, or so I think, at least.

Composition is rarely a hang-up for me during the writing process anymore, even though I have a ton of improvements I can make in that realm. It's sort of a "good enough" thing at this point. Until pretty recently, my biggest obstacle was usually a disconnect between the soundscape and sound quality of what I was hearing on playback vs. what I had originally planned in my head that slowed me down and had me overthinking things. Getting over that hurdle and being able to make quick, workable production decisions has drastically improved my case of Dicks Around With Knobs Syndrome, or DAWKS, which accounted for like 90% of my writing time. The better you know what your knobs are doing, the easier it will be for you to find the combination of sweet spots that get you the sound you want.

Also keyboard shortcuts and all of that. Templates are nice, too, especially ones which load an EQ into every mixer track and have pre-built drum buses, parallel compression, reverb and delay sends, etc. just in case you need them. Presets are good, too, especially for EQs that don't start with a high-pass as the lowest band or a high-shelf as the highest. And check out Neblix's Kontakt routing template thread if you use Kontakt. Because fuck routing Kontakt every time I start a project.

I was born in 1989, I'm going to be a doctor in hardly over a year, and even I think that's fucked up and not ok.

Edited by ectogemia
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I'm not sure my process has evolved much haha. What I usually do is sit on my keyboard and mess with the sources I want to remix for a while, until I get a decent idea. Then I go to the DAW and start messing with sounds and stuff until I establish how the mix is going to work... Then I just write, usually recording everything through MIDI.

I normally mix after writing. I got that habit on my old computer that could barely handle the VSTi without crashing, so I was forced to do that. I should experiment with mixing while I write though!

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Figuring out a production workflow really helped my speed and direction when writing, and I accomplished that by watching and reading tons of tutorials on production, talking to producers who are more skilled than I am, and analyzing .flp files included with FL Studio. You can't really have a good production workflow unless you have a good background in production theory, or so I think, at least.

Personally I feel like if you can find the part of the production process that you are slowest at, and work at it until you can do it as if it were second nature, that'll be a huge hurdle you just eliminated and your workflow speed will increase most because of that improvement. It was EQ in general for me in the past. Now the only thing holding me back with EQ is the extreme low bass and extreme high treble, and I'm already working towards improving that. :)

Edited by timaeus222
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Personally I feel like if you can find the part of the production process that you are slowest at, and work at it until you can do it as if it were second nature, that'll be a huge hurdle you just eliminated and your workflow speed will increase most because of that improvement. It was EQ in general for me in the past. Now the only thing holding me back with EQ is the extreme low bass and extreme high treble, and I'm already working towards improving that. :)

Yep, critical thinking is the most powerful tool for self-improvement. The more surgically you can identify your shortcomings, the more focus you can apply in addressing them. Personally, I find those two parts of a mix to be the most difficult as well, and I've been loading in reference tracks in a similar genre (hard for me to do since I write weird shit, but something similar enough) and A/Bing mine with effects vs. the reference without effects and EQing til I'm close to the reference track. It's really helped my baseline sense of what good highs and lows sound like.

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Frankly, all this talk from you lot just sounds like double thought gobbledegook to me. :P

Now ^that^ is the first sensible thing I've seen in this thread. While you guys were spending countless hours yesterday crafting paragraphs about your processes and either patting yourselves on the back or hacking yourselves apart, some of us were actually using that time to make music. :tomatoface:

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Now ^that^ is the first sensible thing I've seen in this thread. While you guys were spending countless hours yesterday crafting paragraphs about your processes and either patting yourselves on the back or hacking yourselves apart, some of us were actually using that time to make music. :tomatoface:

It sounds to me like you've never experience the joy of tweaking your DAW settings for hours. :-) I'm not joking in the slightest.

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It sounds to me like you've never experience the joy of tweaking your DAW settings for hours. :-) I'm not joking in the slightest.

You ARE kidding me, right? I am learning Cubase, and also attempting to learn Vienna Ensemble Pro to run inside of Cubase. Tweaking and learning routing is all I've been doing for about two weeks. But yeah, I'm doing that instead of typing about it to you guys. :razz: (oh and I'm loving it)

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You ARE kidding me, right? I am learning Cubase, and also attempting to learn Vienna Ensemble Pro to run inside of Cubase. Tweaking and learning routing is all I've been doing for about two weeks. But yeah, I'm doing that instead of typing about it to you guys. :razz: (oh and I'm loving it)

Fair enough then. I am personally not wasting any time here, because I'm stuck at work. Although I've wondered if I could set up some kind of remote connection to my production PC that would let me actually make music at work. That idea is crazy enough to be worth considering. :-)

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Fair enough then. I am personally not wasting any time here, because I'm stuck at work. Although I've wondered if I could set up some kind of remote connection to my production PC that would let me actually make music at work. That idea is crazy enough to be worth considering. :-)

You never waste time here, your replies are always short and witty (I love that tbh). And yeah if you have the ability to make music at work (or tweak or w/e), DOOOOO EEEEET. :-D

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Fair enough then. I am personally not wasting any time here, because I'm stuck at work. Although I've wondered if I could set up some kind of remote connection to my production PC that would let me actually make music at work. That idea is crazy enough to be worth considering. :-)

Team Viewer, set it up as a personal license. I use this to access my code base at home from work. So it should work the other way around for accessing your music.

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Production and writing (and performing) overlap more than what most people think. In the end you're just manipulating frequencies either way. If you just end up wasting hours on trying to EQ your tracks to make them fit better or whatever, then it likely means you've made some sub-optimal choices in the arrangement and you're effectively trying to sweep the problem under the rug with the production process.

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It sounds to me like you've never experience the joy of tweaking your DAW settings for hours. :-) I'm not joking in the slightest.
To be honest, I feel the same way. I love production.

Just because you don't take time to try and craft your process into something that is expressible and consistent doesn't mean you're not good at what you do.

I don't explain to people how complex my project files are, doesn't mean they aren't. :tomatoface:

Also, I echo that "myeh" production sentiment. In the more recent year I've been kind of shying away from it. This is because I'm really bad at writing and good production is incapable of saving bad writing, so I'm putting it on the backburner and focusing on part-writing.

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Just because you don't take time to try and craft your process into something that is expressible and consistent doesn't mean you're not good at what you do.

I don't explain to people how complex my project files are, doesn't mean they aren't. :tomatoface:

Also, I echo that "myeh" production sentiment. In the more recent year I've been kind of shying away from it. This is because I'm really bad at writing and good production is incapable of saving bad writing, so I'm putting it on the backburner and focusing on part-writing.

Jeez dude, I was just having a lighthearted joke with Chimpazilla. :-P

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