Time and again I hear new producers say, “I don’t have time to work on music” or “I can’t figure out this arrangement for this song I’m working on.” and inevitably songs never get finished. When the producer without time to work on music has time, they often find themselves starting a new project, or opening up a project they’ve been working on and getting immediately stuck unsure of what to do. In this post, I cover five tips to help you finish music faster.
Create A Template Project
When I say “Create a Template Project”, I don’t mean one of those template project files you buy off certain websites that is a completed track that you tweak and some might try to call their own production. That is not the purpose of a template project. A template project can help you finish music faster by having your most common parts of songs already setup like MIDI and Audio channels for your drums, a channel for a bassline, maybe you have some bus groups you use on your drums, or maybe you make house music and you create drum racks with some basic “boots and cats” MIDI information so you can just drop some samples in and start building your groove. When time is limited, seconds matter and saving the cumulative hours that build up of having to rebuild a track from a completely blank project file allows you to finish music faster.
Use A MIDI Generator or Sequencer
If you produce electronic music, you’ve undoubtedly heard countless sequences of bleeps and bloops that were not played or programmed by someone playing keys or hitting pads. Ever since the 1940’s when electronic music was first being realized and explored, sequencers have existed. The first was created by Raymond Scott using thyratrons and relays. In the modern age, there are a plethora of software options for sequencing data. Most allow for precise programming, but also feature randomization capabilities so you can just click the button until things sound cool, make adjustments along the way. There are other sequencers that will generate full on MIDI data for you spanning multiple parts. Instacomposer is one such VST plugin and is billed as an Intelligent MIDI Generation plugin.
My favorite MIDI generator plugin, especially for melodic chord progressions is Scaler 2. Scaler 2 is an inspirational and powerful music theory workstation that gives you access to a world of new ideas, expressions and melodies. With powerful detection of MIDI and audio, Scaler 2 can determine what key and scale you’re in and suggest chords that match your music. The plugin helps you discover the perfect melody with performance expressions, and can even suggest ways to change from one key to another. The Drag and Drop export functionality of the progressions is also fantastic. This plugin can get very deep, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. I highly recommend this if you struggle with chord progressions.
By using MIDI Generator plugins and Max4Live sequencers, there’s no reason to ever not feel creative or inspired as you can still create musical ideas to help finish music faster.
Get Out of the Loop
I’ve produced a lot of different styles of dance music spanning my twenty year career producing music. You don’t need to have 20 different parts and everything about your song ideated before you arrange elements of the track. If all you have is an 8 bar loop of drums and a bassline, that is all you need to start arranging your song and fleshing things out fully. By laying out the loop over the length of a track and finding sections to delete bits from for your builds and breaks, you develop a flow and finish music faster.
You may be disagree with this point, but I urge you to try it. A frequent message I got when receiving feedback, was that my tracks were too busy, and had too many pieces to it, and this was a symptom of staying in the loop for too long. If you’ve got an hour to work on a track and you spend half of that time listening to the 8 bar loop trying to figure out what to do next, that’s thirty minutes you could’ve spent listening to how the track flows.
Finish Music Faster
By implementing the above strategies, I’ve been able to increase the quantity of my musical output while also increasing the quality. If you’re interested in more information on how to improve your own workflow in music production to finish music faster please don’t hesitate to drop me a line to discuss 1 on 1 Coaching.