Okay, maybe not everything, but how often have you accidentally stumbled across a sublime chord progression while messing around at the keyboard only to lose it to the ether as you weren’t recording at the time? Some DAWs now feature retrospective recording functionality, rendering the last few minutes of MIDI input to a track at the click of a button, but if yours doesn’t, get into the habit of manually entering record mode first every time you reach for the ivories. Having the ability to launch your DAW and immediately lay down, say, a beat, a bassline, a pad and/or a lead synth using a set of tried-and-tested ‘generic’ sounds, means you need never lose that bolt-from-the-blue sonic idea to the distraction and buzzkill of ‘new project’ admin again. It’s not rocket science, but the important thing is that you stick to the system, adding new samples to it as they arrive, rather than letting them pile up in a limbo-like ‘Samples to be sorted’ folder.Įven more important than that when it comes to accelerating workflow is creating and maintaining a template DAW project (or several), with a comprehensive but resource-light set of instruments and effects pre-loaded and ready to go. If these are not an option, create your own folder hierarchy, starting with instrument type at the top (drums, basses, etc.), then genre, tempo or whatever other categories suit best, and filter samples into it as appropriate. There are also dedicated applications – like Iced Audio’s AudioFinder on Mac – that can analyze and catalog all the sounds on your hard drive. The free KOMPLETE KONTROL software from Native does the job for you, tagging and sorting all your NKS-ready sample content (that’s everything from, Expansions, and the MASCHINE library), and making it easy to find and preview directly in your DAW. With any contemporary producer’s sample library potentially weighing in at terabytes of files, keeping those loops and one-shots organized and easy to navigate has never been more necessary – or challenging. Here, are seven surefire tips to help you get past your own administrative foibles and environmental compromises, and, ultimately, ramp up your productivity. Yet all too often, we stick to the same intuitive script we’ve always followed, knowing that we could be working more efficiently if we just took the time to audit and address our ingrained practices and habits. For any producer looking to make the best music they possibly can, the importance of establishing an effective workflow can’t be understated.
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