Hey guys, checking in with something i've been curious about for the past week - work habits. When to make, how to work, optimal mental states/awakeness/whatever to get things done.


What works for you, personally?

For me, I tend to section time early in the evening on a daily basis to get some good effort in.

Compose/arrange first, produce second.

Alternatively, dedicate separate time to sound design/mixing than you do when writing

most of this is kind of just new takes of my own based on the original, but i feel like i got the central hook of it down pretty well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I often like adding vocal hits that I've screwed around with beforehand and layering them (Harmor is great for this) over basses I make in either Massive or Serum. I then add the usual, distortion (either Saturn, Trash2 etc), a vocoder somewhere and Guitar Rig. Then I'll bounce it down and run it through the same channel... sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

For example the bass hit I made at the end of this - http://vocaroo.com/i/s0tHUa3nblt6

this, in a nutshell. my go-to's are Grain Delay (in Ableton), Trash, and some Valhalla verb. rinse and repeat i suppose. pulling apart the samples with the 'texture' warping option is also super fun.

This is something I've been doing for a while and I find it can bring a lot more opportunities to the table when working on a concept.
A while back, I was working on an LP and my computer died. Luckily I had wavs of most of the tracks from the album (although I was still unsatisfied with them).. I moved on from them onto new things since I did have project files for them anymore, until I tried dropping one of the tracks into my DAW and "remixing" my own work.. Changed the way I produced forever. You are able to give a track so much more depth and intricacy, just as you would remixing someone else, when doing this with your own work. Nowadays I usually get a good structure of a track completed, then start a new project and drop the wav into it, editing and manipulating it to create something more.

A good way to put older or unfinished tracks to use

I do this to fill in some 'gaps' i have with one songs- especially if i resample what i currently have and put some interesting destructive effects on it, especially a Grain Delay in Ableton or a third party distortion plugin with some neat parameters (Izotope Trash for example)

allows you to put your song in such a different perspective

In my opinion you don't need theory to be 'good' but you definitely need theory to be the best you can be.

The ability to understand what you're writing instead of just playing by ear saves you a lot of time searching for the 'right' notes/harmonies and can lead to really really interesting tracks.