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Recently, I came across an article called “50 ways to increase productivity.” Inspired by this, I took a look at a few things that aren’t on this list that help me with productitivity in the studio. After all, the creative process can be lonely and tiresome and large tasks seem like they will never be completed. Here are my top 5 tips:

1. Use a paper-based desk pad. These desk pads are modeled after those large writing pads you see on easels in board rooms or “Win, Lose or Draw”. The idea is that you can make boxes around groups of tasks and then dilleniate the smaller tasks more frequently. Try to make those sub tasks about even in “time weight” so that you don’t have to work for hour just to scratch off a single thing! For example, don’t just have “finish mixing song A”. Instead, break it down and think about what you really need to accomplish with song A. Maybe instead you should have a few smaller tasks like “set trumpet part better in mix” and “adjust panning and reverb for more depth” and “edit bass part for better sync”, etc. It is extremely satisfying then to me to be able to cross things out as I go and see from a quick visual perspective how far I’ve come that day!
2. Put long term goals somewhere else, but still visible. The things on your pad should be ONLY things you plan to get done that day. That way, you can always go to bed feeling like you conquered the world today! For more long range things (with fat ambiguous names) I put these in various places, such as on stickie notes hanging like stray whiskers from my iMac monitor. It drives me insane, so I love the feeling of transferring one of those tasks to the pad for the day and tossing those out! (more…)

Recently, I’ve been teaching some composition lessons and one of my students, who uses Logic Express, has been discovering a bunch of pretty nifty FREE AU plug-ins that work great in Logic.  I had never used a free plug-in before, preferring to stay with the “commercial quality” set from Apple/Logic/Emagic and Universal Audio.  However, after checking a few of these out, some are quite good and you really can’t beat the price!

So far, the best ones that are free tend to be most useful for sound design or synthesis.  Others that are decent (delays, bitcrushers, distortion) are duplicating (often less well) by something that exists in Logic, so I haven’t bothered with them too much.

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Several audio friends I know (Jeffrey Fischer & Dave Cebrowski) put me on to a different way of monitoring. The technique stresses the importance of allowing for headroom when working in an all digital environment.

To accomplish this, do NOT attempt to have your music “in the red” all of the time. Instead, calibrate your monitors so that -20 dB = 0 VU = 83 dB SPL per monitor. Then, I use the K-14 or K-20 monitoring system with my Precision Limiter from Universal Audio.

The wonderful part about this is that you can actually mix WITHOUT looking at the meter all the time! 83 dB in this system sounds plenty loud, so you know when things are “too loud”, and you just adjust. At the same time, peaks can be allowed because you have between 14 and 20 dB of headroom! (depending on which system you use). To read more about the K-system, designed by legendary mastering engineer Bob Katz, you can read this article on his website.

Enjoy and happy mixing!