When you get a bit older, as your world seems to get filled up with things competing for your attention and time, you start to appreciate efficiency. It’s not for everyone of course but for me it became an essential part of making music whether I was writing and recording or mixing songs for others.
Checklists Are Cool Too
When we consider having a checklist for something we probably associate them with recipes for caramel slice, what items to pack for your camping trip or how to complete a multi-faceted task that needs to be carried out in a specific order.
Let’s face it, besides from the recipe for caramel slice (delicious), checklists don’t seem very creative or enticing.
Discovering Your Process Through A Checklist
One of the reasons I enjoy writing these posts is that they help clarify my thinking on many of my processes. When you have to explain why you do something a certain way or why you think about it in a certain way you have to examine those ideas much more closely.
Sometimes this leads me to reassess what I think or how I approach something. Writing a checklist of your process for songwriting, recording a guitar, setting a song up for mixing will help you think deeper about why you do what you do. This should give you a number of questions to answer:
- Why do I do it this way?
- What do other people do and could I modify what I do based on their process?
- Is my process clear and when should I deviate from it?
These are highly creative thoughts to have.
Show Up & Get Things Done
Have you ever sat down to write, record, mix etc and felt a little lost? I don’t expect anyone would say no. Having a checklist to help. Why? Because it can set you on a path and helps you out of the land of 1000 decisions and decision fatigue.
When I open a mix session to start to work on I follow this basic checklist:
- Save out a fresh version so I can always refer back to the original.
- Arrange the tracks, drum on top, vocals on bottom.
- Rename tracks so they make sense to me.
- Colour the tracks so they are visually distinct (I also have set colour for certain instruments and groups of instruments).
- While I’m doing this housekeeping I generally listen to the track to get a feel for it.
- Take a note of significant automations, then delete all the automation.
- Gain stage the audio and virtual instruments.
- Faders all go down and then I start to build out a rough mix balance, sometimes keeping compression, EQ and FX settings which might be in the project but often removing them completely.
I’ll stop there.
A Living Document
Do I check off each of those items as I work through my mix checklist, no, but I stick to this basic pattern each time. I know this will get me into a creative place. Some people call this flow. Getting into flow through the use of a structured approach is efficient and optimal for my creativity.
It’s also important to note that this process has gone through many iterations and will probably change again as I grow in my craft.
The Takeaway: Go write a checklist of your creative processes. I think you’ll be surprised what it will do for your approach to creating.
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