RE: One at a time or what?
December 19, 2016 at 6:52 am
(This post was last modified: December 19, 2016 at 7:48 am by Homeless Nutter.)
When I was writing and recording music, I'd always have a number of tracks I'd switch between, every time I felt I wasn't making progress with the current one, or when my mood changed. Occasionally I'd have a manic spur of enthusiasm and/or an upcoming deadline for one particular tune and then I'd focus on that one song for a few sleep-deprived days. I'd usually only actually finish a small selection of tracks, I'd be working on, but having a large library of different projects, covering a variety of moods and styles, and at various stages of completion, made it easier for me to always have something I could work on, if I felt desensitized, stuck, or bored. Doing something else is often the best solution for writer's block and - in the long run - minimizes the time wasted, blankly staring at the screen.
I don't think there's a"right way" to go about the process, but I can't stress enough the importance of "fresh ears", during most stages of creating an audio track. If you're bored and frustrated, it's probably going to come across in the music in some way. If your ears are tired and overly familiar with the material - you'll miss a lot of things, especially during mixing. It's amazing what kind of self-delusion our brains are capable of, especially when dealing with repeated patterns, for a prolonged amount of time. I still sometimes discover clicks, noises, and distortion in my old tracks, that I never noticed before, despite - or perhaps because of - having heard them countless times.
I find, that working on a number of tracks at once also helps to keep them stylistically and sonically cohesive, which is particularly useful, if you want your demo, or commercial release to sound like an album, rather than a compilation. Of course, in such case mixing and mastering of the material is usually done after it's all been written, arranged and recorded, so that the dynamics and the frequency spectrum are even across all the tracks. It's probably less important, if you're making single tracks to put on YouTube, although it's still best to give each song at least a few days before mixing/mastering, so you have the aforementioned fresh ears and some perspective, at this crucial stage of production.
I don't think there's a"right way" to go about the process, but I can't stress enough the importance of "fresh ears", during most stages of creating an audio track. If you're bored and frustrated, it's probably going to come across in the music in some way. If your ears are tired and overly familiar with the material - you'll miss a lot of things, especially during mixing. It's amazing what kind of self-delusion our brains are capable of, especially when dealing with repeated patterns, for a prolonged amount of time. I still sometimes discover clicks, noises, and distortion in my old tracks, that I never noticed before, despite - or perhaps because of - having heard them countless times.
I find, that working on a number of tracks at once also helps to keep them stylistically and sonically cohesive, which is particularly useful, if you want your demo, or commercial release to sound like an album, rather than a compilation. Of course, in such case mixing and mastering of the material is usually done after it's all been written, arranged and recorded, so that the dynamics and the frequency spectrum are even across all the tracks. It's probably less important, if you're making single tracks to put on YouTube, although it's still best to give each song at least a few days before mixing/mastering, so you have the aforementioned fresh ears and some perspective, at this crucial stage of production.
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." - George Bernard Shaw
