Productivity tips for music composition in a DAW

With the goal of increasing my output as much as possible, I’m constantly hacking my productivity and trying to remain unstuck and moving forward. Lately I’ve had a lot of success with an approach I’m going to try and outline here.

Really its an attitude adjustment more than a specific list of actions. I will dive into each of these in this post:

1. Tend the Creative Fire
2. When you’re writing music, just write the music
3. Minimize sound design
4. Walk away--you’re done!

Tend the Creative Fire

This is the core of the ethos. When you have a creative work in progress, that creative spark, inspiration, fire, whatever you want to call it, is your most valuable asset. You need to chase it, let it lead you, stoke its fire, and one way or another, hold it for as long as you possibly can while you capture your art down on tape, midi, whatever.

Everything in this approach is about defending yourself from distraction, defending your spark.

So: sit down with intention.

If your goal is to explore all of the flavors of reverb you have at your disposal, then by all means: throw some midi down on a piano or synth track, and spend some quality time getting to know your plugins. This is totally essential to success: understanding your toolkit through experience. No one is arguing the usefulness of this.

However, if you sat down originally to write music-- to give life to a seed of an idea you had, to help it flourish and grow, and perhaps one day share it with the world... then tweaking the predelay on your reverb for 20 minutes more than likely just killed that seed dead in its tracks, or at least put it on life support.

When you’re writing music, just write the music

The musical content of your work is its true capital. Time spent away from this is time added to finishing the project. Keep in mind that it is much, MUCH easier to effectively do sound design separately from composition, once you have a complete musical idea to work with.

Make the goal of the writing stage coherence not aural perfection. Get the emotion and feel across. Focus on melody, phrasing, chordal voicing, instrumentation, arrangement. Focus on structure and content, rather than sonic quality. Sound designing later, when you have a complete idea to embellish and accentuate, is so much more efficient it really pays to avoid getting sucked into too early.

In addition to overthinking the mix and effects like compression and reverb, individual instruments and timbres can sidetrack you as well.

Synths

Beware the trap of coming up with the perfect patch for your piece. This can suck up so much time, and is much better done in a dedicated session. Synthesizers like Massive X or Alchemy are insanely complicated, from voicing to infinite modulation. So fun to explore and play with, but they will blow you way off course. And whats more, I find that sound design jumbled in with a composition session almost never yields results that I like. That mixing of concerns does a disservice to both composition and sound design, and impoverishes both of your creative focus.

Grab a preset and move on! Alternatively, learn to keep it simple and learn how to leave "good enough" alone after some quick dialing. I'll be honest, I have a hard time not rolling my own even when moving quickly, but I’ve found my quick path to “good enough”, especially in Massive X, using more traditional oscillator shapes and a generous amount of cutoff.

Orchestra

I use mostly spitfire libraries, which (like most orchestral libraries) are extremely responsive to expressive modulation, but again, here be dragons. When I'm composing, I try my best to “play in” the dynamic modulation with a modwheel as I'm writing a part. This data almost never makes it to the final cut, but it gets me at that good enough spot where I can consider the musical idea captured, letting me move on with composition.

Minimize Sound Design

When writing music in a DAW, it’s important to cultivate the discipline of less-is-more with respect to sound design. Whether its individual instruments, effects, articulations, dynamic curves and automation, the important thing is to do as little as possible to make it sound enjoyable. The key word is enjoyable, not perfect. This is yet another instance where the phrase perfect is the enemy of done shines.

Perfect is the enemy of done ~Socrates

Oftentimes things like reverb or synth voicing can be vital to the musical idea. Fair enough! But it’s important to be mindful of the pits we can fall into and be judicious. Avoid pursuing “perfect” at this stage at all costs. Cultivate the ability to arrive at “good enough” with minimal effort and broad strokes, and get back to extending the content of your work ASAP.

You're Done!

By keeping everything other than composing and arranging to a minimum, I’m always a little surprised when I reach the end. I’m done? Really? Sure enough, the musical idea is complete, expanded upon, structured, arranged. Complete. Without fatigue. I still feel inspired and interested in the piece.

This makes the dedicated sound design, mixing, and tweaking sessions to follow feel like an exciting reward.

It's a hugely important part of this process to identify this juncture. I often find I am start to tweak things other than the core content and have to catch myself, then I realize-- oh wait.. these are tiny changes. The piece is done. Time to give it some space. For my current project, moving on to the next movements has been a perfect padding.

You were closer than you think!

I’m always blown away by how close it actually feels to done

After a few days away from the piece after finishing the initial writing phase I’ve described, I’m always blown away by how close it actually feels to done, all of the minutiae that bothered me and threatened to blow me off course shrinks or sometimes goes away completely. This perspective is the next best thing to a second set of ears.

My theory is that we generally make solid decisions on the fly. Overthinking is the enemy in so many things, creative pursuits especially. By not overthinking the little things, we can move through the core creative process quickly and keep our creative fire burning bright. It seems to me that the truer we are to that fire, the more everything else seems to fall into place.

What do you think?

Do you like the idea of resisting the tweaking until the end, or do you thrive on meandering through all the complex details as you go? I'd love to hear a defense of the opposite approach.

Credits

Cover photo: Elijah Ekdahl

Inspiration: Eric Maisel's book Fearless Creating. I think this is a hugely valuable book for composers and musicians, and probably all creative disciplines.