was handed out to an expert to design and implement. If you
come back to me after 5 years, I’ll hopefully have a lot more to
write about gear but I guess this is all I have for now.
How I organize, plan, and prioritize my work.
This can be best described in a few essential steps that I
follow:
1. Clean and Organised Workplace: Before I sit on my desk
I make sure there is no dust and cluttered bullshit lying
around. You need to have a connection between yourself and
your canvas, which is your DAW or gear. Unnecessary clutter
around you interferes with this connection.
2. The Vibe: I always try to create a vibe that helps me stick
to my desk for hours and hours. I’ve make sure to have
some greenery, mood lighting, paintings, air fresheners or
anything that sets the mood. Water, beverages and munchies
are a must to be stocked up. You can’t be leaving your desk
every half an hour to get water, get some air or food.
3. Pen, Paper, Timer: It’s essential to make notes of things to
do for a particular production or a mix down. It’s even more
important to define a timeline for completion of each task.
Hence – pen, paper, timer.
4. Templates: After a fair bit of experimentation, one can
easily figure out his or her flow of work and the processing
involved. You get used to your gear or plugins. You know
what works on a kick and what works on a vocal. 90% of the
times you will end up using the same plugins or processing on
most of your individual channels. Therefore, if you already
have a template with all these things already taken care of,
it saves you time and your productions sound better from
the start. I use a ‘production template’ and a ‘mix template’.
My production template has pre-assigned channels with
inputs and return tracks from all my outboard gear. My mix
template is divided into multiple stems like kick, bass, snare,
overheads, room, drums bus, bass, pianos etc. and already
has all the necessary processing on it which I just have to
tweak a little as per the track. Of course it also has readymade
inputs and outputs to the 5059 for summing.
5. Referencing: No matter how good your room is, referencing
is a must for me. I always reference from the point I start
production to the point I finish a mix down. It’s very easy
to get lost in a kick and bass loop for hours thinking it’s
sounding good but when it’s heard with a similar sounding
hit record, it sounds like garbage. Hence, I reference from
the very start until and unless I’m making something very
similar to records I have already produced.
Turntables PatchBay Apollo ASP800 DP88 NEVE5059
Full Studio Pedals Genelec Monitors
Cockpit MOOG+Doepfer Drum Machines
The
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