“The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.” Orson Wells Creative challenges and limitations are a fun and interesting way to improve your skills. The point of these challenges is to create limitations for yourself to work within to help boost your creativity. In fact it’s more difficult to create anything at all then […]
Day 11: Creativity – limitations and challenges Read More »
Over the years as you build your skills you should also be building your own library presets, audio effect, shortcuts and more. An often overlooked feature is the abelton user library. The Ableton user library can be used to store clips, ideas, presets, sound effects and more. Uses for the ableton user library: Of course
Day 10 : Building your own sound / ideas library Read More »
Questions about online collaboration get posted every week on forums like Reddit, facebook etc. Let’s try and go through some of the best ways to collaborate with online partners. If you haven’t read through it already please check out “Day 8 – Backing Up” because the last thing you want to have happen is your
Day 9 : Online Collaboration Read More »
The most cited backup strategy for data is the 3-2-1 backup strategy. This essentially means having two copies have all data locally and one copy in another location or online. For more explanation on this check backblaze.com article on backup strategy LOCAL BACKUPS The practical way I backup everything on my Mac as I have
Day 8 – Backing Up Read More »
THE BEST PIECE OF GEAR ISN’T YOUR SYNTHS The first thing you have to determine is your goals. Are you a hobby musician, are you trying to be a DJ, are you trying to put a band together, are you just trying to record your own music? Where you allocate your budget and time will
Day 7 : Budgeting  Read More »
In Day 2 we talked about tracking your time with things like screentime (iOS) or rescuetime. Now that you have analysed how you use your time you want to make a schedule to prioritise what you really want to do. 1. Limiting time wasteThe rise of the smartphone means we have a portable computer/TV/book etc
Day6 : Scheduling practise Read More »
In Day 4: Mobile Music 2 we talked briefly about analytical listening, this post is going to go into much more detail on how our ears are the most important piece of gear. It’s very easy for us to think that that new piece of gear, synth, plugin is the magic bullet that we 100%
Day5: Ears are your best tool Read More »
Music out and about can be different if you can’t fully focus. If you can’t use your hands for example if driving a car you might need to focused on activities where you can just listen. Some possibilities are: 1.Test your mixes in the car / train/ etc Listen to how your mixes sound on
Day4: Mobile music 2 Read More »
Sometimes it’s great to have hours to sit down in the studio and get the work done, but sometimes we don’t have a few hours. Being a musician involves wearing many hats and this means we travel and do lots of other things not directly production related. one way to make the most of your
Day3: Mobile Music – creating music out and about Read More »
Back – Day 1: Now we have sorted the physical part of the studio we need to work the digital part. If you are a dawless jammer you can skip this section but I guess most producers use some kind of DAW (I mostly use Ableton Live). Just like your studio space computer probably needs
Day2: Optimising computer use Read More »
