I have been in the studio for a few days and wanted to share my process of actually starting and finishing an album. In short, never get obsessed with one thing. Keep things moving and keep the ideas coming.
Over the past three years I have taught a private course on music production that takes you from the start of a track to completion. I’ve used the image below to help explain my process. If you want, you can right click and save the image. It is much bigger than shown on the blog.
What I am trying to show here is the logical process of song making to complete a track as fast as possible. I have already talked about Stage 0 in a previous post. Now if you follow my blog full of Pre Production materials like creating drum racks, creating presets, and such you will see I spend a lot of time in Stage 1. For this article I wanted to talk about Stage 2 and 3.
As I was making music the last 2 weeks I have mainly just been working on sketches. What I mean by that is little pieces of a song. Like a rhythm, a melody, and a fee to start with. Once I get one I move on. I generally get 2-3 done a day. So that means I have about 11 sketches. From that I know about half, if I am really doing well, of these sketches are rubbish. The key is to not get obsessed with anyone. Otherwise, you might work on a track for 3 weeks polishing something that was shit to start with. Then After working on a bunch I go through and move some over to working compositions.
When I am in Stage 3, composition, it is important to keep the feeling of movement. I do this is by having my hands in many creative paths. If I am working on a track for 3 hours I like to mix it up and move on to one of my other working tracks. That way I don’t get in that endless loop we can find ourselves. I have found myself working on different parts of the composition over a few days. So on the first day on a track I got the intro and the main beat. The next day I work on that tracks part b section, and then move onto another track where I write a part A section. I bounce around on all my tracks for many days until they start to get completed.
The advantage of working this way is that the whole album/ep has a similar feel. Since you are bouncing around any new techniques or sounds you might like, you will probably use on a few tracks. It keeps a continuity. It also keeps the feeling of movement as compared to being overwhelmed that you only have 1 track of your Album done. This way you have 6 almost done tracks and just need to stick with it.
So here are a few pointers.
- Make sketches as fast as you can and feel unattached to throw it away.
- Keep the story line of your whole album in mind as you are writing.
- Keep things moving by working on multiple songs.
Enjoy the entire process. Take your time and know this takes a while and it’s all good. After 3 days hard in the studio I am going to enjoy the fact that I am on a beautiful island, Orcas.
