Unmixing – separating logistics and creation

Creativity doesn’t mix well with logistics. Not long ago, I realized how much time I was spending during the creation of songs (or instrumental pieces of music) searching for sounds or plugins or settings. Obviously, this is sub-optimal.

What’s the deal?

What I found is that when I went to record or arrange music, I would get hung up on the logistics of creating the project. I’m sure that it’s no surprise to you, all of this stuff is technical and not particularly inspiring.

Worse yet, if I already had momentum with the creative idea, these technical pursuits could derail that. Of course, I found a better trajectory (at least for me). Over the holidays, I had a few days to focus on preparing for future recording projects. And so, I did.

Sessions Just for Organizing

Specifically, I knew that I needed to set up new project templates and make favorite or specific sounds more quickly accessible. The templates were simple. Just find a typical song and perform a “Save As Template…” (At least that’s how it works in ProTools.)

On the other hand, the sounds can be very time-consuming if you even have half as many as I do. And I thought of it as an investment which it’s already proving to be.

As you can imagine, each virtual instrument will have its own approach to this organization. It’s beyond the scope of this post to instruct on how to do it. Instead, I’ll just mention that there’s a listing of the way I organized sounds at the bottom of this post. Plus, I’ll tell you that having this layout has been a significant relief when creating musical arrangements in the short time since I set this up!

And now… Create!

When the logistics are completed outside of sessions where I’m creating, I feel so much more free to be following the muse. How about you? I’m curious to know if your creative self has found ways to separate the “busy-ness” from the time to make stuff. If you have, please leave a comment here or reach out to me on social networks. (And thanks for reading!)

Oh yeah: as promised, here’s that breakdown of the way I organized my sounds. As you know, everyone will have their own categories. This is just my version.