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Try our tips and leave your hair intact. (© B. Pepone/Corbis)

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As we sit making music with our turbo-charged computers and sophisticated software, it's tempting to think that nothing will ever go wrong. But at some point, it will.

Problems are as much a part of the computer music making experience as audio, MIDI, DAWs and plug-ins: the trick is to see them coming and react, or if you can't do that, to learn how to respond once they've occurred.

The following tips deal with some of the most common issues to plague the modern day high-tech muso - give them a read and hopefully you'll be able to iron at least some of them out of your workflow.

Overload

Your DAW offers a vast number of simultaneous audio and instrument tracks, but as with any application, there will be a point at which the system starts to struggle. You should notice warning signs prior to this, such as a slowdown in processing, stuttering audio, etc. Solutions to this include freezing plug-in-laden tracks and bouncing down multiple tracks onto one track, then muting or deleting the originals.

Preset power

If you're creating your own synth and effects plug-in patches, do you actually know where they're stored, in case things get messy? A preset will have an .xml, .fxp, .fxb or .aupreset file extension, and they can end up in a variety of places, including your DAW's program folder, your shared plug-ins folder, or the specific plug-in's dedicated folder, if it has one. Be sure that all these locations are included in your backup routine.

Can't undo!

Get to know just what your DAW can and can't undo. Some DAWs, such as Reason, let you go back on absolutely anything, from a volume fader change to a cable routing. Others are less generous. Some won't let you undo your fader movements or changes made within third-party software instruments. Take the time to experiment and find out what operations can and can't be undone.

Sent correctly

If you're using effects on auxiliary channels, you might find that you can still hear them, even when you've turned down the volume faders for the audio being processed. This is because you've set the effect sends to be pre-fader, meaning the amount of signal sent to the effect is only affected by a channel's send control, not its volume fader. Turn pre-fader off and any reduction in volume on the mixer channel will also affect the amount of signal sent to the auxiliary effect.

Chop chop

Applying a cut to an audio clip can create a nasty artefact in the form of a clicking sound at the cut point. To get rid of this, you can either apply a very small fade-in or fade-out to the clip, or make the cut at what's known as the zero-crossing point. This is the point where the waveform crosses the 0dB line as part of its cycle - ie, silence. Your DAW or audio editor probably offers a 'snap to zero crossings' option to do this automatically, but if not, just zoom right in and do it manually.

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