Wouldn’t it be great if every weekday of our lives we sprang out of bed, had a quick shower, opened the door to our home studio and got ourselves settled in for another full day completely immersed in our passion.
Alas, the reality is that unless you’re retired, or somehow able to avoid the 9-5 of work or school/college, music-making is something we have to find a way to fit into to our schedules.
Throw romantic relationships, families, children, exercise and general life admin into the mix and that window gets considerably thinner. This is all before we’ve even touched on countless other aspects of modern life, and various entertainment choices vying for our attention. Not to mention, of course, the temptation to just close your eyes and have a rest…
But, you’re a creative person, right? The act of making a new track gives you purpose. It's satisfying and life-affirming. It's why you do it.
If you can't squeeze in a music-making session, it’s highly probably you’ll feel frustrated, anxious and incredibly eager to get back into your musical zone as quickly as humanly possible.
It’s something that this very writer has definitely felt during particularly hectic weeks. New ideas for tracks or melodies almost taunting you with how frequently they pop into your brain when you’re miles away from where you want to be.
So then, once you’ve got that glorious two-hour stretch to actually work on some of your tunes, you want to walk away from the session feeling productive and positive, right?
Sometimes, that existing frustration can be elevated by the sheer inertia of endless choice, ruining advancing any further by the time it takes to simply try out different options.
That feeling of just constantly hitting walls when shaping up an arrangement. Or, spending too long kicking around the same track, so that you eventually lose all sense of perspective. It makes it very hard to finish anything satisfactorily.
Maybe auditioning another synth, trying another beat, or just notching out a frequency will suddenly bring the track closer to completion.
Not quite? Well, let’s try… oh, that’s your alarm going, time to unplug and head back to reality.
Maybe next time it’ll all come together…
The truth is, the music creation process is limitless, and your options are near-infinite. Similarly the mixing process is a delicate, painstaking art for even the most finely-honed of professional ears. Those of us sneaking it in between our 'adult' responsibilities will often just have to wing it as best we can if we ever want our music to be heard.
And, as we all know, winging-it is fraught with self-doubt.
There’s simply too much choice, and too little time.
It’s best then, to try and drain the overflowing pool, and impose a limit on all those options. Cutting down on the amount of tools you use, and the amount of time you spend on a track can shake things up.
Be your own boss, and force the change to happen.
Start by whittling down the options. With only two directions at the crossroads, rather than six (or 6,000), you'll be more trusting of your instincts, and not find yourself lost down one of those potential avenues of possibility.
Self-imposed limitations have been deployed by many of music’s chief innovators over the years. Not because they didn’t have time necessarily, but because studio self-control, or re-direction, can frequently push us out of our go-to comfort zones. And, they can be useful for nailing down more abstract, experimental pieces…
“When there’s a deadline, there’s also a destination, a context, a reason for something. And that’s what makes me finish [a track]. Up until that point, it’s an experiment,” Brian Eno told Red Bull Music Academy in 2013.
Eno’s infamous ‘Oblique Strategy’ cards were devised by him and multimedia artist Peter Schmidt back in 1975. They were designed to spur musicians to think outside of the orthodoxies of their practice (or their typical music-making routes) via triggering, open-to-interpretation instructions.
Some classic examples of these randomly selected cards include
- Cut a vital connection
- Turn it upside down
- What wouldn’t you do?
- Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do
- Do we need holes?
The idea was to disrupt the typical thought-processes that musicians snap to under pressure, and suggest they approach their instruments differently.
What I’m talking about in this article however is similar to the Oblique Strategies, though a little less abstract. We're here to be more focussed on saving time as opposed to nudging you onto a different creative mindset.
Though, you might find yourself in uncharted territory just by the very nature of not doing what you’d normally do… and that's always fun.
We’ve previously explored this aspect of self-imposed rule-setting with a deep-dive on one of Eno’s most celebrated acquaintances, David Bowie, who himself was always hyper-aware of controlling his impulses in the studio. “Maybe I’ll write out five or six chords, then discipline myself to write something only with those five or six chords involved. So that particular dogma will dictate how the song is going to come out, not me and my sense of emotional self,” Bowie stated.
Let's boil it down then. Shrinking your production toolkit, instrumental choices and resisting overloading your mixes with 60+ tracks just slims the odds of wasting that precious (often hard-negotiated) time in your studio.
So, in the spirit of Eno’s Oblique Strategies (albeit a little less artsy) here’s a few of our own self-imposed rules you can try when starting your next track. Using these as a guide, you can probably concoct your own additional restrictions. Shake them up and choose two or three. Then apply them to your next track.
Hopefully, your process will be far speedier at least. And, you may find yourself surprised at the clarity of both the final track, and your creative mind.
1: No more than 10 tracks in the project
2: Keep the bassline repetitive throughout every part of the song
3: No more than three melodies
4: Make every track element with just one software synth
5: Absolutely no guitars
6: Absolutely nothing but guitars
7: No topline hook - just go for a mood
8: Ignore the temptation to swing into a chorus or drop, keep on a relentless verse
9: Do everything just using the DAW’s provided instruments and tools
10: Can you keep a one-chord tone/strum throughout? Try it
11: Only use loops
12: Once you finish your arrangement, remove two elements from it. Be brutal.
13: Use only one mixing tool per mixing aspect (one EQ, one compressor, one limiter etc)
14: Go completely drum/beat-free
15: Complete the song in one day (or one session - if you don’t have time)
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