Juggling Studio Roles, How to stay focused when doing it all? Options

[Bonzo3]

I've been wondering why it takes me so long to get from start to finish when making music – and in many ways the answer is obvious: when you're acting as writer, musician, producer and sound technician for the same song, of course it takes time.

However, I feel that one problem with performing all these roles is the difficulty in staying focused. I'm sure I can't be the only one who writes a song with a certain production or instrumentation in mind, and then gets bogged down mid-song by worrying about how I'm going to achieve that sound, rather than leaving this problem to someone else. I think this is particularly a problem when you use programming software as your composition tool, rather than just a production tool.

I'm sure that all of these roles get a little easier through pracitice and experience, but I'd love to hear from anyone how has tips on how to juggle these roles and take things a step at a time, rather than chasing your tail.

All the best,

Bonzo

[Wilko]

My buddies and I have a fairly simple procedure for staying focused. Basically we use a program called "tabit" and tab out our songs, and it plays them back in midi so we can hear how everything sounds. Then eventually after we all approve it we call the song "done". Later we come back to any random song we have created that we especially like, and we sit down, and we begin to record it. However we have never managed to record anything that didn't sound like junk, due to having no "good" equipment until a few days ago.

Here's an example of one of our songs, it has all the parts we are going to record, the drums, bass, everything is all there, so you know exactly what you're going to be doing. Much easier to stay focused then noodling around.

http://flamescape.com/~wilko/commtechportf...t/alexmidi3.mid

This post has been edited by Wilko: Mon 20 Feb 2006, 07:54