How fast do you work?

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When you're producing new tracks, how fast do you work? I tend to get stuck sometimes and I find it diffucult to actually FINISH a track. Do you have a tips?

I'm producing house.

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Not fast at all.
Spent 5hours last night on a tabla loop and 6 the night before on a 303 line.
"I was wondering if you'd like to try Magic Mushrooms"
"Oooh I dont know. Sounds a bit scary"
"It's not scary. You just lose a sense of who you are and all that sh!t"

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For some dub step styled stuff i have been working on which involves a lot of custom sound design It has been a fairly slow process. Slow because I do a lot of sound design and constantly tweak and design custom sound libraries. I always like to work from a "What If" perspective and then get highly creative with sound manipulation to try and help make my statements come across.

Eventually what I want to do is have my own personal sound library full of custom made sounds.

I used to work fast, but then I realized the stuff I liked more was the stuff I spent more time on. This probably goes for many artists though, because the longer you spend on a piece the more you will appreciate it.

The more self-made music that come out now I think will drive producers to "polish" their sound more than ever. Take Deaumau5 for example who really spends a lot of time trying to get his mixes to sound professional. Or Trent Reznor who is a known perfectionist when working on an album.

You want to stand out and be well produced vs the other people out there who rush to the finish line and this process requires learning and can be a slow process.

Sure you could go take a course in audio engineering and get a bit of a head start, but in order to be a good producer you need to know more than just this. I think you should also have a good ear for sound design and a good sense of music as a language *Very Important* to really stand out.
:borg:

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When I started out a tune would take one or two days. These days it can take up to two months if not longer. Mostly this is because it's easy to advance with both mixing and arranging, but to really try many possibilities and take the one you think does the music the most favours is quite time consuming. I have over 100 different versions of my latest Cubase project saved in the project folder. I've taken the "many worlds" approach to writing :)

In particular I'm trying to better my abilities at mixing, using more complicated FX setups, feedback and sidechaining, mojo and sound sweetening processes, dynamics, etc. That takes as much time and creativity as the actual notes themselves.
http://sendy.bandcamp.com/releases < My new album at Bandcamp! Now pay what you like!

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Slowfast.

I very rarely make tracks now, but when I do it's all POW POW POW let's make 5 in a week! I tend to mess around with audio a lot when I'm not making tracks though, so I'll often have new stuff in my library of sounds which can speed things up or act as inspiration.

I'm a fan of keeping things sounding a bit rough and underproduced too, so that type of working fits well for me. I think the manic energy with which I produce things (on the increasingly rare occasions that I do) carries over into the music. Even my more experimental stuff sounds quite raw and I'm happy with that :)

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200 mph!

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Fast and then s l o w...

I compose really quickly and then spend ages sorting out the mess, tweaking the arrangement, playing the parts properly and making rough mixes so that someone with ears that work can mix.

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glacial
If you have to ask, you can't afford the answer

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Sound design is definitely the most time-consuming part for me. I guess it's difficult to mix something well if the material you have to begin with is poor. You just can't fix everything in the mixing process.
A track every two months is satisfying output for me considering synth-programming is my main music-related activity now.
Free banks for soft synths | ghostwave.fr | soundcloud.com/ghostwaveaudio

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vurt wrote:200 mph!
less than 12 parsecs ;)
Image

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Hi!
It's a good question! For me it depends on the kind of music:
-when doing electroacustic music, it is reaaaally long:
-first recording sounds (I'd say an average of 6 to 12h of material for a piece, wich take about the double to record (thinking, choosing, recording, etc)
-Then edit the recordings (cuting every sound into little pieces, about 2:1 time ratio with the recorded time
-Then listening to those sounds a lot, until I know them and "get into them", if you will. (generaly doing others stuffs at the same time like half of the time I listen to them, getting them to enter my inconscient slowly, I'd say it's a two weeks/4weeks process)
-Then starting to play with them, run them into plugins, start to make some "montage", play impros with them with patches I made with Usine, etc, this process last until the end.
-Composing stage, I'd say more or less between a month and a half and a year, for the one that cost me the most until today... It was painful...
Well albeit I think it takes between 2/3 month and a year, more or less. The thing is that I can (and do) make others musics at the same time (I mean in the same period) but I can't work on two electroacustic pieces at the same time.

-when doing electronic music:
-It's a lot faster! I'd say max a month between start and end. But then I let things aside for a while and come back after, for final editing steps, and mixing correction (after hearing it everywhere I can).

-when doing improvised music:
-Well if you count the time making patches to create the improvisation system, it's a lot of time, if you count the time recording I'd say I use allmost a half of what I record to edit and put out.

And with years passing by I tend to work more fastly, but things finally take a lot more time, as I now realize a lot more what's bad in my work, and get more exigent.

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Ridiculously slow! But I'm ok with that.
Cap'n Spanky
From the Planet Screwball

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I am glad I have your aproval.

And the necesary smiley: :hihi:

More seriously, I think it's interesting to see how everyone has a different work thythm. I remember a documentary on Curtis roads where he said he had a piece started in 1988, and the filming of the documentary was 2008 I think. So it could be a lot slower!

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I honestly don't finish songs. For me it's just a continuous process of revising and learning from my mistakes.. So I guess you could say I work slower than a glacier. I don't really care about people hearing my music or appreciating it, I care about improving myself as a producer.

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The details are what takes the most time.
There are 2 things I learned in all the years:

1: Don't waste your time on details!
2: Details are the most important thing!

:hihi:

Cheers
Dennis

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