Music Making Tips - Tip 2 - Seperate Creative Process from Production

Many music makers including myself  are going to create and produce music all in the same stage. This is wrong! When you are recording sound you should be least concerned with the audio effects such as compressors, equalizers, saturators, chorus etc.

First and foremost, in the creative stage you will be laying down your musical ideas in the form of musical phrases, hooks, loops, and different sections of the song (intro, chorus, bridge). At this point you are going for the harmony that keeps you inspired and focused. The longer you manage to stay in that state of mind the more musical material you will be able to record.

Should you stop over adjusting equalizers or compressors at this stage you will risk of shifting your focus from laying down the sounds to the infinite tweaking of parameters. When creating music it's totally fine to have a default set of audio effects pre-added to the tracks that you are going to record, say, a compressor with the default parameters, equalizer with a slight cut at 30 Hz (mostly likely you will cut there anyway), some reverb and delay on sends to create a feel for space.

As soon as you feel you have recorded enough musical material to produce, move on to the technical part of the song creation process. Start building your effects chains, adjust parameters to taste. Save your project, revisit, tweak again until it sounds as you wanted it to sound.

Have you got any music making tips to share? Please share them in the comments section!