Your Writing Process...

[thedjnifty]

Ez people,

So I've been producing for a good few years now on and off, and I've got to gripse with most aspects of producing, but the one main thing that I'm still yet to nail down is my exact writing process in terms of the balance between creating / writing vs engineering (spending more time mixing as I write).

Most recently I've adopted the approach where to maximise creative flow I do the absolute bare minimum engineering / mixing on my sounds as I write, which is going okay as I'm able to add new sounds and move forward creatively faster, but as you can imagine each sound and the mix overall doesn't sound particularly good, and now I'm concerned that because my mix is rubbish I'm going to find it harder to add new parts as there's not a lot of space present in the mix.

Basically what I'm asking is how do you guys approach creative vs engineering as you write a track from scratch?

Do you go all out creative with minimum engineering to allow you to write (and from a writing viewpoint finish) the track faster, then come back and engineer all your sounds later? Does this throw up any pitfalls for you?

Or do you make sure you mix the track roughly as you go, e.g. roughly compressing kick drums etc. as you write and inserting all "engineering" plugins on your sounds and setting their parameters roughly as you go, so that as you write you have a better representation of your mix? But do you then find your creative flow is sometimes held back because you've entertered into "engineering mode"?

As I say I'm still trying to find the right balance that works for me but would be really interested to hear how other people approach this...

Cheers!

 

[Scifa]

A little bit of both, as the track progresses things will change.

 

[wingz]

i usually engineer sounds on their own and when i'm feeling creative enough to start a track i use those engineered sounds as a sample pool to draw from. that way you're cpu efficient and don't have to worry too much about mixing since most of the sounds are already as full as possible. once i got like a decent 16 bar loop to play around with i try to set for a theme and look up samples or browse my synths/fx's which makes the whole process of finding sounds much easier.

basically knowing roughly where you wanna go makes the whole writing process a lot easier

 

[Solace]

In the very first part of starting a track I usually don't do any mixing/engineering (maybe some fast volume adjustments if it gets to bad). I just wack a limiter on the master and go crazy.
When I feel the creative part is getting a bit slower, I start doing the mixing/enineering part. I take the limiter of the master and make sure I'm not clipping anymore. And while in that part, I usually get new ideas for the track.
And before I start doing arrangement stuff, I do a first proper mixdown and things like that.

 

[thedjnifty]

Cheers guys it's interesting to hear different people's processes.

I think it's all about what works for you personally, but having gone over things in my head I think the way I'm working at the moment is probably what works best for me so it's all good.

I think there can be a bit of a monkey on your back when you're writing a track and everything sounds like shit from an engineering point of view, especially considering how polished pro tunes are these days, but I guess you just have to remember to keep calm, carry on writing and remember that somewhere down the line you're going to spend time making everything sound as nice as it needs to!

Big upz x