Does this vicious cycle sound familiar?
Make some music > hit obstacle > feel bad > search for info > buy random stuff > dopamine spike > make music again
Before you know it… > hit obstacle AGAIN. And the cycle continues.
Contrast this with a 7 phased creative process
1 - Clarify
The aim of this phase is to prepare your DAW, plugins and prepare an environment for your creativity to flow. The focus is to design a sonic pallet along with a clearly defined vision for your music.
One of the reasons why producers fail to finish music is because they have no vision of what the track is trying to convey.
Once you identify what you’re trying to achieve, you can then select the proper instruments and sounds to use in your session.
The main focus of this phase is “pick your band”: to optimize your DAW for creative expression and reduce possibilities!
2 - Flow
Now is the time to let go of your inhibitions, engage your “right brain” and dissolve into the flow.
In this phase, you PLAY your instruments. No edits or mouse clicks. With proper clarification in phase 1, you get creative way more easily.
The key is that you won’t get bogged down by going back and forth with tedious technical work (AKA rabbit holes).
This is also the space where “happy accidents” occur and all sort of unexpected musical surprises. The aim is to tap into your subconscious to come up with ideas you would have never thought up in your mind.
It might shock you to know that some of the most popular songs of all time, legendary pieces of music, were created in minutes.
The main focus of this phase is to “be the band”: to let go of your quality judgments and create freely.
3 - Extract
After completing an epic jam session you’ll have generated a massive amount of musical ideas and raw creative material to work with. Beats, basslines, riffs, motifs, melodies, etc.
This phase is about switching over to your “left brain” and making the decision as to what are the best ideas from your creative improv.
There’s tremendous power in separating the idea creation phase from the idea judgment phase.
This is where the process of curation comes in. With a huge amount of material, it will be significantly easier to identify the golden ideas. The gems.
This means now identifying what to keep and expand upon and what to let go of and recycle.
What are the best ideas? What ideas best serve the song? What ideas don’t fit with the others?
This flows naturally from the last phase as you’ll have plenty of material to choose from instead of scrounging for ideas and staring and a black DAW.
4 - Compose
This phase is when you take your parts and ideas from the last phase and structure it into a musical arrangement.
This is when the project transforms from a collection of scattered ideas into a time bound musical journey with a beginning, middle, and end.
You’ll intuitively know where your ideas will best fit in your song from the last phase.
You’d be surprised how many producers I’ve chatted with who struggle with the arrangement phase simply because they don’t have enough ideas! You can start to see how these phases interconnect.
You might have to start editing and changing some of your ideas. Maybe in the intro, you only want part of the melody to play. Maybe as a transition, you want a more simple variation of your drum beat…
A great song tells a story and keeps the listener engaged for the whole experience. This is the key to making music that people WANT to keep listening to.
5 - Edit
This phase has many parts to it. First, it’s about constantly referencing and reflecting on the final structure of the song.
Does everything flow well? Do you need to remove parts? Add transitions? Change notes? This is about removing imperfections, timing issues, and questionable harmony.
Then you can start to get creative with the art of editing itself; enhancing the music with detail and depth that would have been otherwise difficult to achieve.
The main focus of this phase is to clean up, tighten and tune everything up to your artistic standard.
Some artists edit a ton, some do minimal editing. It’s up to you and what you’re going for!
Think about adding effects, automation, and smoothing out transitions to enhance the seamlessness of your song.
What makes a pro-level production is usually found in the edit phase!
6 - Mix
Mixing is a careful and subtle refinement process to bring about balance and maximize the sonic impact of your song.
This goal is to dial in your mix and find a balance of tones, textures and dynamics to satisfy your artist's ear. You want to make the sound jump out of the speakers!
This is the final step of creative input. The last 10% of improvement to make your song a professionally polished track.
Many producers overcomplicate this phase and get “lost in the sauce”. The truth is that it’s a critical step yet a simple step… with the right process of course.
There are 7 steps to mixing:
- Organize your session
- Set up routing
- Balance levels
- Process tracks
- Automation
- Effects
- Finalize
7 - Master
Mastering is the final coagulation of the sonic experience into a final releasable form.
Mastering done properly should be the most subtle of all the phases.
You’ve finished most of the work so far. Now you just want to add some final touches and make sure your track is the right volume and accurately reproduced on a variety of speaker systems.
Make sure it sounds good in headphones, portable speakers, your car, and your phone speaker.
Depending on what medium you’re planning on releasing your music on, you’ll have to get your song to the proper volume.
Once you’ve finished your final master, congratulations! You’ve completed the process.
Then it’s just a matter of recycling through the process. In truth, THIS is where the magic occurs…
It will BLOW YOUR MIND what happens when you experience the “bigger picture” of cycling through these various phases after you’ve gone through them.
See how everything can become WAY more clear and doable when you have a process to follow and experiment with.
This is what your music making can feel like with a creative system!
If you want to take control of your path and you’re serious about your music…we partnered up with Alex over at Meta Mind music to bring you a comprehensive, nuts and bolts program called Workflow Wizardry that walks you through and goes way deeper with every step of the process you saw above.
By the time you're done, you’ll have a creative system that you can continue to shape and refine into your own on top of consistently finishing amazing tracks in your studio.