There’s an old, clichéd quote from Benjamin Franklin that says,
“By failing to prepare, you are planning to fail.”
I’ve seen that quote so often I’m rolling my eyes at myself for including that in one of my emails. However, there seems to be a reason it’s so often quoted.
Because it’s right on the money….pun intended.
Even though Mr. Hundred Dollar Benjamin died way before the invention of the audio recording industry, he still has a point that’s relevant to staying productive in the studio.
If you don’t plan what you’re going to do, you’re just going to fuck around on your instrument or reorganize your kick samples until you run out of time to do anything creative.
But if you plan exactly what you’re going to do creatively, then you’ll make time to actually get started. And the beauty about getting started is that it leads to progress. Progress leads to momentum which leads to motivation. That motivation makes you realize that hey, you’re almost done with your new song, production, lyric or whatever.
And then sooner or later, look! You’re done!
It may not be perfect. It may not even be something particularly great. But it’s something new.
And it’s not just a new way of rearranging your sample library. It’s a new creation.
That’s why preparation and planning is so important. It leads to actual results.
You Gotta Start Somewhere
Starting is the hardest part. It’s the biggest unknown because the possibilities are endless. But this exciting unknown can also be your creative downfall. Because there are so many options to choose from you’ll choose nothing.
When you’re a home studio musician and producer that’s working on your own stuff it’s easy to get caught up in doing everything at once. You can write your song while you’re making the beats, mixing the synth line and adding production elements to it.
This works for a lot of people, but it can be really discouraging because there’s no real sense of momentum. You won’t feel like you’re reaching any short terms goals because you have everything started but nothing even close to finished.
If you’ve ever felt discouraged enough to quit working on a song because it was just a combination of chords and random melodies then you know the feeling. It’s the worst feeling because it’s the feeling of failure not because you’ve never done anything, but because you started and quit.
You got all these songs on your hard drive and you’ve given up trying to finish them.
If that’s happened to you then you'll need direction and a workflow that actually helps you finish songs, instead of just starting them and then go cry in the corner.
It's just one of the things that my book Better Mixes in Less Time helps you achieve, and this week you can get it as a part of my Ultimate Birthday Bundle where you can get my best training at one low price.
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