Striving for perfection in music recordings, how do you manage the urgency of meeting industry deadlines?

One thing I can say is as an artist you will never be happy and you will always believe you can do better. You have to listen to others. When recording do at least three vocal takes or instrument. if they all sound similar you have got to learn to accept what you've done. If someone else says its good listen you can always perform live what you think you can do better. but you will never get a project finished striving for perfection. It may never be perfect to you.

Smoke weed. It says 125 characters or less. Just smoke weed. That's it. I still need 125 characters. This is taking too long.

A Strong Concept: As a composer scoring music for media (films, tv, video games) I've found it helpful to establish a strong "concept" well before getting near a computer, piano, or pencil/paper. That means figuring out how you'll be translating the story you're about to score into music. ? What's the storyline? ? What are the characters like? ? When and where does the story take place? ? What emotions and thoughts come to mind? ? What music does this story evoke? These questions can help you make tons of musical decisions before even writing the first note. This also helps in making the "staring at a blank piece of paper" scenario feel a lot less daunting.

I never use the term deadline! Sounds so big and scary. I prefer the term target date. And I’ve never missed one yet. Your mental attitude and the way you approach the prep for a target date is important. Do what you do as quickly as you can, as well as you can, and the date will seem doable.

For the most part, yes your process has to be streamlined. Sometimes we can have a little wiggle room, but you want to try to stay with your schedule the more you have everything planned the more fluid it would become overtime supporting your overall process and growth as well as allowing you the space to grow creatively. Always be realistic with your time and start to time your processes and if you’re not satisfied or it’s not what you really thought then do what you have to do to tweak them so the repetitiveness becomes more fluid. Be the judge of yourself and your processes.

There is no such thing as a perfect recording. It's all subjective. I think that is what I love about music production. Perfection is an unattainable task. Your goal should be to achieve excellence in your pursuit of that elusive perfection. As a professional engineer and producer, I can assure you that most of us carry a bit of obsessive tendencies. However, that will ultimately get in your way. You can always improve with practice. This said, prioritizing tasks is essential to that improvement. It is imperative to go into the studio with a plan and goal. Make sure you write down your patch notes, microphones you used, takes needed, etc. Prioritize what is most important to the concept of the project. Build a plan to get you there!

The right take is why you even did the song I told my band mate Be animated as possible I literally write songs about moving shifting switching places

Embracing flexibility is a much-needed skill to beat the infamous "writer's block". Whenever I find myself writing a few bars only to endlessly delete whatever idea I just came up with over and over again, this is a clear indicator that my "vision" for the piece is too rigid. My musical intuition is trying to take me in a different direction but my rational intellect is refusing to play along. Being flexible means reconciling the two (musical intuition and rational intellect).

Creating templates in your DAW for certain projects is a life-saving time hack. For example, I currently have 14 channels available for recording through and each is set up in a template in my DAW, routed and ready to go as soon as I unmute any given channel. In Ableton, there’s a feature where you can save favorite plugins, instruments, and make your own instrument racks. While creating, this keeps you in the flow and spending less time searching. For mastering, You can set up up a chain on your master channel for things like live bands, acoustic recordings, or show tracks. All of this saves you time in the long run.

There's so much talk about technology and its use in creative work, especially with the rise of AI. To me, the bottom line of technology is this: whatever tools help make your music more beautiful, interesting, and above all, more human, should be embraced wholeheartedly. Anything that gets in the way of that must be discarded immediately.

Never underestimate the power of taking a break from writing and coming back to your work with fresh ears. Often you'll find that the solution you were looking for is right under your nose. Getting feedback from trusted peers is also incredibly effective, but keep in mind the old saying "never show a fool unfinished work".

Sometimes seeking feedback can make you feel vulnerable, but don’t let that discourage you or stop you from doing so push through and communicate, get perspective and insight. Don’t take anything personal and keep in mind the person is only judging or critiquing as you asked them to do from their perspective. So choose wisely who you ask for input during your creative processes Also make sure you know the difference between supportive/constructive criticism & just being torn down as those are two totally different things. (no one should be torn down) Lastly, when developing or creating music everything is not for everybody, sometimes some folks need to just wait for the finish product & don’t need to be part of the creative process.

My perspective on the music creation process has changed a lot in the last 10 years. These days I recommend thinking about it as a "test and learn" process - the goal is to get as much music out there as possible and learn from the crowd what is resonating and what is not. That wasn't possible in the old music industry but in the streaming first world it is. It saves time and effort and means you don't need to over think things. Just get something half ready and get it out there - on socials or DSPs - and ask for feedback. Release as much music as possible - there is next to no incremental cost in doing this. Then double down on the tracks that connect.

Sometimes you just gotta throw up your hands & walk away and then the next day restart/readjust the project. If you feel stressed, because you’re at a dead end things aren’t happening right, it’s just off a little and you can’t accept that & it’s causing you to be uncomfortable or frustrated just stop. Take a breather do something else, relax practice gratitude, and then come back to it in time, it’ll all work out. Be kind to yourself creativity and anything you want to achieve flows when you were at peace. Everything will become right with what you want and if it doesn’t and you’re in a good space then you’ll see the path of something else greater begin to blossom, greater than what you were initially striving for with the project.

Perhaps you just don't. This isn't a decision to be lazy. The perfect can come in the imperfections. People feel that and they increasingly want that. If everything's going to be perfect, we might as well let the robots do it. Talent is something intrinsic but it takes work too. Strive for what makes your heart sing. I don't mean to brush this question off, but I think reframing it would be okay.