How Automation Can Help Your Songwriting

Ever wish you had more time? Uh yeah, only everybody. Well aside from delegating and batching your work, there’s one last thing to free up time other than ditching the work completely: automation. Automation is a staple in developing technology, so why not apply that anywhere else? This article is intended to get you thinking about automation.

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash

Benefits Of Automation

The benefits of automation is pretty clear: you can create a process to automatically do a certain task or streamline a process to free up time.

This is the ultimate time and money saver; more so than delegating and batching.

With delegating, all you’re doing is sending the work off to someone else; depending on their rate compared to yours, you may not be gaining anything from this other than freeing up your own time so you can take on more work.

For batching, there’s still the same amount of work that needs to be done by you, but you’re just cutting out the distractions and getting into a mindset that helps with completing a task more efficiently.

With automation, you’re decreasing the amount of work anyone needs to do either by being methodical, or letting a computer do it. This saves you the most amount of time, and you can be sure that it’s up to a certain degree of quality.

How You Can Implement Automation

Take budgeting for instance. If you need to know exactly how much you are paying for food, miscellaneous items, rent, etc, you’ll need to write down every possible expense.

That would take a long time to write every single item down even for just a month. You’ll want the dates, names, price, and maybe even a category. The first thing to do is use something like an excel sheet.

You can use this to do any sort of math you’d like, including adding up all of the charges in a certain category, looking at expenses and totals for certain months, whatever you need. This is especially helpful for keeping track of business expenses, so you can write them off on your taxes :)

So, you still need to put everything in, and that can take some time; let’s see if we can make this faster.

What I realized, for me, that my bank account and credit card both offer downloadable spreadsheets that you can just copy and paste into an excel sheet. Bam, now I can see expenses for an entire YEAR in a matter of seconds as opposed to hours putting them in one by one! A huge weight lifted off my shoulders when I found this out, because I could do hours of work in just seconds, and have it just as organized.

This probably sounds completely unrelated, I know. But let’s look at some examples you can implement into songwriting or studio related topics.

Examples Of Automation

Checklists are a huge time saver, and quality assurer. I’m a big fan of those. In fact, I’ve made 2 checklists for you for free, relating to studio preparation and mixing and mastering preparation! Click on the links to find them!

Checklists can help streamline a process, and make it easy to see what’s difficult or inefficient; for example, you may be doing something in a certain order, but it really makes sense to do it in another order to save time.

If you make songs from your DAW or routinely mix, master etc, you can make a template. I’ve made a template every year, refining what I need each time. A lot of time is used setting up and organizing, so why not start out that way! If there’s certain plugins you use all the time, make presets and add them to your template with pre-made tracks!

Setting up certain settings as default that you use all the time can really speed things up in your template; for instance, I’ve got a certain track I always send my tracks to. Now, I set it up so that whenever I make a new track, the default output is sent to that certain track! It has saved me countless clicks and avoids headache when trying to figure out why things aren’t routed correctly.

Presets are another common way to streamline the process. You can add your plugins with presets to your templates so things can just work right off the bat. It definitely takes time to make these, to figure out a good starting place for you, but it can save you a lot of time. You can set your compressors to be a certain ratio, certain attack and release times, etc, each removing a small portion of time. If you have enough tracks and instances of this plugin though, you can MASSIVELY speed up your workflow.

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I’d love to hear the ways you automate your work; what’s the biggest mind-blowing thing you’ve learned that streamlined your process?

-Michael