Setting up an Effective Music DAW Template

Effectively creating and utilizing a custom template is a very useful way to enhance your workflow. Just like building any product, when making a song, there is only a handful of things you actually have to create to put it together. Imagine baking a cake... you have the individual ingredients, the cooking utensils and the oven. Master how to use each of these and you can bake any kind of cake you like.

A song doesn't have a lot of elements, but making sure that you have a handle on how to create each of them with ease is necessary if you're going to complete your songs reliably. Once you understand which elements are the most difficult or time consuming for you, all you have to do is take the time to really solve them once and put that solution in your template.

The things to consider are:

1. The musical elements - Bass, drums, percussion, lead instrument, chordal instrument, vocals, fx

2. The mix - Making sure each of these elements shine and have adequate space to be heard clearly.

3. Arrangement - The pacing and transitions in the song

4. The story/feel - This would include the emotional sound choices, lyrical content, chord progressions and melodies. 

In order to have an effective music template, all you need to do is ask yourself "which one of these holds me up the most?" then spend a day brainstorming how to solve that problem once and for all so that it will never hold you up again. Lastly, repeat this process until there is nothing that holds you up.

For example, I had a hard time making unique chord progressions. Each one either sounded lame or stale. So, I did research on tools out there that could help me generate chordal ideas quickly. I found 3 different plug-ins that support this: Cthulu, Captain Chords and Ableton's midi plug-in simply titled "chord".  I spent a few hours learning each inside and out, then I set each up in an empty session so that they were ready to use at a moment's notice. Now I NEVER need to worry about chord progressions (or the sounds needed to make them sound good) ever again. I saved these resources to my template and moved onto my bass as that was the next area that was holding me back.

Proper preparation prevents poor performance. If you find yourself getting stuck on every song, just ask yourself "where was I not prepared enough?"