Music Production Workflow: How I work FAST for max creativity

This is a little bit of a departure from usual content offering up some more general tips for boosting your creativity in the studio.

As someone who has taught at numerous production retreats and seminars, the subject I always enjoy teaching is workflow. It’s an overlooked yet crucial aspect of graduating from a library of hundreds of sketches to actual, finished projects.

So, why the need to be fast?

It’s not about bragging about how many tracks you’ve finished. If a project requires 1,000 hours, you should give it that. What it is about is realizing that the real, raw passion that connects you with your audience is often fleeting. You need to capture that spark as quickly as possible.

I have ADHD, which is both a weapon and a curse. For someone like me, it's essential to have systems in place to capture ideas—otherwise, they just come and go. I don’t always get it right, but I have managed to release six albums and hundreds of singles and remixes over the years. From experience, it’s usually the tracks I get out quickly that do the best, not the ones I spent the most time mixing.

Here are a few tips I try to adhere to to stay quick and effective in the studio.

1. Curate Your Production Environment

This includes the room, the gear, and how you interact with your DAW. I always try to cultivate an overwhelming feeling of "wanting to get shit done" when I walk into the studio.

This might sound silly, but I place a high value on making sure the lighting is nice and the diffuser is going so it smells good. I also value my gear being clean, plugged in, and ready to go.

I’m not advocating you buy a bunch of gear. On the contrary, less is better most of the time. But I do like having inspiring things around me. In terms of hardware, controllers are key. Nothing gets your ideas out quicker than banging on keys and pads as they come into your head. Even if you’re not a great player, you can use features like chord quantizing to aid you.

I have a bunch of controllers I rotate, but my core essentials currently with Bitwig are the Novation Launchkey. The DAW integration is superb and makes it easy to mess with ideas. They’re also inexpensive. Find controllers that work for you.

2. Avoid Option Paralysis

Sometimes, less is more. You do not need 1,000 plugins to write music. Honestly, 90% of what I do could probably be done with Bitwig’s own built-in Polymer plugin. The stock plugins in modern DAWs are more than enough.

Obviously, I have a bunch of plugins, but I try to keep my core tools to a select few. I recently did a big purge. While some of the plugins I removed were great, there is just no reason to have five Juno-106 emulations installed, regardless of whether one is "more accurate." Who cares? Pick one you like the user interface for, stick with that, and learn it well.

3. Stay Organized

Option paralysis is a real killer, so organize your tools so you don’t waste time looking for things when you have an idea. I have a system where I remove the "chaff" and then tag things into groups in Bitwig. I don't want to think about which tool to use, but rather its purpose. If I need to control dynamics, I choose my "Dynamics" group, which presents a manageable list of tools I’ve selected that perform relatively different tasks. From there I can say, "Ah cool, this saturation has a tone I think will suit what I’m doing," and I’m done.

The same goes for samples. One tool I use is Sononym, which (aside from its cool AI tagging) lets you find similar samples. I’ll often spend time building my own custom collections from across multiple libraries. So, instead of looking through folders from a specific sound design label, I just think "kick drum," and I have a folder in which I know every single kick drum works.

4. Separate Your Cognitive Load

This is arguably one of the most important points. Staying organized doesn't happen automatically; you need to put the work in. But you don’t want to be putting that work in while you're trying to be creative.

The same goes for sound design or trying new plugins. Being minimal in your plugin selection doesn’t mean never trying anything new; it means trying things and then intentionally choosing what works for you.

Schedule time for this. Schedule time to do sound design, to play with new toys, to dust off the gear. I like to schedule what I call "playtime," where I have zero obligation to achieve anything. I just listen to presets and do stupid experiments. Then, when it’s time to dive into your head to get creative, nothing interrupts that process.

5. Stop Giving a F*ck

This has taken me 20 years to figure out. Seriously, stop giving a fuck.

Nobody cares about your mixdown, and if it's crap, you can fix that after the core idea is done. Spending an hour EQing a kick is 100% going to stifle any creativity you’re trying to extract from your brain.

Historically, 99% of my tracks that blew up in the charts weren’t the "amazingly produced" tunes. They were the raw melodies, the tracks I got out quickly that retained that original emotional essence. Quite often, they were the ones I didn’t second-guess. I just said, "fuck it," hit send, and released them.

It’s a tough thing to come to terms with, but you have to realize that constantly worrying about whether you sound as good as someone else will always result in you being the second person who arrived at that sound. When you start listening to yourself, that’s when the magic happens.

This may sound cliche, but if you’ve read anything by Mark Manson, you should. He gives practical advice along these same lines that you can apply to your music. Basically, you’re not special, so just try to enjoy yourself, and you’ll be surprised to see what you can achieve.