I was recently opening a session to do some edits, and as Pro Tools fired up it paused and warned me that my interface was at the wrong sample rate. It’s my personal home studio system, so no one else ever has to use it and wonder what to do when this happens. But the slight pause and the 30 seconds it took to fix made me think of all the things that can happen that hinder – or even stop – the recording process. In my End Rant “Redundancy” (in issue #164), I talked about having extra gear on hand in order to swap out and keep working when recording. That’s important in a professional studio, but there are obstacles everywhere that can stop us from capturing music, and it happens more often than we realize.
I’m lucky that I have an extra room in our house for my home office/studio. I can keep a microphone (and its pop filters) set up on a stand that I can swing over and do voiceovers with. I have cables in a drawer that I can use to plug in bass or guitar when I need to add a part to a song. If I had to set up a mic and stand every time I needed it, I would have to put off doing the work, or even potentially skip capturing an idea. If I had to pull my speakers and interface out of a closet and set them up, I’d likely never work at home or write music here!
Before I swapped out interfaces and bought some new hard drives, every time I went to record in my home setup Pro Tools would take 5 minutes to load a session and then freeze up when I hit play. The only way I could figure out how to get around this was to restart the whole computer, and even that didn’t always do the trick. At times, I’d spend an hour getting the damn thing going! If I had mixing to do, I’d go downstairs in the morning, open Pro Tools, and come back later hoping it might play. Sometimes, I’d put off doing some mix prep at home and waste studio time on it since I knew that system would fire right up. But when I started budgeting in extra minutes just to fight with my system, I knew it was time for a change.
Every day that I’m not in Jackpot! Recording Studio (or elsewhere) I make a to-do list in the morning. It will include chores around the house, magazine editing or writing that is urgent, phone calls to make, interviews to do via Zoom, and even what time to start cooking dinner. I start mapping my day out to ensure I can get this all done. Time in the home studio is carefully budgeted, and I try to make visits to the basement office as long and complete as possible, in an attempt to get at least some part of a project finished and off my list.
During the early pandemic I began to head down to Jackpot! for all of my Pro Tools sessions. Even though it took some time to get to the studio, unlock everything, and turn the computer on, I found I always got more done and worked faster. I know the monitoring is better, allowing me to make decisions faster, but I think what really sped me up was the lack of distractions and interruptions. (As much as I love our cat, even just today she decided to sit in front of my computer monitor at home and stop me from working. Other days I get distracted by tasks around the house that I've been putting off.)
Examine your own routines with music and recording. Are you putting up obstacles? Are you working around obstacles? Or are you the obstacle?