Constantly getting distracted while making music? We’ve collected seven tips and tricks to help producers be more organised and productive in the studio.

No more wasting time in the studio. Follow these tips to make the most of your music production sessions, so you spend more time making beats and less time procrastinating.

Whether you’re paying for studio time or producing in your home studio, make better beats in a shorter amount of time with these seven tips and tricks for a productive studio session every time.

Turn off the wi-fi

Tackle the easiest thing first and remove those distractions from the studio. You could, for example, leave your phone in another room. Lurking on social media is always tempting – especially if you’re having a tough time getting on a roll and want to prove to everyone that you’re having a productive day.

Resist if you can. Hold off until you’ve got something to show for it instead of posting that selfie which took you half an hour to edit and caption, featuring you posing by your cool new setup.

Get your samples in order

Beforehand, organise your sounds and plugins to save yourself time when you could be cracking on and producing. That can be as simple as making sure all your drum sounds are in the same folder and so on.

If you know for sure there are sounds that will fit perfectly in your track, make a folder featuring them so you have them to hand. No more hours spent searching your hard drive, taking you out of the zone.

You might find you make smarter decisions when you’ve got a smaller pool of tools to choose from, forcing you to manipulate the sounds you do have to hand in a more creative way.

Make a to-do list

Try and have in your head the tasks you want to accomplish by the end of the day. It doesn’t have to be a physical list, but it might help to be able to mentally tick things off as you go.

Imagine you’re on a deadline is also a good trick. You can hold yourself accountable, and you’re more likely to get to the end of the week feeling you’ve accomplished your goals.

Keep your tracks organised

Tricks like arranging your instruments in a smart order, naming your tracks and colour-coding help to keep your session clean and ordered. Check out some workflow tips here:

8 great ways for music producers to organise DAW tracks
One step at a time

Find yourself skipping all over the place, jumping from mixing to arranging before you’ve finished composing your melodies or putting together a basic beat? Daydreaming about how you’re going to promote your release before its even finished?

It depends on your workflow, but you might find it helpful to separate out your process, taking it step by step and resisting the temptation to skip ahead.

Know your DAW manual

You’d be amazed how many troubleshooting questions can be answered within the user manual of your DAW. Put aside some time to learn the inner workings of your DAW of choice – things like keyboard shortcuts, templates of favourite sounds and preferred arrangements.

They’ll always be things you don’t know, but doing a bit of research beforehand will mean you spend less time watching long YouTube tutorials.

Reference tracks

Have a couple of reference tracks ready to listen and compare your arrangement and mix to. Making quick comparisons often will keep you on the right track and prevent little mistakes that all add up in the long run.

Even with the best of intentions it’s easy to get distracted. At least by keeping these tips in the back of your mind, you’ll set yourself on the path for being more organised in the studio.

Do you have tricks that help you stay focused in the studio? Let us know in the comments.

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