Rediscovering the Joy in Live Production! (🎶November’s Monthly Notes)

So, 30 days ago my Monthly Notes was titled – 61 days, 21 tracks!!? (🎶October’s Monthly Notes), and I set my self the goal of live streaming the production process of 3 tracks a week.

And….

I did it, and rediscovered a whole lot of fun in the process. 12 live streamed productions in the last 4 weeks (a couple missing from above where I messed up the streaming process, but I have the live recordings).

So, what does live streaming the production process mean? I’ve had a few people ask what this is all about.

WARNING – the next section is going to be mind numbingly boring to anyone who is not into the creative musical process…skip ahead to the video later.

To the rest who are still with me, this is the life-cycle of a live streamed production:

1. Splurge: At 5:00 AM some time probably 6-12 months ago (sometimes longer), I would have done an early morning Splurge (a no judgement, quality-suspended creative dump of what ever musical idea I can come up with in 30-40 minutes).
2. Incubate: The idea is saved in my Splurges Folder and ‘incubates’ for min of 2 weeks with no listening in that time.
3. Assess: I listen back to the 5 splurges from 2 weeks ago and Rate the track from 1. In Play (“I want to work on this idea NOW”) to 5. Nah (there really is nothing here worth working on…for now. Nothing gets deleted). The assessed Splurges get moved to the Sketchbook folder which is sorted by Rating (1. In Play at the top) and by ascending date (oldest for each rating at the top).
4. Select for Discovery phase – although with Live productions, it’s actually the Live Discovery Phase. I take the top track from my Sketchbook, anything from 6 months old to 6 years old (if I’m luck-dipping in the Sketchbook). In Discovery Phase for live production, I basically play around with the track idea to identify what elements I can jam live with. Sometimes it’s existing elements from the Splurge, and other times, I add new synth and drum parts that I know I can improvise with. As soon as I have enough parts that I think I will be able to jam something, AND the track has formed a sense of PURPOSE and DIRECTION, I am ready for the Draft Phase. (In the normal production process this would consist of me laying down all the parts in a finished arrangement to make a complete track)
5. In the Live Draft Phase, I basically set my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) to record exactly what I am about to jam, every note I play, and every effect I tweak and every audio clips I trigger…AND I set-up my video streaming software to record the video and audio off the jam – and STREAM it out to Twitch, YouTube and Facebook at the same time.
6. And the Recording of that jam is EXACTLY what I post as the finished track to BandCamp (and SoundCloud). As well as having a complete DAW recording of all the ideas I came up with (and happy and less than happy mistake).
   
   But that’s not the end of the life for that track. What I have now is a rough and very ‘fresh’ jam of ideas, and a clear direction for that tracks potential. The next few steps for that track would be:
   
7. Listen back to the all the jams I have had in a few months time, and identify which off the tracks would work well Live!
8. Take those tracks and extract the ideas that make the track, and build a version that can be repeated Live, with some parts as audio clips and others to be jammed (once again) in real time.
9. Play Live!!!

And that live jam process has been awesome fun – and I have completed 3x as many tracks in the same time….Perfect!

Here’s my pick of the 12 tracks I did in November (9 tracks to finish in December):