I’m going to do a huge dump here, because this is a topic that I’ve obsessed on for 20 years now, and I’m new here and have relative anonymity.
Literally every decision I’ve made for the past 20 years has been in service of my craft - getting gear, getting time to work on music and process, getting access to venues and outlets for any external validation and encouragement to keep going - playing live, getting on compilations, releasing my music, touring, whatever. It’s gotten me pretty much nowhere other than personal satisfaction, pride in my craft, and a life well-lived pursuing the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do. “Want” is even too soft of a word; it’s obsession, pathology. I wish I had gotten hooked on almost anything else, honestly!
My wife and I had a kid a year ago and I’m coming up on 40 terrifyingly quickly. I have less free time and energy than I’ve ever had. It’s funny, too, because in my twenties I was always obsessed and anxious about having more time to work on music - I had nothing BUT time! Hours every night! Entire days on weekends and holidays! Hilarious in retrospect.
In spite of all of this, I’ve actually been more “productive” - in the sense of actively finishing and releasing work that I’m satisfied with and proud of, and that gets a reasonable amount of external validation via reviews, sales, opportunities, and live bookings - in the past 2 years than any time prior. A few things that have been indispensable are:
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Mise en place. My entire studio is set up so that I can walk in that room, flip on a few power sources and the entire room of equipment is online and ready to work. I can go from dark, dead room to sequencing an entire room of equipment and multitrack recording with safety recording to tape in under a minute. This required spending money on a bunch of unsexy, un-fun things like multiple patchbays, more cables than seems humanly possible (and this coming from a modular synth guy!), label makers, power strips, racks, desks/stands/shelves/etc., thru boxes, direct boxes, reamp devices, etc. over the years. Any time I get a new fun piece of gear, I must figure out how it should best connect into this ecosystem for actual productivity and ergonomics. But once that’s squared away - and I insist on keeping it all squared away - I cannot articulate how magical, intuitive, and user-friendly my studio is. It’s one gigantic instrument. I could make an entire song with my eyes closed.
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Discipline will trump inspiration every time. I make myself go into the studio to work at least 3 weeknights of the M-F stretch whether I’m in the mood or not. This is after dealing with family, domestic obligations, and so on, so it’s rarely before 9 at night. Sometimes it’s a total exercise in futility - last night, I wasn’t feeling inspired at all, and I ended up dicking around with fighting a cheap SQ-80 I recently picked up to accept CC’s from the Cirklon. It kept locking up. The parts I wrote were stupid and irritating. Then I went to bed. But for every night like this, there’s a night where I get in there not feeling any particular inspiration or drive and end up stumbling on something amazing that keeps me wired like I just did rails of coke, I’m so excited and inspired. Monday night it was a mild breakthrough for patching up a few drum sounds that I had in my head and wasn’t sure quite how to pull off IRL, until I did and was fist-pumping the air and programming awesome sequences with them on headphones in a quiet house. What I came up with from that experiment is already turning into a song that’s so cool it’ll probably go on my next record. It’s like exercise - you just have to get in there and do it, on schedule, whether you feel like it or not. [If only I could do the same with exercise, but I’m working on that too]
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Working life is full of so much downtime it’s absurd. Life is one big waste. I’m all about leveraging whatever portable, on-the-go tools we can, and GOOD LORD there are SO MANY NOW. In 1999 I bought a Roland PMA-5 so that I could work on jams while walking around my college campus. It ate batteries like a bitch and people thought it was a palm pilot. I’d work on songs between classes and dump them into my MC-505 back at my dorm room. In the early 00’s, commuting every day on the metro in Washington D.C., I used it and a Yamaha QY70 (later upgraded to a 100). Later in Chicago, I’d rock the Nintendo DS with the Korg cartridge. I had an hour on the train going to work every day, and home again - that’s two hours of jamming and writing tunes that I could come home and patch up to way more sophisticated instruments! When iOS hit, it changed literally everything - sunvox, etc. in my pocket with headphones. Unreal. Even way back with an iPod touch it felt like the future; now with an iPhone XR coming to me tomorrow, I’ll literally have a computer in my pocket that’s more powerful than the iMac I bought, what, 5 years ago? There are SO MANY TOOLS that you can use to take advantage of public transit time, lunch break at work (I’m looking over at the OP-1 next to my work keyboard right now), waiting rooms anywhere, solo lunches, flights or train rides, evenings in bed after holiday visits to family, etc. Avail yourself!
