Print your music

When making music I’m trying to get into the habit of always creating a finished audio file.

This means there will always be a new version of the song and it’ll be its own file. It won’t require a DAW to open. It’ll be its own file, just how it’ll be when it’s released. That’s why I’m doing it.

It keeps stuff moving forward.

This means that I can send that file to myself to listen to in my car, or on other speakers, or on another computer or different headphones. I can also listen to it on my phone outside.

Doing this is helpful because before I release music I like listening to it as if I were the listener. I wouldn’t be listening to it in my apartment on my studio monitors (Adam Audio T7Vs). I’d be listening to it through headphones while walking outside or through my car speakers while driving.

It’s a slightly different setting that affects how the music is experienced. There’s extra background noise and the speakers aren’t as high quality as my monitors are. There are other distractions like people either driving or walking around. You have to pay attention to some other stuff while doing both of those things (driving or walking). Experiencing my music like that makes me much more confident in what I’m releasing because I’ve experienced it as other people will.

Printing your music is also a great reminder to finish your music. Deciding when a piece of music is finished is something that you don’t often do unless you’re sharing the piece of music somewhere. And unless you do it often, you won’t be good at doing it. Deciding that a piece of music is finished is a completely different thing than deciding what to write in a piece of music.

And printing your music every time you stop working on it is like saying, “If I decided it were finished right now, this is what it’d sound like.”

A small reminder that eventually the song will be finished. It might even make you realize that the piece is closer to being finished than you realized.

The last reason this is useful is practical. You can check where you left that piece of music without having to open and load your DAW. Depending on how extensive the piece of music is and how many plugins it has, it might take a few minutes to load every instrument, synth, plugin, and effect in your DAW. Having the option of listening to an audio file quickly can save a lot of time, especially if you have a deadline to finish multiple pieces of music.

That’s why I’m trying to get into the habit of always printing my music.

ISJ