Hey Producers! I'm Derp the Dinosaur and my challenge to you this week falls under the Practical category!

Often when you load up your program to start righting, jumping in and creating blips and bleeps is the most instantly rewarding thing to do, but this week I want you to spend 10 minutes or so creating a blank production template, so when you get future sparks of inspiration, you've got framework right in front of you to help speed up the creative process.

This can be completely different depending on your preferred genre, and can be as basic as setting up tracks for the most basic of instruments, or getting right down to adding in blank clips ready to populate with information.

And of course, if you felt like sharing it, then everyone can have access to a bunch of different templates!



Here's some tips

If you're not too hot on creating progression throughout a tune, take a track you really like, warp it in a new audio track so it's in time, then put Location Points on the timeline of when things happen, then all you need to do is remove the original and BAM a whole tune template ready for the filling.
Things like kick drums and snare drums are easy to put down, ie: a generic 4/4 kick midi clip on a blank track with an empty sampler can save time.
You could load all your favorite types of one sample (kick, snare, hat etc) into one giant drum rack read to go, so when you start producing you can just whiz through them with the chain selector
Try to color things how you like, and see if you can remember what is what. It really really helps when your tune starts getting complicated and you need to find something fast.
You can save your template as default in the preferences section
Have fun!

Cool man.

I have a template i use that i think people would find helpful, Its basic but i have a pre-rendering audio channel geared up for cutting and re sampling, I have all my drum racks and percussion as well as my nifty Kick layering machine i created (Highly proud of hehe). I also have a stems group ready to take in and record audio from all my midi groups for when i mix down using stems, as well as an FX channel and bass channel which has my sub machine and is in MONO by default....everything is colour co-ordinated too which makes life easy....ive seen people selling Templates like this on You-Tube but why bother when it's sooooo easy to do yourself....id be willing to load mine here if anyone wants it?

Yeah Karl , i wanna share some stuff !

I will post a template when its done. ( 3 days or so )

Cool !

I liked this one. Made my own last week (still some tweaks to add RE sends)
Pretty basic, but the idea is as follows.
6 channels= Drums, Perc, Bass, Synths, Techy noises, Stuff. Each one of those channels is a group, and in each group is everything that relates to that type. EG all the drum machines, samples etc go in the Drum group channel. All the percussive stuff I use goes in Perc, all my bass synths (26 home made bass synths and counting) goes in Bass etc

I use 128s ala Ill Gates, with the drums, so all my favourite drum samples are allready loaded and ready to go. Same with Percs etc.

Then in Each channel group I have extra blank midi and audio tracks, ready to accept new instruments, ideas as I go along. Everything in a channel group is EQd and compressed appropriatly, and each channel can potentially contain a huge amount of instruments/ audio tracks.

Then across the top of the sequencer window I have a basic song format mapped out.

I made the same template for the other programmes I use, and empty slots ready to slave into Ableton for recording. So Im only ever really dealing with 2 x 6 channels (although there maybe excess of 48 active outputs)

The beauty of it is, as I create more sounds, and design more instruments, I can simply add them to the master template. So each time I write a new song, eveything I need is there ready to go, all set up.

I cant beleive I never did this earlier! Having already released about a dozen songs, I am looking forward to saving time and creative power with my new template!. cheers Tom for the insipiration.