Hola

Whats your work flow?

Finished up a sound engineering production course recently. Was reasonably interesting, but mainly unrelated to what I wanted to do. Good general background reading.

But it did highlight the problem with making electronic music that Ive found anyway - you tend to do everything at once.

So I'm learning about the best way to record each instrument, top tricks for tracking, then sections on how to approach mixing once the tracking stage is all done, then mixing down with the prescience to know what the mastering engineer needs....

.... and at every step there's a sort of implied understanding of what the next stage needs. Tracking stage needs to be as good as possible so that the mixing stage can take over. Mixing stage needs to be tip top so that the mastering dude can do his job.

How do you know what to do at each stage, and where to stop?

So If I spend ages designing a synth sound and automating all the variables it goes through and writing the midi part for it, how much attention to I need to pay to its sound? Because I have the choice to engineer the synth so that it fits into my mix, but am I supposed to just make it sound lush, then fit it into the mix later?

And given all this how do you know where to stop given that a lot of the time with dance music you need to know how the master compression is going to affect the groove and swing of everything?

Soo......

Whats your work flow? Do you do everything at once, or do you write everything in midi, then work on each track, then work on the mix, then set it up for mastering?

Doing my head in at the moment. Never sure how far to go at each stage, what to cut, what to keep etc.