"workflow"

This seems to be the neologism du jour in a bunch of musician forums I look at. Here is an example, C&P-ed from SoS forum:

tips for speeding up my workflow
hi guys,
im in the process of working on a couple of 12 track albums and could do with speeding up my mix workflow a little. Im working within logic 9 and mixing completely in the box.

I've started noticing it recently. It gets up my nose a little because it sounds like wanky management-speak, like you'd get called in to see your supervisor and they'd say that you need to improve your workflow for greater throughput or w/e and you'd maybe apply for another job later that night. Fuck that shit.

where did this term come from, and when did people start dropping it? Also, link to egregriou s examples, if you have seen such.

i dunno, i don't mind this phrase so much, it makes good sense to me as a concept. improved workflow = being "creative" becomes easier/more of a focus.

having said that yeah it has become a bit of a buzzword of late.

What on earth does this even mean?

"speeding up my workflow"

It doesn't make any kind of sense to me. Is this a process that one wants to faster, or more effectively? (which doesn't make sense to me on an intuitive level - that half the fun of making music is the process of dicking around and figuring out what works.)

Is it a state of mind one wants to get into? That, to me, would make more sense. I would like a way to segue more easily into a music-working state of mind. So I can go straight from having a tune pop into my mind, to sitting down and getting it down on hard drive. To this end, I've tried moving my "studio" back into my bedroom, but this doesn't really make sense as I can't leave it set up in the way I used to be able to leave a 4-track set up at the end of my bed. (Especially as I use my laptop for everything, so I have it out all the time, which is good, but am less likely to use it for music, which is bad.)

It just sounds to me like it's a wrong-headed approach to making music. Like "speeding up my workflow" is about chucking out more product, more tunes, more quickly, rather than any kind of enhancement of the process from a quality or fun or enjoyment level.

But I could be reading it wrong.

I guess it means that if you feel creative and want to get a song down quickly while it is fresh you can sometimes be delayed by needing to create a drum track, choose sounds - which while important might get in the way of getting the melody out of your head. Sometimes I use a default rack set up that I've already pre-filled with instruments and a guide drum track so I can get the melody down and then change all the presets later.

OK, that makes sense.

I get that on some electronic music forums I used to post on. That they would talk about how it is NECESSARY TO BUILD A WHOLE KIT first before you start demoing a track. Like, WTF, that is so ass backwards. Grab the first kit that sounds anything like what is in your head, and get it down. Then worry about the details.

I used to have Reason set up to open not on a blank rack but on a preset brush drum kit and a particular wub sound that I was really attached to. But I removed that because I had become too damn attached to that wub sound and ended up using it on every single track. It's always a compromise.

I guess that my way of working has changed so completely from 4-tracking to the way I make music now that there's a lot of things I take for granted about the way I used to work that I no longer do.

I'm using reason / record too, and having a default template with a load of instruments and effects is useful. But I do agree that there is a temptation to reuse and rely to heavily on things that are there automatically when you start the track.

rely *too* heavily

It's weird, though. When I was making drum tracks on a 505, I never spent any time at all going "OMG, the kick drum sound is the same on every single track!" I just spent all my time worrying about whether it went with the bass and the melody or not.

I used to use the exact same chorus pedal and delay pedal on every single song I ever recorded (with minor tweaks to the settings) and never worried that everything "sounded the same" - so why, now that I have Reason and an almost infinite amout of settings - do I spend ridiculous amounts of time trying not to rely on the same sounds, even though I *like* those sounds, or else I wouldn't have chosen them in the first place?

This kind of choice can be paralysing. And also it can lead to that plug-in fetishisation where people think that getting a new, expensive virtual piece of kit will enable them to be more creative because it will give them new sounds?

(I took 45 minutes to write this, so sorry if this has already been covered)

Like any management/technical term it's been heavily misused. It becomes wanky management speak when it gets misused by wanky managers as a passive-aggressive way of saying "I need you to work harder". It's this year's "work smarter not harder", except even vaguer and harder to counteract with direct questions.

Now this is going to sound like I'm cribbing from a management book...

Workflow should really be about making the work fit in with how you work best. Any project, even one you're really excited about working on, has tedious repetitive bits. The goal of workflow is to reduce the time spent on tedious tasks and increase the time available for interesting and creative tasks.

In the recording studio (aka my bedroom), it means setting the gear up so that I don't have to keep plugging/unplugging cables etc. just so I can record something. It also includes using templates in the DAW for commonly used things like guitar, MIDI controller keyboard, basic drum machine, etc.. There are also practical things like the naming of project folders, etc..
I also try and group similar uncreative tasks together, so that they'll take less time. Instead of doing the mixes for demos as and when, I'll set aside a 3-4 hour period and get a dozen of them done in one go. Or I'll spend an hour converting, tagging, and uploading MP3s. The idea is that by grouping similar tasks, the tasks take less time in total than if they were done separately. Also the tasks become easier, because there's a natural tendency to get into a rhythm with repetitive work.
On a larger scale, I'll use a spreadsheet to keep track of my progress on the individual songs on an album. Each song has a separate row, each with columns for track #, song title, notes, who is singing it, key, time sig, BPM, demo review notes, mix review notes, and track length. There are also tick box columns to indicate completion of music/lyrics/demo/preparation/recording vocals/recording instruments/1st mix/2nd mix/mastering.

I don't want all this to come across as the smug pronouncements of a super-rigid PHB middle manager. By nature I'm an incredibly disorganised person. But the upshot of using workflow (or at least my interpretation of it) is that I get a lot more enjoyment out of the limited time that I have available for making music.

But in an office, unfortunately, workflow usually means dealing with nobs in suits who say things like "utilise synergy".

some of interpretations of this term I see, incl some above just seem to mean having a "setup" for your electronic music gear, midi/audio recorder etc. Like I have a default song which is just a bunch of empty tracks linked to each of my synthesizers so I can play any of them just by selecting that track, and a couple of ready-to-go audio tracks. I don' think of that as "workflow" necessarily, it's just how I have things set up.

Other uses of the term, incl the person on SoS forum, seem to involve having a template for creativity, which does not appeal to me. I can see it being useful if you work in making music for TV or advertising, or you have hit on a succsessful club music formula and want to milk it while you can, but that does not appeal to me at all to the point where the term "guarantor of bad art" comes to mind..

As an aside, I saw this other thread at Sos while I last was there:

Hello all,
I've so far done my mixes mostly in the box but some recent projects have convinced me that sending a stereo mix through a nice piece of outboard equipment adds a fullness and depth to the sound that's hard to obtain in the purely digital domain. The really esoteric stuff is beyond my budget but I'm looking to invest around 1200-1400 pounds in a single piece of outboard equipment, mainly for processing mixes.

Classic! "I want to buy something for about 1400 ukp, to...er...make shit sound better" Yeesh.

"I want someone to sell me an Aural Exciter which will magically make all my bits of utter cack sound like number one radio hits with a BULLET!"

Someone's been watching the Josie & The Pussycats movie again.

i think i'm bad at flowing my work or something, i always think "i need to have a default track where banging drumz, some ambient sounding shit, and a basic bass and piano are loaded already so i don't spend 10 minutes setting it up everytime inspirations strikes" and then i spend 10 minutes setting everything up and i'm like fuck it, i'm rollin son *bangs on midi box*.

I feel the same way. The setup time due to routine (imo) clears ones head and makes one ready for getting shit done.