Focus On One Thing...

...and cheat at everything else

In line with The Process Is The Product, we are thinking about optimising our learning and doing workflows, rather than on end results. The end results tell us important information about where we are in terms of abilities and workflow, but once made, they are perhaps shared, and then discarded. If we want to hear something again, we make it anew.

Now Focus On One Thing, Cheat For Everything Else is the music production equivalent of someone isolating a muscle group when working out in the gym. If we want to learn to 'make trance plucks in Serum', then we want to practise 'make trance plucks in Serum', and the more of our practice time we spend on 'make trance plucks in Serum', the better we get at 'make trance plucks in Serum'. The less time we spend on 'make trance plucks in Serum', the less intensive our practice, and the less time we spend on the thing we are trying to learn. So if, to use this example, you are trying to get better at 'make trance plucks in Serum', then have a midi clip ready made, perhaps even have the skeleton of a track already arranged so that you have a context within which you want to 'make trance plucks in Serum'. So spend five minutes of your hour setting up the arrangement, perhaps even just load a template. Then spend the remaining 55 minutes of your hour working on the pluck.

Now what you repeat you remember, and what you don't repeat your forget. So you don't want to 'make a tranc plucks in Serum' just once. As Bruce Lee said: I fear the man who has practised one kick 1000 times. In the case of our trance pluck, we want something we can make in 5 minutes from scratch, and then make that same pluck, roughly, eleven times in our 55 minutes. This is no different than practising a phrase on an instrument like a guitar or piano. What instrumentalists do is to practise the same pattern over and over again until they can do it reliably, and hopefully eventually effortlessly. A synth is a musical instrument, so learn a synth as a musical instrument, which means repeating common patterns many times, rather than like a child who plays for five minutes with one toy, then gets bored and picks up another toy. If you approach production like a child mindlessly playing with one toy after another, you won't get very far.

](FocusOnOneThing)*. If you're not striving to learn arrangement, then don't waste any time on it, but if you are* striving to learn arrangement, then practise arrangement and don't spend much time doing other things. The more focussed your learning activities are, the more yo intensively practise a small number of things, the more those things you focus on are burned into your brain.