Workflow Wednesday with Headhunterz: Working faster

By Hard News 22 February 2016

Headhunterz is very active on Instagram and he likes treating his fans to daily updates. While he isn’t as active in the Hardstyle scene as he is on Instagram, he has been giving extremely valuable studio-tips for a few weeks now.

‘Workflow Wednesday’ as he calls his tips are something that a lot of our readers will find interesting, because many of them have an interest in pressing buttons and turning knobs. That’s why we’ve decided to publish them on our website whenever he decides to deliver a new one. Yesterday he explained something about ‘Working faster’. Read and learn!

“I’ll share something that made me work much more efficient. I realized that working fast is crucial for staying in the creative flow. If you take too long to finish a track you lose the ability to listen to it with fresh ears and you risk your track to lose it’s spontaneity. That’s why nowadays I separate the process of making music in 4 parts.

First of all I start with the idea. What do I want to make? This is a personal thing. I don’t like the empty page. I want to have something to start off with. That’s why I make sure I know where more or less I’m going.

Then I make sure I have my sounds ready. Just like a band that wants to record a song. If it has to start searching for sounds while recording a song it will get frustrating and the magic of the recording session will disappear. They make sure they’re ready to roll before they record even a second of the song! So all my sounds or at least 80% is ready for me to drag into my project without having to tweak them too much any further.

Then I arrange the song. This is where the magic happens and where I don’t want to be held up by having to get into sound designing or too much eq tweaking etc. Often the less you have to think and the more you just let it happen, the better the song. It’s all about capturing the moment. That magic moment of inspiration where it feels like the song writes itself. Don’t worry about imperfections. This is about the idea.

When all that is done, only then I go into details. Now is the time to spend as much time as you like on perfecting the transitions, eq settings etc. You can go as far as you like with this but remember, in the end the best tracks are all about the best ideas. Girls don’t care about the mixdown. I actually do care, but not about the mixdown of a bad song.”