Workflow with Headhunterz: Streamlining

By Hard News 03 March 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 ‘Streamlining’. Read and learn!

“Streamlining your workflow is fun, it improves the quality of your productions and it’s going to save you time and frustration when you’re working on songs.

First of all, if you’re like me, you constantly learn new techniques, shortcuts etc, so very often I create
a complete new template or I update my old template so I start each song in the most efficient way possible. I have my master chain set up (Slate FG-Red, Tube-Tech PE 1C, Ozone 5), a reverb (valhalla room), delay (echoboy) and sidechain (I draw this as a volume automation on a bus). I have folders ready in my arrangement where I sort my audio and instrument tracks. This way when I work I can easily find channels and focus on working on only drums for example while I have all other folders closed.

Now, this is where workflow really kicks in: The file browser. When I used to work in Logic I never used the browser but nowadays in Studio One it’s my number one tool to make me work fast. I have folders in my browser for every single track I finished where I have saved every sound I made for that track and every synth preset or fx chain sorted per track. I have folders sorted in categories for all sounds I made when I was sound designing. Leads, basses, etc. I have a huge library with my own sounds that I made myself of which I know they sound right. This way when I want to make a song and not focus on sound design I never have to look very long to find a good sample. Studio One in particular offers a function called Music Loops where you can save a midi event, along with the effects chain AND the synth preset, which you can drag from your browser into your project, and it even has a preview function that lets you hear the synth playing the midi file so you know which preset you’re loading in.

It is so worth taking the time to save and organize everything you do so that you don’t have to do the exact same action over and over again for each song. It brings you back to the creative part of making music, after all that’s where the magic is going to happen. Good luck!”