Building Your Own Routine

“I wouldn’t be an artist if I lived by a routine,” my best friend would say to me every time I would give him advice about creating a routine for his music and personal life. A routine he would say, is just so boring. There is no denying that most routines are often boring and lack excitement, however, nothing builds consistent growth like a great routine. 

To build a great routine, you need to focus in on areas of your life that a routine best serves. Not every part of your life needs to be on a routine, but certainly there are areas that a routine can make a huge difference in. Lets say you’re a musician looking to have a successful career, having a routine for consistent growth in your music’s awareness and also production quality just makes sense.

So building a proper routine for growing those two area could go something like this; first figure out how much time each day or week you can dedicate to a routine. So lets say you figured out that you can spend the first 2 hours after work each day for 5 days a week. That could be one hour for music production (songwriting, band practice, music theory - etc) and the other hour you could use to build the awareness up for your music (social media, newsletter work, press, finding opportunities - etc).

With your new plan of action, it’s now time to start the hard work, actually following through and sticking with your new routine. Obviously, this is where most routines fail. However, if you just think about the progress your new routine will cause, that should be enough motivation to keep you going.

Focused time and practice will cause positive growth almost 100% of the time. That’s the power and rewards of having a great routine and sticking with it.

Microphone Check! Simple Studio Techniques

When setting up your mic in your home studio I would suggest using a nice condenser mic, you can get one from 100 and up. You also want to get a pop filter, this will cut out the excessive p's and b's from getting to the mic. If you can, you should also invest in a mic pre-amp. This will give a good clean sound. If not you can just use the phantom power on your mix board.


The distance your artist should be from the mic is about a fist away. You should also set a ceiling on your mix board or software. This will prevent clipping from occurring during the recording.


I would advise you not to put any effects on the microphone during recording. You can always add those afterwords, if you put a bad effect on the artist during recording and don't like it, you can't remove it!

Now if you have the budget you should create an isolation booth. This will stop all outside noise from interfering with the recording. If you can't do this, most people use anything from a bathroom to a closet to create a good recording atmosphere. Use foam padding wherever possible to reduce and echoing effect.


So all in all its pretty easy to create a professional sounding microphone with a couple simple steps. Good luck and stay tuned for more posts!