What helps you work faster?

Recording clean cymbal fades and samples of the drums.

Try get a drummer to let cymbals fade completely. It's funny how hard they try and focus.

The Furmans are expensive but, in my opinion, worth it. Very easy to use. We usually set up a basic mix while standing next to the musician, hearing what he is hearing, explain how the mixer works and they are set. It also has a basic hi/lo eq for the entire monitor mix.

Recording as many instruments at the same time as possible makes a huge difference. As much as I love the sound and workflow of tape, recording the band live is a bigger deal to me than the decision to record to hard disk or analog tape. And I worked exclusively to tape for the multitrack for about four years.

Keeping a note book by the console, that's a great one. When it's time to mix I have a little list of things that have worked for that song when we were tracking basics or overdubbing. It could be panning, eq or a certain "feel", like a certain level of ambience on the vocal will remind me of a certain recording, I'll make a note of it and get it back while mixing.

We keep photos of setups and our track sheets let you write in detail what the tracking chain was. Comes in handy when you look it up years later. Specially useful for checking out what mic was used with singers. I'll make sure that mic is up for the "shoot out".

Having a mental archive of recording chains that work for certain things is invaluable. You'll never forget the things you struggled with in the past.

Doing some kind of exercise. A major one. If i don't, my mood gets worse as the sessions keep coming. I ride my bike to the studio. It's not a 2 hour workout (wow) but it keeps my head (relatively) in order. Along these lines I would say, for me, not rehearsing with my band because of work for too long screws my head up in a similar way to not exercising. Not a fan of energy drinks either. I have a coffee maker that drips into a thermos so the coffee is always drinkable. Maybe I should set up another one next to the console... Perhaps an intravenous feed... Hmm...

Downtime is always maintenance time. My partner here at the studio does a lot while sessions are going but there are certain things that need an empty studio and two people. A major maintenance help for us is Steve Sadler's support subscription. Keeping the JH24 running smoothly.

 

Having instruments always come up on the same channels on the console has made a difference. For me, channel 2 is kick drum (resonant side), 13 is always a guitar channel, 16 is main vocal... Obviously, if the band is drums, cello, tuba, marimba and lapsteel things are going to change a little, but you get the idea. Less thinking means mixing can be more visceral, intuitive, unconscious process. And faster.

A deadline. Ha! Couldn't help myself.

In all seriousness, DAW templates with different I/O setups are critical to me. That and having all my patch bays and gang boxes clearly marked. Simple things go a long way.

Here some of mine in order of importance.

1. Having everything in the studio wired for complete versatility. I can wire anything to anything through patchbays both in the live room and the mix room. Every patch point can be used bidirectionally.

2. Having "go to" mics that you know the sound of. I'm going to shoot you straight here, most people get caught up in the whole overblown "right mic for the job" and end up with too many damn choices for everything and end up in "analysis paralysis" trying all these combinations of everything and wasting time. Pick a couple of known workhorse mics for each instrument you intend to record and learn those mics well. Learn every possible position and trick for these few mics and it'll go a lot further than buying mic after mic, hoping for some magic bullet. One thing you'll always see when you study the pros, they have about 5-8 mics they use for every recording, and you already know what they are..

3. Headphone mixers. Like the Furman or others. I bought a cheap behringer AD/DA box and bus out headphone stem mixes to it from the DAW. From there it splits out to 4 cheap 8 channel mixers where the player can mix his own headphone mix, including EQ. This has saved me from spending 30 minutes each session trying to balance the headphone mixes for all the players at once on my end.

4. Create a game plan for everything. When I get a new band in, I always have the drummer come in the night before the first session and go through and tune the drums with/for the drummer first. Change heads, move mics around, etc. This saves hours during the session and hearing a well tuned kit always gets the band excited. It's as much psychological as it is practical.  When the band feels like you are taking care of business, they feel a lot more relaxed that their money is being well spent.

5. Have DAW templates. I couldn't agree more with the person who mentioned this above. I have templates for a couple different setups so I can boot it up, load the template and I'm ready to go. Each instrument has pre-determined tracks that I set them on with bussing already set up for headphone mixes and stems. The patchbay is already set for each instrument and bus and is set to the outboard that I like. Sometimes I'll change it on the fly but most of the time, not.

6. Know your gear! This touches on the mic thing above, but know all your gear and how you use it. Again, this is another one of those places that people who don't do this very much will say silly stuff like "I always start fresh for every band" or something. Balderdash! Even if you "reset" all your gear and plugs to 0, you'll instinctively start turning knobs and flipping switches right back to pretty close to what you had set. That's called "your sound". Everyone has one eventually and that's why different pros have different sounds even with the same gear, and each one is very noticeable. I stopped pretending that I gave everybody a fresh slate and just left a lot a gear set to where I like it and use it often. I embraced the fact that my gear has a sound and my settings are my sound.

7. No serious drinking or doing drugs in the studio while on studio time. A shot or a beer or something to loosen up a tense player is cool, but that band member swilling a half bottle of JD before he's doing his parts isn't going to happen. Also, that dude that runs outside every 10 minutes for "fresh air" isn't happening either. If you are a cigarette smoker, you'll say that you're going for a "smoke". A person who goes for "fresh air" or "a break" is usually doing drugs. Chances are, they'll end up too fucked up to play or they'll end up fucking something in the studio up. If you want to hang out after a session and smoke some green and help me put everything up while talking about stuff, that's cool. If not, go home. If you are doing something harder than a little weed, I'm going to ask you to leave. Luckly, I'm 6'3" 250lbs so I can do that kinda thing and people usually do as I ask.

8. Keep the atmosphere light. Tell jokes, talk about stuff. Have plenty of reading material and games and stuff. Bored people who are sitting around with their heads in their phones/tablets/gizmos aren't going to inspire performances. Uninspired performances lead to retakes. Retakes lead to boredom. Boredom leads to uninspired retakes.. and the circle starts again. You are the leader of the session. Sit up and manage that session in all aspects. Keep things moving and keep people excited to be there as much as you can. You'll be amazed when you get word-of-mouth reviews where someone has told someone else to come to your studio because "you're awesome and inspiring" or stuff like that instead of just getting a good sound. A lot of people get good sounds these days. You gotta go above and beyond and make the people want to come back for the good experience. It makes people work harder and faster if nothing else.

9. Tell the truth, tactfully. It's going to happen. The singer is going to ask you what you thought of the take he/she just did. They *want* to hear that it was the most wonderful thing that you've ever heard. You think it sounds like two birds fucking and then getting run over by a car. How do you get the singer to do another take without murdering their self-image and effectively shutting down any hope of a good retake? Truth and tact. I find that it's always best to stick to the facts, jack. Instead of blurting out "it stunk, do it again", focus on something like "when you sang ________ I think the S is too much, can you try it a bit softer" and stuff like that. Give them something to work on getting better instead of just being overall negative. It works more often than not. Oh and put some reverb on the vocal headphone mix. Works every time.

I just turned 40...and I'm getting (more) fat...gotta start shedding some pounds...

DAW templates are important. I normally use the computer as a tape machine, so my template is a simple 24 tracks with outputs assigned to channels on the desk.

Normals in the patchbay, a must. I can split the signal in three places in each channel in the console. It gets used so often I don't even think about it!

I agree that tried and true methods should be the first thing to attempt during a session. And as you say, there is no magic bullet, only good microphone choice and technique. And it is of little use to have many mics if you don't know them intimately. There are a few mics that work so well for certain applications (the 4038 for tenor sax comes to mind) that it puts a big smile on your face when yo put up the fader