Do You Know The 80/20 Rule In Music Production? Use It To Jumpstart Your Productivity
Pareto's Principle or the “80/20 rule” has become well-cited and utilised across many areas of business but can you apply it successfully to mixing, mastering and music production?
Out of all the choices we make whilst doing what we do, roughly 80% of them make very little difference to the finished mix. Shocking right?
So what is the 20% that really counts?
How do we identify it?
How can knowing our 20% help us as audio engineers?
For those of you not in the know, The formula goes like this:
20% of our activities give us 80% of our results which, in business, is basically saying that 80% of your sales are coming from 20% of your products, or 80% of your sales are coming from 20% of your salespeople. You know, that kind of thing.
And, it often applies to anything we do in life…
80% of traffic is on 20% of the roads
perhaps 20% of a band’s tracks are the ones that generate 80% of their streams
you regularly only wear 20% of the things in your wardrobe!
But for this article, I’d like to look at it more from a productivity perspective.
If you spend small amounts of time focused on the right things, you can make a significant amount of progress.
In order for our 20% to work best for us, we need to be very focused, goal-driven and intentional about our current goal or task.
So How Can We Apply This 80/20 Rule To The Creative Arts?
We all excel in different areas, so your 20% could be quite different from mine.
This is easier in the business world because they can track numbers but for us, the idea is to try and somehow track our results.
Goal Setting
By setting ourselves goals, we can measure our results easier. We knew where we were at the beginning and can look at where we ended up to see if what we did, worked out or not.
If one of your goals is to develop your general mixing skillset, then the following principles might be worth trying in order to discover your 20%…
Learn from those that already (successfully) do what you do, much like a musician would learn the jazz standards or classical music.
We can sit and watch the famous engineers on pureMix video tutorials or maybe sit in on real-life audio sessions. Pull a few strings, do you know anyone who can get you in on a session? If you're feeling flush, you could invest in some 1-1 training or a premium group coaching session like Mix With The Masters.
Try to reproduce what you hear, so, if you like a particular reverb effect that has been created in a song, then sit at your DAW and try to figure out how it was done, no hints from YouTube!
Spend time developing your own ideas. Get hold of some session files and just mix, build up your creativity muscles.
Talk with likeminded people. Don't re-invent the wheel, time spent talking to others can help you come up with options that you'd never thought of before.
Ask yourself questions like "if my goal now is to really nail my low-end mixing, what have I done so far that has made the biggest impact in this area of my work?”
At the end of the day, you've got to work out what your goals are and where you want to end up.
Using a free time tracking app like Clockify can help you work out where exactly you’re spending your time and then you can easily work out your 20% providing you remembered to track your time of course!
Not Enough Time In The Day?
Think about what you would do if your music mixing time was cut to 1 hour, what would you tackle first to get the most done? Maybe setting the static mix? Yeah, that’d be mine.
If your time is limited, divide your time into chunks and decide what it is you want to achieve in this session.
Then, be intentional about where you’re going to focus your time. Maybe it’s editing the bass guitar for 30 mins, then perhaps you'll spend the final 30 mins on the vocal comp.
Focus on what you need to accomplish in that hour.
Like anything else, we can only hope to get better at our craft by practising, so if you have a limited amount of spare time, it’s important to be intentional about what you’re going to do with that time and if you can somehow quantify your results, then you’ll be able to use your 20% wisely and make great gains in your free time, skills and income.
Learn something, get it down really well, move on to the next thing.
30,000 Foot View
Oh no, not business jargon, Sara, please!
Sorry, yes! Let’s run this one up the flag pole, shall we?
Take a holistic view of your mixing. What bits aren't working for you and where do you seem to make the most progress in any session?
When you find something that works, that brings you better or faster results, do more of it!
For me, this has seen me spend more time on the static mix, just using faders and the pan pots to get the levels right and get as close as possible to the finished mix where all it needs is a little bit of volume automation to get a final balance.
Another area for me is to start by addressing sounds at the bus/group level and work backwards. This means that I don't have to do as much work at track level and I make faster progress.
Can you see how just these two tasks can get me roughly 80% of the way to a finished mix?
Identifying Your 20%
Now, I just want to clarify, it doesn't necessarily work out as 80/20 exactly. It could be 75/25, 90/10, 98/2, but you get my drift. The main idea is that there is usually a large swing in one direction.
Think back over the past 12 months to figure out where you made the greatest gains. What was the one thing that had the biggest effect on your music production? Take that thing and do more of it and monitor your results.
Which tasks are you doing that you know aren't creating roughly 80% of results? Do they need to be done at all? Can they be outsourced or automated instead? At the very least, can they go to the back of the queue?
By identifying your 20% and doing more of it is the only way to guarantee you'll improve your results.
Here are a few of my suggestions that might make up your 20%:
Take more care over mic placement
Gain staging
Referencing
Learning new keyboard shortcuts
Building a selection of DAW templates
Acoustic treatment
Song structure and arrangement
Take regular ear breaks
Limit your plugin list to only a few choices
Stop soloing and EQ/compress/pan in context
Conclusion
Being aware of the 80/20 rule can have a huge impact on your productivity in the studio and even your whole life. Doing the small things consistently can pay off in a big way and by observing our results and switching things up, we can truly maximise our music creation, skills and profits.
We don’t have to be rigid about this, just have awareness so that the next time you look at your key performance indicators (KPI’s), you can see how any growth might be attributed to the one or two things you changed last quarter.
Good luck!