Tips for Traveling to Produce Records and Condensing Your Year into 12 Weeks!

I hope the American’s reading this had a great Independence Day celebration and enjoyed time with their loved ones eating food and blowing things up!
(YEE HAW)

To everyone else…hope you had a good Thursday!

What I Learned From Traveling 1000+ Miles to Produce a Record

Back in 2019 I spent about a quarter of the year traveling to produce bands and artists across the country, but since the shift that was 2020 I haven’t stepped out and done that type of long travel production. Then I got a call from Jason who is an artist I am producing from Houston and had the opportunity to travel to him for a week to produce his record in person and FINALLY getting back into the travel production after years of holding off.

I firmly believe that you can learn from all kinds of experiences and after the great experience we had working on Jason’s record I decided to log in some of my takeaways from the trip on the flight back home.

Here are those takeaways as I scribbled them down 30,000 feet in the air:

• Know when to push and when to take a break

• A quality cup of coffee and a thoughtful, slow morning can very much set you up for a day of focused work

• Be open to new conversations and new experiences

• Don’t be afraid to dig in and get the work done past your perceived “comfort zone”

• Don’t Settle

• All you can do is plan well, be flexible, and move with intent

• Do everything to make tracking as comfortable as possible

• Edit as you go for better more confident takes

I do feel like I walked away from that week more confident in myself, both as a music producer and as a communicator.  It can be really easy to feel unsure in times like these where you are very much running blind, but being able to lock in and make sure you are getting the best quality performances and recordings you possibly can is all you CAN do.  And that’s exactly what I did throughout that week.

If you want to hear me talk in more depth about the trip and dive into some of the things I learned, I talked about it on a solo episode of the Home Studio Hangout Podcast recently (Episode 118) and went a little more in depth on five of the takeaways that seemed the most important to me!

Give it a listen and let me know how you like the solo episode style 

You can find the video link below or the audio only version on your favorite podcast player!

Andrew

Book Review:
“The 12 Week Year” by Brian P. Moran

“The 12 Week Year” is a book on goal setting, prioritization, and productivity that attempts to shift your thinking from an annualized format to a quarterly one.  With a great premise it can definitely be taken seriously, but it can feel a little dated in places from it’s 2013 publishing. 

The burning question though… is it even worth the read?

For some reason this last couple of weeks I really struggled to get through this book.  The concept is pretty easy to understand.  Instead of having to wait an entire to year to see if you were successful or correct about a business move, shorten your “year” to every 12 weeks.  

This way you can be hyper focused on a specific aspect of your business and then if you need to pivot you have another 3 “years” to make the needed adjustments so that the time you actually end the calendar year you can have made much larger moves forward in much shorter time frames!

Working in quarters of the year isn’t new to business, in fact it’s how most businesses operate.  The difference between working quarterly and the 12 week year is the mindset shift that happens when you shorten the perceived timeframe you are working In.  Making a 12 month execution cycle shift into a quarterly execution cycle will inevitably up your ability to get more done in a calendar year and helps you avoid the pitfalls of annualized thinking!

Now, I’m doing the simplest explanation of it possible in order to give you the general understanding and I definitely DO recommend this book especially to those that are newer to reading business focused material.  However, if you are an avid reader of modern business books some of the chapters in the middle and latter sections of this book might seem a little obvious or not as well fleshed out as some other books.  An example is when you get to the section on time-blocking your calendar.  “The 12 Week Year” goes through a very light version of explaining the benefits of that scheduling model and how it can help you, however if you’ve read the books “Make Time” by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky then you have more than enough done your education on time blocking and how to implement it into your life so the small section in “The 12 Week Year” will feel like a La Croix version of “Make Time”.

I feel like that is a very specific case compared to the average reader though. I know most people aren’t burning through 25 business books a year like me, so I can assume there will be overlap sometimes when I read a lot of similar types of books. 

Overall I’d give it a 8/10 if you are new to business books and a 6/10 if you are a veteran business book connoisseur.

Definitely a solid read, though it can feel a little dated or light in sections, the overarching concept is really great and Is definitely something I’m going to be testing out implementing in my own scheduling for the rest of this calendar year! Even though it can suffer from it’s 10+ years in publication the concept is still work a read to everyone, especially because most libraries or audible subscriptions have it available for free!

Buy the book HERE (any purchase helps fund the newsletter)

Community Showcase

If you want to showcase what you’ve been doing or something you might have dropping soon reply to this email or send it over to [email protected] with the email subject:
“Community Showcase”

We would love to show off what members of our community are doing!

What You May Have Missed

• Everything You Need to Start Producing Music

• How I Made a Beat Using ONLY SAMPLES

• 2024 SO FAR, Moving to Nashville, and Hanging OUT

Hope you have another great week!

❤️