Workflow refinement: Is This Step Really Necessary? Tuesday VO Studio Tech Tip

With each repetition of a combination of steps, we become creatures of our own habits. Repeating those steps shifts things to our muscle memory, offloading thought until we cease considering the individual parts of our routine. It’s why we repeat scales on an instrument, kata in martial arts, or positions for dance. All practices embed a set of physical motions which can then be utilized automatically as we progress.

In pursuit of efficiency, we then tend to combine those steps into a process chunk. That’s really all we’re doing when we create a processing Rack, Stack, or Macro in our studio recording software – taking a set of discrete, specific steps and making them occur in a particular order. The particular steps matter a lot. Once we move past the most basic of fixes, it’s seldom that there’s a “one-size-fits-all” solution. If we have thought through those steps and understand why we are doing them, a strong framework and efficient workflow will keep us focused, and productive, doing creative work within that framework.

When initially setting up any reasonably complex workflow, we sometimes include steps that end up not being terribly important. Those unimportant steps may be inconsequentially redundant, nothing more than “busy work” – things that keep us engaged but don’t actually add anything to the process. Perhaps those steps never actually mattered. However, it’s more likely we’ve gained additional experience and have moved past the point when they were necessary. While it’s important to set up guardrails, it may not be necessary to put protective padding on them as well.  We may be able to discard those extra layers.

Eliminating extra steps is a good reason to think things through from time to time. Just like in the garden, we’ve got to prune things back to allow new growth. It’s helpful to pause periodically and ask just “why” you are doing any single step in a complex workflow. It may just be a task that’s no longer necessary.

If you would like a free review of your vocal recordings, please use the upload tool on my Audio Review page.

If this resource has been helpful to you, please share with one of the buttons below!
You can also sign up to receive these and other advance announcements via email each week.