Once you get making music on a regular basis you start to find that there are specific things that you do to the different parts of your tracks on every track you start making. This could be putting a particular effect on a particular drum (I for example nearly always put a bit of reverb on my main snare drum).

So one thing we can do to save us lots of time and also make it easier to get working on our music is to make a template file which we can load up when we start up our music software. Everyone makes music in different way so really you should make yourself a personalized template as this will be setup just the way you like it and it will save you from doing the same things again and again.

A template file could incorporate some of these ideas, but really it could incorporate anything we do everytime you make music...

• Commonly used effects on certain channels
• Send effects and returns
• Multichannel routings
• MIDI and Audio Mappings
• EQ
• Channel Names

I am using Ableton rewired to Reason. In both these commonly used software programs we can set them up to load our template file everytime we create a new project, (This also stops us from accidentally saving over our template)

Setting a template in Reason
Create a template and save it as a file on your hard drive. The choose Edit > Preferences and on the General page you will find a section calledDefault Song. Click Custom and select your saved template. Everytime you choose New it will now use your template.

Setting a template in Ableton
Create or load up your template and choose Options > Preferences and under the File Folder tab we will see a save button at the top. Clicking that will set the current project as our template and it will load up everytime you choose New Project.

In other software I am sure that there will be a similar way of setting up a template file. If not you can always just save a file as a template and load that up instead. Just remember to choose Save As so that you don't lose your template settings.

As part of my album project I will be using my template files that have been set up. I'm not going to give away my template files because I believe you should make them for yourself to be setup the way you like it. My template files includes Reason devices and channels preset up and named for all drum parts such as Kicks, Snares, Hi-Hats, Crashes etc. All are routed with common effects on each and ready to be sent to a Send for parallel compression.