Using DAW Default Templates To Save You Time ⏳

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Did you know, you can save a huge amount of time with some tricks in your DAW - your DAW being your digital audio workstation. Pro Tools, Ableton, Fruity Loops, Cubase - whatever it is you use, I'm going to show you one of the easiest things that is often overlooked, and that is building templates as well as a default template.

My name is Zion and I'm the founder of the Triple Threat Artists course and community and together with Josh Doyle, another great producer, we teach students and support students in getting their music production better and better so that they're not having to rely on a producer every time they write a song. And we're always looking for ways to help you save time.

If you'd like to check out our course or community in any of the freebies, we offer, check the links below. All right, let's jump into this.

A lot of people don't realize this, but your DAW, no matter what DAW you have, as far as I know, has a way of making a default template. So when you start, you already have something. Now, there are some thoughts behind this.

One is that I used to always start with a drum track. And so I always wanted to have a drum set. So what I could have done is maybe just started like a drum tack in Ableton. I'm using Ableton Live. It's just my thing. So I could have just started with the drum track and immediately just started hammering things out.

The only problem about that is when you have an instrument already loaded, it takes up CPU. It takes up time to load. Sometimes you want to open your DAW and get started right away, or you're going to open a different project anyway, and you don't want to have to load up a drum set.

There you go. I like to do is I usually separate my tracks into two groups. I have my drums at the top, and then I have my instruments. Now, of course I would have vocals as well as a group of vocals, but I usually, because I don't sing generally, I usually use vocals from somebody else that gives them to me.

They'll come in later and I'll put them in later. But just right off the bat while I'm recording and getting started, I like to have a track that's already set up for a kick, a snare to two snares. I actually like hats, tops, tops, or like loops that are kind of high-frequency loops. And then maybe an extra thing just for symbol swells or something like that.

And then in my instruments group, I like to have all my basses together. I usually like two different basses available to me. So of course, if you've watched my last video I separate bass tracks and the low frequencies and high frequencies, I just copy and paste the bass track. And I like to have two sets of that because oftentimes in a song there's two different types of basses.

And then I have all my instrument tracks, well, nothing, none of this is rocket science, but here's the thing I have each one of my tracks already set up so that I've got Neutron, which is kind of my mixing plugin already ready to go on every single track and its side chained to the kick.

And that's nice because if you've watched my last video, the side chaining will, will happen. I can control it right away. And I've also got a slope on the higher frequencies. Oftentimes I'm doing a lot of low-fi stuff. So I'm usually having to duck a lot of the higher frequencies cause it's supposed to be a kind of a warm mix. So that's why I've set up this way.

Now about the master bus. The master bus I always have three things here, actually four. Usually I throw one more on here. That's my mono plugin. So my first plugin is a VU meter. I use a VU meter just to go ahead and get a sense of the loudness of my project. This the headroom is set to 16 and I'm trying to kind of dial the loudest part of the song so that the frequencies hit around zero just right off the bat.

VU meters, you probably already have one. You don't even know it, but they're very smart to have, and that's kind of modeling off of an analog console. And I can't remember exactly how the units of volume are measured in this. The way volume is measured is so complicated. And, every time I learn it, I forget it. So I'm not going to go into it. You can YouTube that if you want to. This is made by Waves. I don't really recommend this one because it doesn't have an AU version for the plugin. It's only a VST and I like AU plugins. So this is the only plugin I have that does this. And sometimes it crashes my DAW. So as soon as I get things dialed in, I usually delete that plugin out of there.

Then I have Ozone. I use Ozone, this is Isotopes, Mastering plugin, and I've already got it set to… I like the IRC three. This is the balanced setting for the maximizer. I always have a ceiling of at least negative 0.1 or sometimes 0.3. And then my threshold is going to be usually set somewhere in here. So I just started at negative eight, but you could start it wherever you want. If you could start it with no threshold and not really make it loud. I usually don't even turn on Ozone until I started mixing a little bit. I get a little further down the line and get a pretty good mix before I even start using Ozone.

And then I have my tonal balance tool. And tonal balance is one of the best tools I've ever bought. It comes with, I think, comes with neutron, isotopes, neutron. I love this tool. I'm not a sponsor of Isotope by the way. I just love their mixing tools. Isotope, if you're listening call me!

Anyway, they've got a lot of great settings in here and they have actually, you can create your own curve for whatever songs. You could like, if you loved the sound, the EQ curve or the tonal balance of a YouTube album, you could put the entire album and have it do an analysis of it and create a curve for you for that album.

I usually use the modern a lot for a lot of pop stuff. And then lo-fi hip hop is the curve I created. I analyzed a bunch of songs that I really admired and I created this curve and that's what I use all the time. So it's already set to that because I mix lo-fi songs at least two a week.

And then lastly, I like this mono plugin. I usually have it turned off, but this is just to see how my mix is going to sound in mono. It's nice to have right there on the master bus.

So after you finally kind of get the … i'm going to turn these off… After you finally get all the tracks you like, and you got stuff set the way you like… Oh, by the way my groups are set. My drums are already set to negative seven. And my groups within this instrument's groups are set to negative seven.

So I'm already starting all the tracks kind of quiet because inevitably if everything's set to zero, when you start loading tracks in, if you're mixing somebody else's stuff, you're going to immediately have to turn down your volume anyway. It's just going to be clipping like crazy. And you're going to get a lot of distortion and your VU meter will be off the chart. You don't want that. Okay.

So after you got everything just the way you want it you're just going to go up to here to 'file'. And this is in Ableton, and you're going to just say, save, live set as default set. Now you could save this as a template if you want it to, or, but I would definitely find the option. It might be in your settings or preferences or something about saving this as the default set. Then once you do that, then every time you open Ableton, this is just going to pop right up.

It's really slick! And it'll save you a ton of time. I didn't even know about this for several years while using Ableton. Feel kind of embarrassed about it, but this will save you a ton of time. So you might want to have several different templates. But find a way to be able to open your DAW very quickly. You might even want to have just one midi track with with nothing on it and no audio tracks as a template. It'll load your DAW really, really fast at that point.

Okay. I hope that helped!

• Zion

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