Award Sounds Music, Photography and Consultancy

The Short Answer

Everything

The Longer Answer

The longer answer is that every series of actions we perform can be thought of as a process. Understanding those processes will help us improve, even as individuals, whether we're concerned with Music, Audio, Photography, Moviemaking or what have you. I'll discuss each in turn and set the scene for forthcoming articles.

A Basic Process

Making a cup of tea is a process. It's a set of actions that have to be performed in sequence so that the end result, a cup of tea, is achieved. It's quite a complex process when you look at the detail and document it fully. But it's rare that it ever gets documented to that great a level. Occupational Therapists have a test for clients where they see if their client can make a cup of tea. Sometimes, the client forgets to heat the water, other times they forget to put the tea-bag (or other flavouring) in, or forget to put any water in and so on. The number of activities that we take for granted is astronomical yet we know by habit what the sequence of those activities is.

Every process can be mapped. It will take forever and may not be beneficial, but you can map any process. The trick is in deciding which processes to focus on.

Now back to the title, let's look at process mapping and the other facets of this website.

Music and Audio

Can you remember the first time that you compared your home-grown track against a commercial CD? It was quiet, probably very quiet. You may then have learned that you needed to get your tracks mastered. You may have also learned about dynamic compression and if you're still lucky, you treated it with awe as opposed to applying it everywhere and anywhere.

Mastering is a process. Some of the process steps are applying equalisation, manipulating stereo imaging, applying reverb and applying compression.

If you do this on the cheap at home rather than send tracks out to a mastering engineer, you're then into having to dither tracks yourself as well. Similar to the revelation you experienced with the quiet home-grown track, you'll have probably encountered that distortion resulting from when you reduce the bit-depth without dithering.

Where am I going with this?

There's a process in there. For every track, I follow the same process. Think about that. "For every track, I follow the same process."

If I can automate any tasks, I'll improve my situation greatly. Some of the benefits of automating regular tasks:

• Save time
• Reduce chance of error compared to manually performing the same tasks
• Ability to process changes in batch
• Ability to schedule changes
• Ability to trigger changes based on events (e.g. inserting a card into a card reader)
• Achieve consistency in results.

Learning

More important for me is that I can compare my process against that of others and learn from it. It may be that I learn I'm happier with my process than what others are doing, but at least I've decided on keeping my process. I'll go into that process in a bit more depth in a later article.

Music and Audio Recording

What are the steps to recording a track?

Choosing a suitable room, deciding where the musicians will stand, configuring portable acoustic treatments, laying out the microphones and cable, connecting to the recording equipment and so on. All fits into a process.

Look at most questions by recording newbies along the lines of "what's the best way of recording instrument x". They're looking for a description of the process, even though they may not know it. What the more advanced engineer knows is that the key to a lot of the questions is knowing the how the results from the basic processes sound and then figuring out a good solution from there. That solution may include changing the basic process to meet the client's artistic aims. The article on comparing how different pros recorded guitars provides great insight into this area (article is available to subscribers only at the time of writing this article, although I think it's released months after the publication date).

Photography

Digital Photography software is ripe with workflow. It's one of the few subject areas where I've really seen some real progress in workflow and implementing processes that can be used on a regular basis. Some make use of the operating system's specific automation features, e.g. OS X's automator andscript tools are great for this purpose.

Setting up a shoot is a process. Deciding on studio, lighting, props, models, camera bodies, lenses, positions, aperture, etc. All part of a process. On the other side, if you're hiring out studio space to photographers, you probably go through a process, including processing payment, booking and even the clear-up after the shoot. The more you know about your process, the more flexible you can be to client demands without undercharging them.

As a photographer, you shoot out in the field/on location, bring the images back to a computer.  Do you:

Wrap-up

In the above text, there are a lot of questions. Largely rhetorical from my point of view. They're present to make us think about how we perform our activities. By analysing the process - or more plainly, just by thinking through the actions that we perform - we can improve how we work.

In the next few related articles, I'll pick up the specific topics and discuss them in more detail. I'll also publish my processes and workflows.

I've started a series on the Fundamentals of Process Mapping for a wider audience but still useful as background to this article.