We all know being organized will help us in life. Knowing where something is without even thinking twice can be a major plus. Sometimes when it comes to production, we don’t take organization into consideration. Today I will show you inside my folder structure. After a long battle with myself, I knew I had to do better. I almost lost out on a few placements which prompted me to come up with a better system. I want every producer reading this to know I’m here to help. This folder setup will have you ready for a lot of scenarios that will come your way. You can follow and create the folders as we go or you can download an example zip at the end of this post. Let’s get right into it. First and foremost have a backup strategy in place. Our beats are too priceless to lose over negligence. You can read a few workflow tips [here] that will help. On to the folder setup. DAW The first folder to create will be named after the DAW you use to make your music. For me it’s Reason. Yours could be FL Studio, Maschine, Ableton and so forth. I like to type this folder in all caps so I know it’s a root folder. MP3/WAV This folder is to easily showcase ALL the beats you’ve made in a given year. Dump the audio files of your choice here. I personally prefer WAV for quality reasons, but feel free to use MP3s when sending beats to artists. YEAR/MONTH The next 2 folders are for sorting when you create a beat. Year then month. Pretty self explanatory for these. One thing you might want to add for further organization is to tag your beats. On MacOS you can tag folders by color. I use green for when beats are ready for showcasing, yellow if arrangement or mixing needs to be done, and finally red if it’s just a skeleton of a track or I don’t like it. This gives me a quick glance at what needs to be done if and when I come back to these folders. BEAT TITLE I’m sample based so I always name beats as follows; Song Title - Artist Name [Tempo] & [Genre]. See the example above in the screenshot. I mainly do this so I know exactly what I have in my catalogue. Whatever system you come up with for naming beats, make sure it’s something that you could identify with years down the road. That’s the easiest way for me. Plus you may change things up over the years but you’ll still want an easy to understand format if you ever need to reference older material. SOURCE FILES After creating this folder, ALWAYS save your beat files here. For instance Reason’s file format is “.reason” These source files can add up pretty quickly, especially if you create new ones when you start a new task. We want to keep like files in a respective place. STEMS My definition of stems is an audio file of every sound created in a beat. For instance, if you have 3 different kick drums in your track, you should have 3 separate stems for each kick. Some folks have other names like exports, trackouts, but you get the point. Whatever you call them, have a folder named for them. When your beat is done or mixed, export the files in 2 separate batches. One WITH effects which we call “wet” and another WITHOUT effects which we call “dry”. This folder will be very important when you start making placements. If the artists you create with ever need stems for mixing, you’ll have them ready. CREDITS Once a beat has been sent, recorded to, placed or released I make a note of it in this folder. You may be updating this a lot, sometimes artists never use what you send. You may have even sent the same beat to 2 different artists. The note will keep you up to speed. Make a habit of keeping things dated here. I also like to keep project artwork here as well. TEMPLATES Not too hard to figure out what goes here. Any time you update your template, be sure to make another version. Rename it something different, date it, etc. Never overwrite templates, It's cool to be able to go back and see how your templates have changed over time. MISC.
For everything that doesn’t fall into the above folders, I’ll just drop them here. Mostly I use this to store agreements between me and artists or companies I sell beats to. Well there’s my production folder structure in a nutshell. I hope you guys can take something from this and become more organized if you aren’t already. Comment below with some of your organizing tips. I’d love to see what you guys are up to! Don’t forget to download the zip file so you have an example to reference. Until next time, it’s ‘Tool.
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instrumentoolI have a passion for teaching and writing. Some of my many thoughts are here. Archives
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