You’ve probably heard about the latest design craze, Feng Shui, which talks about how your life can be enhanced by moving things around in your home and place of work. One of the most important tenets of this movement, though, is the same one in many self-improvement courses—the idea that if you just clean your environment, you improve your life. This can apply to musicians, too, since we seem to have entirely too much to do in entirely too little time, and forever seem to be late for appointments, paying bills, getting to meetings, and sometimes even late for gigs. Many times, we find this is because we can’t find an accessory, have problems finding a phone number, and even find ourselves unable to find time for rehearsal or a decent night’s sleep. Sometimes, some simple reorganization is all that’s needed to make things easier, so here are a few ideas to create that needed time, if only through putting things where they can be found so you don’t spend hours better spent otherwise doing so.
YOUR REHEARSAL SPACE
This is a great place to start. Instead of practicing one day, spend a few hours cleaning up your mess here—it will pay in the long run. For the moment, coil up all those loose cables, dust off the large pieces of equipment, pick up all the loose items from the floor and give the room a good mopping/vacuuming. If nothing else, it will help your vocalist and others who might be sensitive to dust to breathe easier. You may find you’ve located that important connector that you needed so you could patch an important piece of equipment to your computer or soundboard—start a labeled box for these and place in an easy to see and access space on a shelf or perhaps atop the equipment it’s used with. Find a safe spot for your demos and masters away from your tape eraser, heat, sunlight, moisture and large speakers, but where you can find them if needed. Separate out the blank tapes and keep them in a different place, preferably near your recording gear, so you don’t have to waste time finding one at a crucial creative moment. You should also have at least an old cracked cup with working pens/pencils atop or near some clean writing paper, perhaps even with staves or tabs already printed on them for those times when you need to jot those precious ideas or notes down. Keep scrap paper and working pens/pencils near a working telephone, too, so you don’t have to waste precious moments finding them when crucial calls come through. Near that phone should also be a calendar with enough space on each date to scribble important appointments, events, bills due, and entry deadlines. When you find those pesky notes containing lyric or musical ideas, slip them into at least an old recipe file with dividers denoting whether it’s for lyrics, drums, phone numbers, equipment information, and so forth, and put that box in a key location (mine had gotten so huge it now occupies an entire shelf in my music room as well as two files in a filing cabinet, as well as a large section in my computer.) Keep other important sound recordings, reference books, sheet music, tabs, and lead sheets where they can be easily found and accessed in your music room when needed, too.
