Five Ways To Spend Your Time Productively In Quarantine

These are strange times. More and more of us are confined indoors as we battle to contain the coronavirus pandemic. We have to make the best of a difficult situation, knowing that we may be stuck in our homes for weeks or months.

Here at SoundGym, we are in the same situation as many of the rest of you – and so we've been racking our brains to think of ways we can all spend our time productively during this difficult time.

It probably goes without saying that you will be working on new music, and of course SoundGym is ready to help you with all your online ear training needs! But maybe you are looking for more ways to spend your time. Below we suggest five more ways you can use this downtime constructively. 

1. Learn A New Set Of Skills

Have you checked out the SoundGym Free Audio School? If not then now is the perfect time to do so. We have created five learning programs; each one curated by sound experts and educators to provide learners with a rounded view of a range of subjects. Each subject is broken down into various topics, which are in turn made up of a number of videos that we have pulled together from a range of sources.

There are five programs to choose from; Live Sound, Electronic Music Production, Recording and Audio Engineering, Synthesis and Sound Design and finally the huge Mixing and Mastering course which contains nearly thirty-six hours of video! There is enough content here to keep you busy for weeks.

2. Get Out Of Your Comfort Zone

If you have more time to work on your writing and production than you were expecting, why not spend it pushing your musical boundaries. There are many ways you can challenge yourself. Try working in a genre you've never worked in before and you'll undoubtedly learn something new. If you always work inside the box, try recording some live sounds – even if it's only percussion played on household objects.

 Perhaps you can time-limit yourself to keep from overthinking your musical choices; try to finish a track in two hours or less. Or perhaps limit yourself in other ways; why not try to create a complete track using only five samples – it will push you to find creative solutions to musical problems. 

3. Collaborate

It isn't just you sitting at home – it is a large proportion of all producers worldwide. Now is the perfect time to set up collaborative projects.  Try to find other producers at the same level as you on Instagram or Facebook and reach out to them. Perhaps you can remix each other's tracks or start a co-production together. Working with someone new is a great way to learn new tricks, and of course when it comes to promoting the resulting music they will help you with that too.

4. Update Your Sonic Arsenal. 

With a bit more time on your hands you can investigate adding some new plugins to your collection. You are doubtless working on new music right now, so you can immediately test out any new additions. Of course many of us are working under financial constraints at the moment, but there are plenty of excellent free plugins available and we write about one of the best each month on our blog.

Some favorites that we've covered in the last few months include; Native Instruments' Komplete Start - a generous bundle of instruments and FX - TAL's 1980s style vocoder emulation and some very interesting delay plugins from Puremagnetik and Imaginando.

5. Catch Some Live Streams

Musicians and DJs across a huge range of genres are finding themselves having to cancel tours, and as a result are taking to Twitch, Facebook and Instagram Live to perform. We've seen streams on various platforms from Christine And The Queens and Yungblud, while there have been performances on Instagram Live from Chris Martin and John Legend under the #TogetherAtHome hashtag.

Diplo has also been taking to Instagram for nightly DJ sets, promising 'to help keep your spirits high during our month of social distancing'.

We have some of our own live streams planned here at SoundGym too, with the launch of our 'Live Community' initiative. We hope that this will help musicians, producers, and engineers feel more connected and less isolated during these difficult times of social distancing.

---