Template your life

Do yourself a favor—on a slow day, invest in creating or maintaining your templates. Having a bullpen of current templates, each set up to your specs and instrumentation will save quite a bit of time when the call to copy that music late in the night comes. Preset as much as possible with placeholders, and think through all of the components you use in your work: chords, text styles, expressions, lyrics, everything. Seek out the settings within the software that will place those items in the desired locations, and sizes as soon as they’re dropped into the score, cutting down significantly the time spent on manual positioning. Time spent studying the options and settings at your disposal will always be time saved in the long run. If you find yourself repeatedly moving an object into the spot you wish it would be in, chances are very good there is a setting for that. As always, work smarter, not harder. Spend your time making the music accurate and beautiful.