My 5 Biggest Music Production Problems and Their Solutions - Music Production Podcast #420

podcast
Written By Brian Funk

Have you ever felt like the more you learn about music production, the harder it actually gets to finish a song? You aren't alone. In this episode, I’m sharing the 5 biggest mental blocks I’ve faced, from "tutorial paralysis" to the crushing weight of trying to be a "Great Artist," and the practical shifts I used to break through them.

After 6 years of the Jamuary challenge, I’ve learned that the secret to finishing more music isn't a new plugin or more music theory; it’s about moving from a romanticized "Artist" identity to a prolific "Maker" mindset.

In this episode, we discuss: 

The "Quantity Over Quality" Hack: Why having a routine allows you to fail safely.

The Skills of Finishing: Why completing "bad" music is the only way to prepare for your best work.

Learning by Doing: How to escape the "Tutorial Junkie" cycle and get your hands dirty.

Killing the "Artist" Label: Why viewing your work as a "body of work" is more freeing than chasing a single masterpiece. Stop overthinking, start creating, and let’s get those ideas out of your DAW and into the world. 

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Please review the Music Production Podcast on your favorite podcast provider!

Brian Funk

Episode Transcript:

(00:00.000)

I wonder if you feel this way too. The more music I make, the more I learn, the more theory I understand, the more gear I get, and the more I learn about that gear, the harder it gets to make music. Most things in life are easier the more you do them. Driving a car, riding a bike, cleaning the house, whatever. And those things become second nature. But making music is different. I find myself getting stuck, unable to make decisions. I worry if my music is any good, I wonder...

If I'm getting any better, think about how my music compares to other people's and probably most of all, I hesitate to even start. I resist taking those first steps, feeling paralyzed by infinite directions that I could go with my music. I can't decide on what kind of music to make and I'm left feeling, I don't think it's uninspired, but unable to take any of those directions. I worry about self-expression and what I'm doing.

If it accurately encapsulates who I am as an artist, I stop having fun. And I thought I loved making music. I spent January making a piece of music every day for the January challenge. And for the sixth year in a row, I managed to show up and make something every day of the month. And as usual, it wasn't easy. And for the majority of the days this year, I kind of waited till the last possible minute to start.

but I think I learned a couple of valuable lessons about making music and the mental challenges that come with it. In this episode of the Music Production Podcast, I want to have a conversation about five things I struggle with that get in the way of my music making and how we can change our thinking and approach so that we can make more music and have more fun doing it. These are mostly in the order that I encounter them in the music making process, but the last one is kind of a class of its own and deserves special attention.

There's the problem of getting started. The first thing to realize is that making music is different than most of the things we do each day. There's no guarantee of success. Like, I don't know if I'm going to make anything good, that I'll like it or anyone else will ever want to hear it. And I think this is why I often put it off until the very end of the day by doing things that I enjoy much less. I complete chores, vacuum, sweep, prepare meals, clean, errands, rearrange the studio.

(02:21.145)

And all of this stuff will get done, put in the time and it will be finished. And you can have that little bit of satisfaction at making something and completing something, but making music might not go well. First of all, you have to decide what you're even gonna make in the first place. And this is where I often get stuck. And also why I don't think the problem is a lack of inspiration because I wanna make a billion styles of music. I wanna make singer songwriter stuff, rock band music.

Hip-hop, EDM, IDM, experimental ambient, but any choice I make leaves behind all those other possibilities. And if it doesn't get off to a great start right away, I start questioning whether I should have maybe made something else. And that stresses me out. So I do the dishes because I don't have to decide which dishes to do. I just do them and they're done and I can pat myself on the back for it. I think the best way around this issue is quantity.

Having a regular routine of music making allows me to pick something today knowing that I can pick something else tomorrow. If I don't have to lament the path I chose because I can take a different path tomorrow, I feel better about it. So by staying regular and consistent, I allow myself to go down different musical paths and be okay with it not working out so well. If I'm showing up all the time, then I can afford like a fruitless session. It takes a lot of the pressure off.

Making it routine removes the question of if or when I will even make music. The time arrives and I start. Put it in the calendar. Keep it like any other appointment. This can help me to get started. And even though during January I did wait till the last minute, the fact that I knew I was doing something and I knew I'd be doing something tomorrow helped me get started and helped me actually see ideas through. After getting started, there's the worrying about making something good.

Of course we want to make something we consider good and it'd be amazing if everyone agreed but worrying about this will only cause frustration We can't control what other people will think It's like being angry about the weather. It's wasted energy and completely out of our control It also robs us of the joy of creating The actual act of making something is fun and exciting Watch kids. They have that. Beginners have it too. They don't expect the product to be anything amazing

(04:45.966)

They just enjoy the making of it. I think this is feeling we all fall in love with and we have to remember to embrace it while we're working. Getting too judgmental in the early stages robs us of this. The whole point of pursuing music is the fact that it's fun. If we're doing it for other reasons like success, money, or adulation, it's kind of a stupid choice. There are all kinds of secure jobs that you might not love but will pay you well.

And if you want likes and thumbs up, get a dog or a cat and post videos of the cute things it does. But don't strip the fun out of music making by trying to make it into success and focusing on the uncontrollable thoughts of people you don't even know. The funny thing about it is so much hit music that artists make, they don't even know it was happening when they were doing it anyway. Countless artists never expected that song to be the hit. So when you're making something, it's best not to worry about how good it is because you kind of don't even know.

Instead, focus on making the process as much fun as possible. And ironically, that fun will likely translate into the music, and that's the exact type of stuff people will pick up on. There are some benefits of making bad music. First, you gotta give your ideas a chance. There's really no way to know if something's any good until it's finished anyway. If I'm judging my music too much while I'm making it, I'll always find something I don't like or something I'm uncomfortable with, and that's because it's not finished yet. If I go down this way of thinking too much,

I'm not making music anymore. I'm just worrying if what I'm making is any good. I'm out of the moment. But there are a couple things, some nice benefits that we get when we allow ourselves the freedom to make bad music. First, if you abandon a track before it's done, you never get to the end. And finishing music itself is a skill. By following through on even bad music, you're getting the practice of finishing. And since finishing is the last stage of the process,

It's the part we get the least amount of practice with. So learning the skill of finishing will prepare us for when we have something we really love. We'll know how to bring it to completion. Second, we learn from our mistakes. Many athletes achieve greatness only after failure, and that's because they've learned what to work on and how to improve it. If we're never challenged, we never get to do any reflection on our process. Listening back to our music teaches us more than any book or tutorial ever could.

(07:07.641)

You'll be able to identify problems and mistakes, discover ways to fix them. It's much better to do that with bad music than to have music we love never reach its potential because we never learned how to finish from our mistakes. Third, we learn how to salvage ideas and fix them. Listening back to my Jamio jams, I'm kind of surprised that some of my favorite pieces of the month were the ones I almost abandoned halfway. As we continue to work on our music, we make decisions based on our own taste.

And as we go through the process, we'll probably make decisions that are pretty good along the way that we like. And we might never encounter those decisions if we didn't continue working on the project. We might figure out new ways to make a boring chord progression more exciting, or clever techniques to make up for bad recordings. But these are lessons we can only learn if we continue down the path the song is leading in order to encounter them. Let it be okay to make bad music.

Then there's trying to master everything before beginning. So over the years, I've spoken a lot about how new gear isn't going to be the secret to making great music. And again and again, I thought some new piece of equipment was going to finally enable me to make my hits and make all the music I imagined in my head. Even though there are some things that have helped me grow and improve, most of the time, it's a false hope. I've learned this

time and time again, and I'm much more cautious about buying new gear or plugins without any delusions that'll make me a better producer. But I've replaced that with learning. I've become like a tutorial junkie. I'll scour YouTube for new techniques, how-to videos, productivity advice. I watch tutorials and stuff I know well with the hope that maybe some small new piece of knowledge will take me to the next level.

You can learn anything these days and it's so tempting to try to find new information or learn skills. It's irresistible, but there's no learning like doing. The point is to actually make stuff, not to learn tools and techniques. That should be the by-product of creating. It's the act of doing that teaches us, not just studying about it. To give you a sense of how I've learned this over and over again.

(09:17.795)

Back in the early 2000s, I got my first decent recording set up, a pair of Alesis ADAT machines. And these were a huge step up for my cassette tape four track recorder. So I started learning a little bit about microphones, EQs, compressors, started focusing on all the learning and figured, learned about mic placement. I record drums and guitars over and over, just experimenting where the mics go, turning them, moving them further or closer, trying out these effects that I got.

but I wasn't really making music, I was just recording. And after a little while passed, I had no music to show for all the time I was spending making music. I kind of realized that even if I did everything completely wrong, it would still sound way better than my four track recorder would. So I decided not to worry about it. I just record the songs and see what happened. Doing this gave me a lot of learning, but in context.

I realized the right way to do something depends on what you're trying to accomplish. So I'd listen back to what I had and make decisions based on that. After songs were done, I could reflect on the process and see what went well and what I could do differently next time. If I had some guitars that were close mic'd really nicely, I realized sometimes it's nice to not mic them the same way and try something different so that they stand out in the mix. All of this happened because I had the context of doing it and I was having more fun and I was being more productive.

A months later I had a full album. It was so much more fun learning along the way than trying to learn everything first. Plus I actually had something to show for it. You can't learn everything first. Today it's even more true. Our modern DAWs and even the cheaper studio gear all sound amazing compared to what we had 20 years ago. We can create recklessly and make tons of mistakes and the gear is very forgiving. Creating and learning along the way gives us the context to understand why we make decisions with our gear.

It doesn't matter how great the synth bass you programmed for two weeks sounds on its own. It matters how it sounds within the mix, with the music. You can't learn what to do with a muddy mix until you create a muddy mix and realize what went wrong. And this is where the learning happens. You can't learn how to drive a car by reading a book about driving cars. You have to do it. You can't get in shape by watching tutorials about working out. You have to work out. Then you can start to learn and apply the things you've learned as you go.

(11:38.668)

One thing I've learned by speaking to so many amazing musicians on this podcast is that the best ones never stop learning, but they learn by doing. There's no end to the learning. It's an infinite rabbit hole. So there's no point to try to master anything before starting. Anyway, you'll be learning forever and never doing anything. So this last lesson is probably the biggest one for me lately. It's to stop trying to be an artist.

We've romanticized the idea of being an artist. We think of them as people with special gifts that act on moments of passion and inspiration to express themselves and reveal their souls to the world. But even the word inspiration has its roots in receiving the breath from a divine God. And art can be so magical and deep that it can make us believe that the artist must have been chosen by some immortal creator. But in reality, it's much more like a craft than a skill we continually develop.

But this way of thinking tends to affect how we create. If I find myself trying to write something meaningful, clever, or special, I almost always fail. I start to identify too much with what I'm creating and feel the need to encapsulate my entire being in some form of self-expression. But there's too many sides to a person and too many of those sides are contradictory. Trying to wrap up your entire persona and emotional depth in a single piece of music is impossible.

It causes too much self-analysis and it gets us thinking too much about how we'll be perceived through our art. I find myself struggling with music because I worry about how people might psychoanalyze me through it. But the truth is, you're not your art. The art may reflect a part of you or might not. It may be a distortion of you, might be an exaggeration. You can explore perspectives you don't agree with in your art. It can be nothing more than a collection of ideas placed together for the listener to apply their own meanings to.

Worrying about being an artist in this way has almost never served me. I think the true picture of a creator comes with a body of work more than a single piece. And this way of thinking is freeing. If I'm too worried about what I'm working on and how it'll be perceived, knowing that whatever I'm currently working on is just a single stroke on the larger canvas, that helps me move forward. I can be silly today and serious tomorrow.

(14:01.505)

I can explore passing thoughts and feelings without letting them define me. I can take on characters and personas that may or may not reflect some side of me. Focusing on contributing to my body of work is much more fun and enjoyable than trying to sum it all up in one great moment of divine inspiration. The picture of who you are as an artist becomes clear as your work accumulates, not in single strokes of the brush.

The more you put out there, the more dimensions of yourself you can show and the more accurate the picture is. You gotta be prolific, make more and don't worry about being an artist. Unfortunately, this is not gonna get easier though. I've come to understand these issues in my music making. I see it in my friends and my students all the time, but an intellectual understanding of it isn't enough. Those things have to be conquered.

every single time. It's a necessary part of the process. And at times it's a battle. But this is the stuff that makes making music so special. If it was easy, it would get boring. This never ending challenge is where the magic is. Every time we cross the finish line is a victory. Doesn't matter what place we come in. All we can really do is take with us the knowledge that we've done it before. And the next time around with the challenge again,

We know we've been here, we've done it, we've made it through and we can probably do it again. And that's where the thrill is and that's why there's glory in it. What types of things do you struggle with in your music making? Do you have any tips that I might've missed? What advice can you share from your experience? I'd love to know. I could use all the help I can get.

Brian Funk
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