How to Finish More Songs

Let’s be honest, very few of us as home studio producers struggle with starting new songs.

Where we tend to struggle is with finishing them.

Today, let’s look at three simple habits you can use to finish more music.

1. Set Time Limits

Give yourself a fixed amount of time to mix or complete a track. Deadlines force decisions.

Whether it’s setting yourself a 10-minute deadline to set all of the levels in your mix, or a two-week deadline to have your song recorded, mixed, mastered, and sent to a friend — creating goals to work towards goes a long way in helping you get things finished in your home studio.

2. Use Templates

Many of us in our home studios spend a lot of time doing repeated tasks: creating tracks, colour coding, naming tracks, adding plugins, etc. Streamline as much as you can by creating templates.

Create a songwriting template so you can jump into writing as soon as inspiration hits. Create a mixing template so you can sit down and start doing the important work, without the time-consuming stage of setting up routing and adding your usual plugins.

This can save a surprising amount of time.

3. Less learning, more doing

Yes, I understand the irony of running a website teaching music production and telling you to learn less. But here me out. Many of us fall into the trap of learning more and more, but never putting it into action.

That’s probably because it feels productive. And it is — but there has to be a balance. Be sure that you’re actually producing music and finishing tracks, not just building up knowledge that you’re not using.

These are all mistakes that I’ve made myself. Follow these steps to avoid the mistakes I made, and focus on getting tracks finished in your home studio.