This year has been one of the roughest years in my life, and for good reasons, but even good things can disrupt your creative flow and make you end up without your sacred music production time. Therefore, here are a few things I’ve been doing lately to regain my momentum, with my music, YouTube and this newsletter that you can apply to your music career.
4 THOUGHTS FROM ME
1. Break down each task into small tasks and avoid BIG goals!
Eventually, you’ll need to dust yourself off from the bad, or good, moments that took you away from music and refocus your attention back to your music. However, it can be daunting to see huge goals in front of you when finding time for music has already been tough, so:
- Focus on regaining your habit first. I’m not going to lie, it will be easier if you can schedule producing time into your schedule, even if this doesn’t come naturally to you;
- Now, get used to producing every day or, at most, every 3 days, even for just 15 minutes. The idea is to get you back to allocating time in your calendar and seeing your DAW so it becomes more familiar again;
- Forget about your yearly goals for a moment and focus on completing small tasks like learning how to do a preset, or getting back to a music course you bought and didn’t finish. At this stage, if you stumble through big tasks, they can possibly haunt and stifle you, which is definitely not the best for regaining your focus;
- A good way to get back to your habit is reopening your last project, or a project that inspired you, and just listen and explore the project. Get inspired again by what you did and have fun with the experience. All these tasks are small reminders of the fun you had with music production, which is what will get you back on momentum eventually.
2. Focus on small wins and deprive yourself from near-future setbacks for a while.
When you’re coming back from a break, or you had a big setback like a rejection, it’s time to go to your ‘comfort zone’ to regroup, and the best way to do this is by getting some small wins. For example:
- Send your song to someone that always likes what you do. That’s something I normally recommend you to avoid, but now what you may need the most is to feel good about music again;
- AVOID at all costs sending your songs to labels until you feel totally OK with your music as sending songs to labels can also bring rejections back, and that would only make it harder to get excited about music again. By the way, that also includes sending your song for feedback from people you don’t know as they can also be harsh and knock you down;
- Lastly, (3) at this stage, remember that just showing up is a win for your music, so regaining this habit, as said above, is something you should celebrate with your friends as it’s one of the hardest things when you’re not motivated to produce.
3. Focus on quantity rather than quality, even if for a small moment.
When you’re just getting back to music, it can be hard to go through sound design, mixing, and mastering, as they can be the hardest task to complete and be happy with, or the easiest to stop your momentum. Therefore:
- Focus on developing your songs up to the stage that you like and that you’re not being challenged by, which eventually can lead you to leave songs unfinished (for a small while). “Leo, but you always say to always finish tracks…” Yes, but now, you need to get back to music and you need to be happy with what you’re making, or you’ll easily lose motivation again, so now it’s the time to have fun with music, which you can see how in this post about ways to keep having fun with music.
- Because of that, you can take the liberty to create and start multiple projects without worrying about leaving them unfinished. This is the time to start one song per day, work for 1hr, and trash it (or hold it) since this will bring back the coolest part about music production, which is just exploring the initial 0-50% of a song, without worrying about the last boring 20% which normally drives us crazy.
4. Shake up your old patterns after you regain a bit of momentum.
After you’re back and with a little bit of traction, it’s time to shake up your patterns and bulletproof your workflow to avoid setbacks in the future.
- Allow yourself longer to achieve your goals, remember, you don’t need to achieve them right now;
- Recalculate your route and change things that weren’t working before, or at least consider changing. For example, if your setback was caused by something that you are struggling with, consider taking a mentor as he/she can speed things up and correct issues that could take you into a new route, which can sometimes be faster than your previous one;
- Rethink why your setback happened and how you can prevent it from happening again. This way, if it gets in your way again, at least it doesn’t kill your momentum and you can easily go back to where you were.
1 QUESTION FOR YOU
What other things can you do to regain your flow?
1. Start a collab or just jam with a friend, in person if possible.
In-person collabs tend to have less pressure and to be more focused on the jamming experience than the ‘we need to get this signed’ mentality, which is great for you to regain your flow with music.
2. “Get back into the wild”:
Get out of isolation and start getting music production topics back into your life. Join forums, like our discord server, watch tutorials from us and interact more with your community, or get inside a community of like-minded producers as the ability to just talk music with other people who have the same goals as you is often energizing
3. Just start:
Your momentum won’t come back if you don’t start again. Everything that you’ve just read won’t help you much if you don’t start, so put away your email, and start by watching this tutorial below:
