Do you get stuck on a song often and how many unfinished tracks do you have?

K

Kyrpto

New member
I tend to get stuck A LOT. I know many people suggest to keep listening to music but that has only helped me minimally. I'm guessing it's mostly because I'm still a beginner at this and have close to zero knowledge on sound design. This is the main reason why I have so many unfinished tracks mostly because I have no idea where to go with it.

How do you guys deal with this, beginners and pros alike?
 
I understand how you feel. It used to happen to me until I decided no more...
The only way to get better is to finish every track you make.
Even if you hate it and think it's a piece of shit, I'd say finish it and move on to the next one.
If you keep leaving them unfinished, you're not gonna progress as quickly as you could do.
Learn from the last one and you'll get better IMO
 
I think its all about decision making

1. I may get stuck with sound-design, melodies

if this seem to become a problem you can create a discipline of how much attention you pay to something, for example how much attention you need to pay to the bass? so lets just say I want to spend 30 minutes with my bass and you do your best that you can for those 30 minutes and MOVE ON, because the song has to be finished

2. arrangement

sometimes people may have a bunch of cool things like bass line, pluck, pad, lead, rise effect, fall effect, bridge, but arrangement could be a problem

you can listen to a bunch of different songs and see how they arrange the song and why something works good why something doesn't work good

3. now just before the song is about to finish, someone may be like " OK, BUT I JUST WANT TO GO BACK AND CHANGE JUST A LITTLE OF SOMETHING "

when you get to this one BE CAREFUL
try not to make any changes unless there is an extreme problem that should not be ignored

think more about finishing, think less about changing

4. BUT MY SOUNDS ARE NOT COOL?

if you feel like your sound design is not good enough, or your mix is not good enough that is a different problem

it may take you 10 years to become the producer you want to become, and you don't want to end up for not finishing a song for another 10 years ,

if you want to IMPROVE, you can spend an hour a day to improve, watching tutorials, discussing on forums like this one, but when you compose that is not exactly time to learn it is more like time to celebrate, time to finish it
 
I constantly have ideas, but sometimes I make sections and I lose all motivation and give up completely. It's an awful trait that I can't shake off. So basically- all the time!
 
sometimes i finish tracks, sometimes i dont. i tend to leave the unfinished ones for a while and come back to them. if i still cant finish them then i usually delete them or remake them in another genre and see what happens
 
The most important thing you can do is not stop. It's perfectly okay to stop working on that track and move to another, but just don't stop progressing with new work. Some will say that you should just strive to finish every single project when you're a beginner and I would argue with that.

If I'm working on something that I don't think will meet my criteria for a good beat then I usually just stop what I'm doing and move to the next one. That doesn't happen as often as it used to, but just don't stop if you want to progress.

If you have a hard time starting new beats then just push through and finish it. I know the feeling because I go through rough patches sometimes and just can't get in the mood to finish a beat because the foundation of it seems lacking.

Any time I feel like I'm not being very productive on a beat or just don't like it and/or have motivation to finish it, it's usually because it's just not my cup of tea. And yes, there have been times when I've turned those beats around into some of my better work.

Personally, I don't believe you should attach yourself too much to one unfinished beat. I have loads of beats that I start and never finish because they didn't really click; however, if you like the beat and want to finish it - DON'T STOP. The more you procrastinate it the more likely you are to never finish it.

Lately I've been pushing myself to be as productive as possible and giving myself goals for each session/day. If you start out with a goal in mind it may be easier for you to complete it. For example, before opening your DAW, tell yourself what your goal is for the end of your session. Do you want to have the whole track structured, mixed or even the whole thing finished? Set a goal and you are more likely to achieve it by the end of your session, guaranteed.

Good luck to ya'!
 
I with you on this. For me its not always that I get stuck; alot of the time I'll find another cool sound or something and end up more attached to it then my current song and then an up abandoning my current piece (yet I always save the incomplete one). I guess I like to go back and look thru a bunch of my incomplete pieces to look for inspiration or just weed out the bad ones from the good ones.

But I can say when I do get stuck its usually because I'm very new too and I'll like a couple of sound and beats and make a partial song but dont quite have the sound design knowledge and stuff to find all the pieces to complete the song.

Either way I feel that as long as you dont quit when you get stuck switching to a new song isnt always a bad thing.
 
What daw do you use if you never heard of those?
Orion has one
Reason has one
Fl studio is known for it's one
Cubase
Studio One
Ableton
LMMS
Podium
 
Been doing this for years. I'm self taught, starting to get a lot more serious with my craft. There's always going to be something that's holding you back, my advice: just keep creating and putting it together even if you don't like the results, eventually you find out how to effectively tie it all together and get the quality your looking for. Practice makes perfect with music. I challenge you, try to finish one project at a time. I know it can be hard, cause like I'll be making one beat and then find a melody line that doesn't fit in that beat but could totally be the stem for another beat. It happens, but its I just discipline I think. Gotta keep climbing higher, being consistently disciplined helps a lot.
 
It takes me a retarded amount of time to finish beats right now. I fiddle around for a while, if I don't hit on a good idea in a few minutes I move on. Every now and then I'll devote a few hours, but not often.
 
im so bad at finishing song i should work on it. like i be having like full song ready and i dont like 2 or 3 things about it and i throw it away. i finish like 1/10 of my songs and thats bad i think. everyone gets stuck, especially in middle
 
I have over 100 unfinished project files / songs and only about 8 songs to show for it that I'm even remotely proud of. The more music you make the easier it seems to get to "finish" them. But like most art nothing is ever truly finished really. I still haven't figured it out myself but that's what I've heard :)
 
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I have about 1000 4 bar loops that never get finished. I have to make a huge effort to start arranging and mixing. Its my weakness.
 
I don't get much time in the day just here and there to make beats, and weekends.

I started making beats "properly" in March 2017. So I'm a beginner.

I have 6 folders of project files, they look like this:

1. Drums Only. (Just drum loops I have made). 32 files.
2. Sample Chops To Sort (Cut Samples, To Then Arrange into loops - I May delete this folder as my sampling sucks at the moment.). 25 files.
3. Synth Only (Anything that's just a bassline, piano melody, nice pad, nice synth will go in here). 26 Files.
4. To Mix And Master. (I haven't learned this part yet, so this is what I call 90% complete Beats). 1 File.
5. To Structure. (I tend to make the first verse and then the chorus, bridge etc., so this is everything that's got the main patterns down). 13 Files
6. Unsorted, (Usually What I have worked on the past week). 18 Files.

Total 115 Unsorted To Only 1 Finished.

I plan to finish off 20 beats this weekend if I get time without losing quality of the beats.

Hope this helps.
 
I complete about 5% of projects I have. I have hundreds unfinished.

But its not getting stuck. There's a huge misconception being created, worsened by social media, that artists just sit down, write a piece of music, then release it, then sit down, write another, then release it, nailing everything as they go. I'm sure some do, but they're probably hacks riding on other people's work hiring "engineers" to write patched for them. *

The illusion is created by the fact that we only get to hear the final product. We don't get copies of their DAW projects or files and sounds they create. We don't get to hear all the experimentation or just messing around at a keyboard or with a synth patch. So people don't realise that there is a developmental process that we aren't seeing. A lot of which is trial and error.

The band Hybrid always create gigabytes of sounds for every track they make and use only a fraction of it. I've heard Charlie May say the same thing. Hans Zimmer has a similar processes. I heard one of the guys from 65daysofstatic say they create a vast amount of content they don't use. In fact I think he said most of it is crap.

It's a lot like writing a book. Writers don't just sit down and write from start to end. Things get rewritten and rearranged and edited. Notes are written and discarded.

Really its understandable. Most of the noises I make are crap, I wouldn't want to share those with people either. So we show only the tiny fraction of our work we call 'finished'.

Every passing thought not becoming a track isn't failure or getting stuck. Its, again, part of a bigger developmental process.

*Soundtrack composers are likely an exception as they have to write to deadline.
 
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