One of the most difficult aspects of producing music is finishing tracks, and yet, it’s one of the most essential skills to develop. When you leave ideas unfinished, they linger as unresolved concepts, preventing you from truly moving forward. Completing a track is not just about reaching a final version—it’s about training yourself to push through the moments when your motivation dips, when the creative process feels tedious, or when self-doubt starts to creep in. Finishing tracks builds your creative discipline. Every time you complete a track, no matter the quality, you are sending a message to your brain that ideas deserve resolution. This mental shift encourages more ideas to surface because you’re showing yourself that your creativity has a purpose. The process of finishing helps you identify patterns in your workflow, eliminate unnecessary steps, and hone your instincts about what works and what doesn’t. More importantly, releasing a track is fun. Sharing what you do is fun. Putting music into the world is the first step towards what really matters: Sharing a connection with other humans! In this post, I’d like to share with you some of the techniques and the mindset that help me finish tracks quicker.

The Role of Repetition and Simplicity in Music Production

Many producers struggle with the belief that their music needs to be complex to hold a listener’s attention. This is a misunderstanding of how listeners experience music. The human brain thrives on patterns, and repetition in music creates a sense of familiarity and comfort. When you start a track, it’s easy to feel the need to overcomplicate it by adding layers of intricate details, but in reality, simplicity and repetition often have the most impact.

Listeners respond to structure. When you establish a repeating loop or motif, you give the listener a foundation to hold onto. Gradually introducing or removing elements from this foundation keeps the track dynamic without overwhelming the audience. Think of the repetition as a tool: it anchors the listener’s experience while allowing you to manipulate their emotional response through subtle changes. Popular tracks often succeed because they embrace this simplicity and repetition, not in spite of it.

Instead of worrying about each tiny change or addition you make, focus on how your track evolves as a whole. Listen to how tracks in your favorite genre introduce new sounds or transitions without disrupting the core rhythm or melody. This doesn’t mean your work should be simplistic or lazy, but that the core of your music should be something recognizable and stable, allowing listeners to connect with it naturally.

Mastering the Art of A/B Referencing for Mixing

Mixing a track can be a challenging stage of finishing a track, especially when you’re uncertain whether your mix holds up to professional standards. This is where A/B referencing becomes crucial. By comparing your track to a professionally produced song in your genre, you can get a clear sense of how your mix measures up in terms of balance, clarity, and overall sonic quality. This isn’t about copying; it’s about understanding the target sound for your genre.

A/B referencing helps you stay grounded. It’s easy to get lost in the intricacies of your mix, spending hours fine-tuning a single element only to realize that, in the bigger picture, it doesn’t make a significant difference. When you reference a professional track, you can focus on what matters most—whether your mix is balanced, whether the levels are right, and whether the song feels cohesive. It acts as a checkpoint, ensuring you don’t stray too far from what works in your genre.

To make the most of this technique, adjust the volume of both tracks so they’re at comparable levels. This prevents you from being swayed by the volume differences and allows for an accurate comparison. While your goal isn’t to sound identical to the reference track, having that benchmark can keep your mix in line with professional standards, ensuring that your track sits comfortably alongside others in its genre.

The key here is to get in the general ballpark of the reference. When you listen to both tracks as a whole, do elements like the bass, the drums, the vocals are at similar levels? From that point on, it can be tricky to try to replicate other aspects of some of the tracks by your favorite artists, but if your own music sounds good to you, that’s what counts. There are plenty of copycats out there who can copy the sound of popular artists exactly, but there’s only one person who can sound like you.

Streamlining the Mastering Process to Avoid Stalling

Mastering can feel like a daunting task, especially if you’re not a seasoned professional. But letting the mastering stage slow you down is a mistake. The purpose of mastering is to polish your track for release, not to spend countless hours perfecting something that doesn’t need perfection. Streamlining your mastering process allows you to keep your momentum, rather than getting stuck on details that could stall your progress.

For most projects, especially when you’re developing your skills, quick mastering solutions like AI tools or simple mastering chains are more than enough to get your music sounding polished. If you’re testing ideas or releasing tracks regularly, you don’t need high-end, studio-grade mastering. What you need is consistency—something that helps you finish and release without overthinking. It’s important to remember that your creative growth comes from doing, from repeating the process over and over until it becomes second nature.

When you become more experienced and you’re working on larger projects, there will be time for more intricate mastering processes. You can even rework singles released on the fly into a cohesive album. For now, prioritize output and momentum. A fast mastering setup allows you to maintain your creative flow, keep producing music, and avoid the trap of endlessly tweaking your track to perfection. Perfection isn’t the goal at this stage—progress is.

The Importance of Deadlines in Overcoming Procrastination

Creative work without a deadline often becomes work that never gets finished. When there’s no clear end point, it’s easy to fall into the trap of endless revisions, always believing that you could tweak the track just a little bit more. The reality is, you will always find something that could be improved. This is where deadlines come in. By setting a clear deadline, you create a sense of urgency and commitment to finishing.

Deadlines are not about rushing through the creative process. Instead, they force you to make decisions, to evaluate what’s working and what’s not, and to commit to a final version. Without this pressure, it’s easy to lose focus, endlessly tweaking small elements that, in the grand scheme, don’t make or break the track. Setting a deadline teaches you to work efficiently and trust your instincts, knowing that you can always come back to improve a track later if necessary.

However, deadlines should also be flexible enough to account for the creative process. They exist to move you forward, not to cause stress. When you set a deadline, focus on using it as a tool to stop overanalyzing and get the track out the door. You can refine your process over time, but a track sitting unfinished helps no one—not you, and not the people waiting to hear your music.

Avoiding Burnout by Prioritizing Rest and Perspective

It’s easy to believe that working longer hours will lead to better results, especially when you’re passionate about what you do. But music production is a marathon, not a sprint. Long sessions can drain your creative energy, leaving you mentally exhausted and, ironically, less productive. Understanding when to step away is just as important as knowing when to push through.

Burnout happens when you don’t give your mind and body the time to recover. It’s tempting to keep working when inspiration strikes, but over time, this can lead to diminishing returns. Your best ideas rarely come when you’re tired or stressed. Often, stepping away for a break, whether it’s a few hours or a day, allows you to come back with a fresh perspective and renewed creativity. This distance can give you the clarity you need to finish a track that you may have been overworking.

If you find yourself pushing too hard, remind yourself that the best music often comes from a balanced, rested mind. In the long run, pacing yourself ensures that you have the stamina to keep creating and evolving. Burnout, on the other hand, can derail your progress for weeks or even months. Prioritizing rest isn’t about being lazy—it’s about protecting your creative energy so that you can sustain your work over the long term.

Sharing Unfinished Work to Gain Perspective

Many producers hesitate to share their work until they believe it’s perfect. But perfection is elusive, and waiting for it can hold you back. Sharing your unfinished work with trusted peers offers a fresh set of ears and insights that can propel you forward. Often, when you're deep in the creative process, you lose perspective on your track. Getting feedback from others can help you identify strengths or weaknesses you might not have noticed.

Feedback, especially when constructive, helps refine your ideas before you get too attached to any particular element. By sharing your work early, you can catch problems before they become ingrained in the track. More importantly, feedback sparks new ideas. It can give you the push you need to finish a track, knowing that others are invested in its outcome and that you’re not working in isolation.

Creating in a vacuum can make finishing tracks feel even harder. A community of peers, whether in person or online, offers more than just technical feedback. It provides encouragement, accountability, and sometimes the validation you need to push through to the finish line. Don’t wait for perfection; invite others into the process, and use their feedback as fuel to complete your work.

In other words: Find your community.

That’s what’s it’s all about!

Cover credit: Maxwell Hunt