In this article, pro DJ and music blogger Phil Morse from Digital DJ Tips offers five self motivation tips for artists who struggle starting and finishing music.

Creative professionals everywhere struggle with the challenges of getting things finished. Successful creative professionals beat those challenges. This is a sentiment that should resonate with the bedroom producer. With the rise of affordable music equipment, there has been a flood of people trying to get into this field and the competition fierce. But music production is just one of the more recent career fields to face these battles, as they join artists everywhere who must learn the skills of self-motivation to survive in these competitive fields.

To address this issue, we have compiled five rules you can use to ensure you’re playing the game well enough to find some success. These tips are a good list to turn to when you need a kick in the butt to get started and feel serious about succeeding in music production.

Rule 1 | Show up!

Mark Twain was once asked if he had to wait for inspiration to come before writing. “Yes, I do,” he replied, “but inspiration always comes at 9am sharp, every weekday!”

To succeed, you have to turn up. When you’re a solo producer, maybe doing it part time, it’s doubly important, because nobody else is making you do it, and you’re busy anyway. But if you don’t put the hours in, the rest of it comes to nothing. Professionals do; wannabes just think about it.

The best way is simply to plan a certain number of hours for production into your days, weeks, and months, and then stick to it. Jobs have set hours, and this is a job. If you’re physically there, ready to start, you’ve already won half the battle.

Rule 2 | Fight Resistance

Novelist Steven Pressfield wrote a seminal book on creativity called The War of Art. In it, he identified the devil on your shoulder that stops you producing creative works, and gave it a name: Resistance.

Resistance is what makes you sort through your sample library recategorizing all of your loops and hits, instead of working on your tune. Resistance is what makes your hand move towards the Facebook bookmark to check your fan page, instead of working on your music. Resistance is what makes you suddenly decide to rearrange your studio to put the speakers in a different place, instead of working on your music.

In short, resistance is what makes you do something else that feels important, but that actually isn’t, at the expense of doing what you’re really meant to be doing – creating. It’s particularly insidious because you feel like you’re working, but in fact, you’re actively looking for anything but your important creative work to do!

A simple way to trap this creeping disease is to log exactly what you do for a few production sessions and see how much time you actually spent producing. Begin changing your habits by first identifying the apparently urgent but really unimportant stuff that gives you “instant gratification” rather than focusing on the real, painful, worthwhile job of creating. We outline more of these ideas in another article called 10 Tips to Fight Writer’s Block and Increase Studio Productivity.

Rule 3 | Finish What You Start, Then Start Again

How many times have you had somebody tell you excitedly about an amazing new tune they’ve made, right up until the point that you ask to hear it, at which point they shuffle uncomfortably, muttering something like “it’s not quite finished yet…” or “I need to master it first…?” How many wannabe producers do you know who never seem to finish anything at all?

Signed bands traditionally had little choice but to finish their records on time, with obligation-ridden advances, studio time booked, and record company execs breathing down their necks. Even then, there are legendary stories of albums taking years to finish (or never getting finished at all). If “real” bands sometimes never finish their work, what chance do effectively self-employed producers have?

You have every chance, as long as you set yourself deadlines and stick to them. Tasks tend to expand to fit the available time. Deadlines are your friend. Professionals produce, release, and move on. Wannabes procrastinate and spend more time coming up with excuses than delivering and getting going on the next project.

Rule 4 | Accept Failure as a Necessary Part of Success

Let me make a few assumptions about you: Music is your life. Your music expresses things for you that words can’t. You can say more about yourself in a musical production than you can find words to express. Bands, musicians, and producers are your heroes.

So how can you possibly live up to the expectations these feelings impose on you? How can you possibly do something of worth in the arena you so admire? How will you deal with releasing something that doesn’t meet your own impossibly high expectations?

The answer is to accept that to get that success, you have to first miss the mark. You have to produce tracks that nobody ends up liking. Hell, you have to produce tracks that even you end up not liking!

Every time you miss the mark, treat it as training – or if you like, as “nudging your guided missile closer to its target”. We always learn more from our failures than our successes. Without the little “nudges” that each almost-success gives us, we simply can’t hit our final, successful goal.

With modern music distribution, there’s a real hidden bonus here. As you release track after track, piling them up on YouTube and cross-promoting them on Facebook and so on, you’re actually building up a back catalogue. And believe me, as soon as you have one success, a lot of people will want to know about that back catalogue. So treat your early efforts as banking stuff up for future success if you like.

Rule 5 | Accept That It’s Natural to Lack Confidence

We are each programmed to think that anyone and everyone can do stuff better than us. That’s simply because we’re involved, anything we do is bound to fail.

Writers feel it when they face a blank page, artists with a blank canvas. DJs feel it as they warm up a night, scared out of their wits. Producers feel it in Ableton Live with a new, empty project and no ideas. All feel like they’re just not up to the task.

Let me give you an example. I have had a long, fulfilling career in dance music. However, even when I was five full years into DJing as a professional, I remember realising that I’d never lost the feeling that I wasn’t really a DJ. I sometimes thought I was a fraud, and that if anyone actually came up to me while I was playing – I mean, just one person out of a packed, happy dancefloor of hundreds – and told me so, I would crumple and never play again. Such was my lack of confidence. It’s better now, but it’s still there. And I’m very normal (I think!).

Here’s another thing, it’s unlikely anyone will ever tell you you’re a fraud or give you permission to be a producer. No-one will say “you’re good enough, welcome to the club.” You have to tell yourself it’s OK, and you have to do it daily.

How many producers do you hear saying they can’t stand to listen to their own work, or read their own reviews? Do you ever wonder why that is? It’s because they have that natural low confidence in their own abilities. Success and money don’t cure it, either. You just have to accept it’s part of the creative mind.

Finally…

A wonderful thing happens when you turn up, blindly believe in yourself and push on. They say “God loves a trier”, and it’s true. When you get going, the stars seem to move in your favor, synergies happen, your mind – having beaten resistance – slips into creative mode, stuff you can’t explain begins to go your way, and out of nothing – painfully, slowly and precariously – good stuff evolves. Good luck!

About Phil Morse

Phil Morse is a DJ and journalist originally from Manchester, England. He currently lives in Spain, from where he publishes Digital DJ Tips: How to DJ properly with portable digital DJ gear.

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