🎧 Don’t over-produce your songs

🎛 Over-producing a song is actually fun - this is why it is so easy to do. But if you want artists and vocalists to write and record to your instrumentals, it’s super important to know when to stop producing a record.

Let’s define over-producing a song as adding too many instrumental layers, therefore making it sound busy and making it more difficult for writers and artists to do creative vocal work on a song. If we want fruitful collaborations, we must exercise restraint in our production process.

We must learn to leave s p a c e in a song. Remember, artists and collaborators need to feel a sense of space in a song’s production in order to imagine their own ideas on the track. If there is no space in a production, melodies won’t pop into an artist’s creative mind. There must be room for melodies. There must be room in a song for another person’s imagination.

Hearing and adding additional layers in a song can be exhilarating for a producer. We are excited by the process of making music, new instrument layers and fresh ideas make us HYPE. We should feel this way, but we need to save some hype for those we want to work with. The more a collaborator is able to contribute to your work, the more connected to it they will feel. When multiple creators feel connected to a song, good things happen. Each collaborator tells their friends, plays the record for their peers, and promotes the song to fans and to their industry network when it is released.

So much modern music is MINIMALIST. Go listen to the Billboard top 100. The productions are SUPER simple, by design. Modern hits are often absurdly simple, they are musically very digestable for listeners.

So, I propose a hack - a solution for those guilty of over-producing. You must make two batches of music:

The 1st batch of music will be more minimal and restrained, leaving room for your collaborators to be creative.

The 2nd batch of music is entirely instrumental! If there are no vocals to cater to, you can go ahead and add all of the layers you wish; the music will actually need you to fill in the space with your own melodic and rhythmic ideas for it to sound interesting.

In the end, you’ll be able to fully stretch your experimental producer-wings on the instrumental music, and have more releases to show for it. Once you’ve flexed those production muscles, you’ll have the peace of mind and the discipline to create more minimal records for your collaborators. You’re welcome, I’d love to hear the results…