I have been producing music since 2006. That is a lot of years of learning, and a significant portion of those years involved making mistakes that I did not recognise as mistakes until much later. None of them were catastrophic. All of them slowed me down or sent me in directions that were not productive.
If I could sit down with the version of me that first opened Reason Studios twenty years ago, these are the five things I would say.
1. Chasing Gear Instead of Making Music
I spent more time researching plugins, reading reviews, watching comparison videos, and building wish lists than I spent actually producing tracks. Every new synth or effects plugin felt like it would be the thing that made my music sound professional. I would install something new, play with it for a few hours, then go back to researching the next purchase.
The reality is that professional-sounding music comes from skill, not software. Producers who know their tools deeply will outproduce someone with a hard drive full of plugins they barely understand. I would have progressed faster if I had learned Reason inside out before ever downloading a second piece of software.
What I learned: Pick a small set of tools and master them. Add new ones only when you hit a genuine limitation, not when you are bored or frustrated with your current results. Boredom and frustration are signals to practice harder, not buy something new.
2. Never Finishing Tracks
I had folders full of 8-bar loops and half-built arrangements. Starting a track was exciting. The first hour was full of possibilities. But somewhere around the arrangement phase, when the initial creative burst faded and the work became about structure, transitions, and detail, I would lose interest and start something new.
This is one of the most common traps in production, and it is insidious because it feels productive. You are always working on music. You are always creating. But you never finish anything, which means you never learn the hardest and most important parts of production: arrangement, mixing, and the discipline of completing a creative work.
What I learned: A finished track that you are not entirely happy with teaches you more than ten unfinished loops you love. Force yourself to finish tracks even when the excitement fades. The skills you develop in the boring middle section are the skills that separate hobbyists from producers.
3. Producing in Isolation
For years I made music without sharing it with anyone. No feedback, no collaboration, no community engagement. I told myself I was not ready, that the music was not good enough yet, that I would share it once I reached a certain level. That level kept moving.
The problem with producing in isolation is that you have no external reference point. You cannot hear your own blind spots. You develop habits (good and bad) that go unchallenged. And you miss the motivational boost that comes from other people hearing and responding to your work.
What I learned: Share your music earlier than feels comfortable. Join production communities, post work-in-progress tracks, ask for feedback. Not every response will be useful, but the act of putting your music in front of other ears accelerates your development in ways that private production cannot.
4. Ignoring the Business Side
I treated music purely as a creative hobby for far too long. Distribution, royalties, metadata, copyright registration, building an audience: none of these crossed my mind until years after I should have started paying attention to them.
When I finally did start releasing music properly, I had to learn everything from scratch while simultaneously trying to produce and promote. If I had spent even a small amount of time understanding the business side early on, I would have been in a much stronger position when I was ready to release.
What I learned: You do not need to become a music business expert on day one. But understanding the basics (how distribution works, what a PRO is, why metadata matters) before your first release saves time, money, and frustration. Read one article a week about the business side. By the time you are ready to release, you will know enough to avoid the common pitfalls.
5. Comparing My Chapter One to Someone Else's Chapter Twenty
I would listen to tracks by established producers and feel discouraged because my music did not sound like theirs. Their mixes were clean, their sound design was complex, their arrangements were polished. Mine were rough, thin, and awkward by comparison.
What I failed to consider was that those producers had been working at their craft for years or decades before I heard them. I was comparing my first attempts to their refined, mastered, professionally engineered output. The comparison was not just unfair, it was meaningless. But it affected my motivation and made me question whether I should bother continuing.
What I learned: Compare your current work to your own previous work. That is the only comparison that tells you anything useful. If your track from this month sounds better than your track from six months ago, you are progressing. Everything else is noise. Every producer whose music you admire went through the same phase of making rough, imperfect music that did not match their vision. They just kept going.
The Bigger Lesson
All five of these mistakes share a common thread: they were forms of avoidance. Researching gear instead of producing. Starting new projects instead of finishing old ones. Keeping music private instead of sharing it. Ignoring business realities. Comparing myself into paralysis. Each one felt like engagement with music production, but each one was actually a way of avoiding the harder, less comfortable work that produces real growth.
If you recognise yourself in any of these, that is not a criticism. It means you are exactly where most producers have been at some point. The difference is made by what you do next. Open your DAW, finish a track, share it with someone, and learn one thing about the business. That is more progress than any amount of plugin shopping or comparison browsing will ever produce.
