My 5 Biggest Music Production Problems and Their Solutions

·16 min·1 clip

The host confesses that trying to encapsulate his entire being in a single piece of music always leads to failure.

Lenny opens by naming a paradox that any experienced creator will recognize: the more you know about music production, the harder it gets to actually make music. Driving a car gets easier with practice. Making music gets harder. More theory means more options, more gear means more decisions, more experience means sharper self-criticism. He uses his sixth consecutive January challenge — making a piece of music every single day in January — as the context for this reflection, noting that for most days he waited until the last possible minute to start. The first obstacle is getting started: the blank slate problem is not lack of inspiration but too much. He wants to make singer-songwriter music, rock, hip-hop, EDM, IDM, experimental ambient. Every choice he makes abandons all other possibilities. When things don't click immediately, he questions whether he should have made something else entirely. His solution is to reframe this: quantity over perfection. Making many things means any single choice is less consequential. The second is decision paralysis mid-creation: once started, every element (drum sound, key, tempo, structure) requires a decision, and the fear of the wrong decision causes paralysis. The third is the comparison trap: comparing his music to other producers, to his past work, to an idealized version of what the work should be. The fourth is perfectionism stopping completion. The fifth, given special attention, is the loss of fun — the feeling that what once felt like play has become work, burden, and obligation. The episode's practical prescription is adopting a regular routine, quantity as protection against the weight of any single piece, and making music for the right reasons.

As heard by us

A steady, useful push to finish imperfect tracks instead of waiting to feel ready.

Making music gets harder the more you know, and Music Production Podcast treats that frustration as something practical rather than embarrassing.

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Why you'd press play

When every direction feels wrong and starting feels harder than it should.

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