🧠 5 things that grow music makers faster than tutorials

Hey music maker!

Most music makers I know spend the majority of their creative time alone.

Usually in a DAW or recording short ideas into their phones. Or watching tutorials, building loops, looking for their sound.

And some of that is necessary.

But it's also the slowest possible way to grow.

Here's the framework that would have saved me loads of time and headache. I call it the BUILD Loop.

Learn the lay of the land first. Sound-making, songwriting, engineering.

Get enough awareness across all of it, then go deep on what your music actually needs.

Ignore what looks impressive or what everyone's screaming about.

What's actually inside the music you want to make is where you need to double down.

Study songs the way Prince did.

He'd buy a record, transcribe the lyrics by hand, then learn the chords off the record while it played behind him.

Always asking himself why it all worked together.

This strategy forces you out of passive listening and takes you inside the song.

It promotes the unpacking of what a song is made of. Things like chord inventory, harmonic rhythm, arrangement, and song form.

These answers close the gap between the music in your head and what you're capable of creating.

A finished record is the end of a chain of decisions, and reverse engineering it only shows you a few of those links.

Understanding the starting point is very helpful. In the age of YouTube, you can find a lot of song breakdowns by the producers and writers responsible.

Try typing a popular song in the search bar along with "session" or "breakdown" and study what they started with, because the starting point shapes everything downstream.

This is what holds many music makers back for years. The joy of creating every day might be in place, but if nothing is getting completed and released.

That's busy work.

Finishing teaches you what nothing else can. Someone skips out halfway through your song and that tells you your intro is weak or your payoffs come too late.

If they make it to the end and feel nothing — that tells you your arrangement isn't building enough tension and release.

An 8-bar loop can never teach you any of that. Get ideas finished and in front of people, and let the response tell you where to get better.

This one grew me faster than all four combined, and it's the one I should've chased more aggressively.

Getting in a room with people who are better than me. I'm not just talking about networking, but actually sitting down and making music with someone ahead of me on a specific skill.

Every time I worked with a guitarist, I'd leave with something concrete to practice. Not "get better at guitar," which is too vague to act on, but a real target I could go build.

When I worked with a bass player in Brazil and brought my own ideas to the session, I realized my instincts were solid, but my execution had a gap.

That experience showed me precisely what to work on next.

Collaboration is an accelerator because it hands you a mirror. You see exactly where you are and what to build next.

Keep in mind none of these five are one-and-done.

They feed each other.

If this framework resonated, the full video goes deeper on each letter with examples and a live breakdown.

Watch it here → YouTube