Guide · Making music

Please stop making unfinished music

If you're a producer, an artist, or anyone who makes music, you have definitely met artist's block: the day you sit down and nothing creative comes out. I made hundreds of unfinished songs before I understood my mistake. I don't want you to repeat it.

Written by M III D O · 23 October 2026

Where the block comes from

Often it comes from forcing it. You burn yourself out trying to make yourself creative, session after session, and the harder you push, the less comes out.

And sometimes it is just difficult to do it all on your own. I agree. I'm an independent artist and I carry the whole weight by myself, so I know how heavy it gets.

What "burnout" actually means

The World Health Organization describes burnout as the result of chronic work stress that has not been managed, with three signs: exhaustion, growing distance or cynicism about the work, and feeling less effective at it. The WHO uses the word for work only. If music is your work, you may recognise all three.

Ideas come naturally when you leave room for them. Forcing them is the part that does not work.

My mistake: hundreds of starts, no finishes

I had to make hundreds of unfinished songs to learn this. Now I know my mistake.

Work on one main idea.

One idea, taken all the way to the end, teaches you more than ten good loops sitting in a folder.

Andrea Stolpe, who teaches songwriting at Berklee Online, gives two tools I like for this:

Ask where you get stuck, not why. In her words, "a more interesting question than 'why' we get stuck is 'where.'" If it is always after the first chorus, or always at the second verse, that tells you what to fix.
Give yourself 20 minutes. Set a timer, and when it goes off, what you have is the song. Record it, then listen again a week later. She also warns against judging every line as you write it: that standard kills songs before they exist.

She writes about lyrics, but it works the same for a beat. Twenty minutes to get the whole arrangement down, rough, start to end. Polish comes after there is something to polish.

Take breaks, and move your body

When you're stuck, stop. Go for a walk, work out, do something physical. This is not just something I believe; there is research behind it.

Walking. Researchers at Stanford found that people came up with more creative ideas while walking than sitting: in one experiment creative output went up by an average of 60 percent. It worked on a treadmill facing a blank wall, not only outside, and the effect carried on for a short time after they sat back down.
The right kind of break. A study from the University of California, Santa Barbara gave people a creative task, then a break. Those who spent the break on a simple, easy task, the kind that lets your mind wander, did clearly better when they came back to the same problems. Resting, a demanding task or no break did not give that improvement.

Two honest notes. The Stanford study found walking helps you generate ideas, not the focused kind of thinking where there is one right answer. So walk when you need the idea, and sit down to finish it: arranging, editing, mixing. And the Santa Barbara result was about problems people had already worked on. A break helps the idea you come back to. It is not a reason to come back with a new one.

Working out was not part of those two studies, so that part is my advice, not their finding.

Don't ask everyone about an idea that isn't a song yet

Don't ask too many people for their opinion when you only have an idea, not even an 8-bar loop. Ten people will give you ten directions, and the idea dies before it has a shape.

Finish it first. Then get feedback, and make it useful. Stolpe's advice on feedback is that general praise like "I really like it!" does not tell you if the song works, and that people don't know how to describe what they hear, so you have to ask for exactly what you need. Her approach, in short:

Play the whole track once, then go through it again one section at a time and stop after each part to ask.
Make sure the audio quality is good, and give lyrics if there are any.
Ask specific questions: what feeling do they get, did anything throw them off, could they tell where the chorus started, can they remember any part of it.

Be your own team

When nobody else is in the room, you have to run it like a team on your own. Manage your time, your sessions and your folders, and plan for one thing at a time.

Some ways to do that:

One job per session. Writing, arranging and mixing are different jobs. Decide which one today is before you open the project.
One folder per song. Project, bounces, vocals, notes, all in one place, so coming back to it takes a minute and not an hour.
A short list of what is open. If a new idea comes, write it down and park it. Don't open a new project until the current one is finished.

Finish it

It will all work out if you're really passionate about it.

Please stop making unfinished music. Finish your tracks, get feedback, and grow.

Sources

Berklee Online: Andrea Stolpe, Tips for Finishing Songs (26 October 2015) · Berklee Online: Andrea Stolpe, How to Get Better Feedback On Your Songs (12 July 2016) · Stanford Report: Stanford study finds walking improves creativity (24 April 2014), on Oppezzo and Schwartz, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition · Baird et al., Inspired by distraction: mind wandering facilitates creative incubation, Psychological Science (2012) · WHO: Burn-out an occupational phenomenon (28 May 2019). The Berklee links go to archived copies because Berklee Online was down for maintenance on the day this was written. The experience and the advice are my own.

World Mental Health Day: my own story Doing it all alone has a cost. Why young men need to talk. Putting an Arabic loop in a trap beat Take one idea and build it into a full track.