There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes with being a songwriter who isn’t finishing songs. It’s not that you don’t care. It’s not that you’re lazy. It’s that somewhere between the idea and the finished track, something stalls. You get stuck, and then you stay stuck.
Joe Gilder has been making music and teaching home recording for 17 years through his platform Home Studio Corner. He recently shared 20 tips for getting unstuck and finishing more songs, and unlike a lot of advice you’ll find online, his is grounded in real experience, not theory. These aren’t things he read somewhere. They’re things he actually uses.
Here’s the full breakdown.
In the Studio: Recording Tips
1. Give yourself permission to goof off
Perfectionism is the enemy of progress. The more pressure you put on a session, the less likely you are to get anything worth keeping. Joe’s fix is simple: give yourself permission to just mess around. No pressure, no expectations. He recently spent 45 minutes recording bass, electric guitar, keys and rhythm tracks for a song he’s working on, fully expecting to replace most of it.
The result? He came away excited about the song, with a clear direction and a vibe he liked. Sometimes the “throwaway” session is the one that breaks the logjam.
2. Know what good sounds like
Hard to hit a target you can’t see. Joe’s point here is refreshingly straightforward: your raw recordings should sound like the finished record. He recalls watching a news segment that promised to reveal the original raw tracks from Bohemian Rhapsody, expecting to hear rough, unpolished audio. Instead, the piano sounded like the record. The backing vocals sounded like the record. Because that’s how it works. Go listen to music you love and use that as your target. It sounds obvious, but it’s easy to forget.
3. Always get a second opinion (on yourself)
This one isn’t about asking someone else for feedback. It’s about not settling for the first thing you try. Set up a mic, record a quick take, then try one different position and compare. Five extra minutes on the front end can make everything downstream easier. One of the two will be noticeably better. Maybe it’s the first one. But you won’t know if you don’t check.
4. Do a monthly challenge
If you’re feeling stuck, give yourself a target. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Write a song this month. Mix a set of tracks. Record something using only two microphones. The point is that motion beats inertia every time. Even if what you produce never sees the light of day, you’re building the habit and keeping the wheels turning.
5. Never say “we’ll fix it in the mix”
Just don’t. If something sounds wrong when you’re recording it, fix it at the source. Mixing can do a lot of things, but it’s not a rescue operation. Reaching for plugins when the real answer is to re-record the part is one of the most common ways home studio musicians waste time and end up with mixes that never quite sit right.
At the Writing Desk: Songwriting Tips
6. Write more than you need
If you’ve only written one song, you’ll feel obligated to record it even if you don’t love it. Write twenty songs and suddenly you have options. Joe’s experience is that out of every fifty songs he writes, maybe ten are worth producing. T
he other forty aren’t failures, they’re part of the process. Quantity gives you the luxury of choosing your best work rather than settling for whatever you’ve got.
7. Keep a journal
Joe has kept a journal since college and credits it as one of the most useful tools in his creative life. The reason is simple: writing lyrics is just putting thoughts and emotions into words on a page. If the only time you ever do that is when you sit down to write a song, you’re not getting enough practice at the actual craft of writing.
Journaling keeps that muscle warm. It also turns out to be a useful source of lyric ideas. Joe marks entries with a little musical note whenever something strikes him as song-worthy, so he can find them later.
8. Never start from scratch
A blank page can be intimidating. One of the easiest ways to avoid that paralysis is to always have raw material ready to go. Use your phone’s voice memo app to capture melodic ideas, chord progressions, lyric fragments, anything that comes to you when you’re away from the studio.
When you sit down to write, you’re not starting from nothing. You’re developing something that already exists. That’s a much easier place to begin, especially when you’re in a stuck season.
9. Make the melody more interesting
A lot of songwriters, particularly those who think of themselves as instrumentalists first, can fall into the habit of writing melodies that don’t move very much. One or two notes repeated over a chord progression isn’t memorable.
Joe’s reminder is that people leave concerts humming the melody, not the chords. If you’ve written a melody you feel indifferent about, try one alternate version. It doesn’t need to be busier, just slightly more interesting. Sometimes that’s all it takes to make a song click.
10. Collaborate
You don’t have to do everything yourself. If you’re stuck lyrically, find someone who writes words well. If your production feels flat, work with someone who excels there.
Collaboration doesn’t diminish what you’ve made, it often makes it better and even if you’re someone who prefers to work alone most of the time, a creative nudge from another person when you’re stuck can be exactly what you need to get moving again.
This works online just as well as it does in person.
In the Mix: Mixing and Mastering Tips
11. Don’t sleep on levels
Joe tells a story about his friend and mastering engineer Ian Shepard playing two versions of the same audio to an audience. Listeners heard more bass, more compression, a fuller low end in version B. The actual difference? Version B was one decibel louder. The lesson: levels matter more than most people realise.
Before you start reaching for EQ and compression, make sure your basic balance is right. A lot of problems that seem like they need complex processing solutions are actually just level problems in disguise.
12. Frequency balance matters
Once your levels are sorted, look at how things are balanced across the frequency range. Low mids in particular tend to be overrepresented in most mixes, they crowd everything out and make things feel muddy. You don’t need to eliminate them, but you probably need to pull them back. Get the frequency balance right and a lot of other things in your mix will start to fall into place.
13. Do less
This one is hard to hear, but most mixes have too much going on, not too little. Too many plugins, too much processing, too many decisions stacked on top of each other. Joe’s example is the bass track that’s sitting wrong in the mix.
Before you reach for a multi-band compressor and parallel processing chain, try just pulling the fader down. If that fixes it, you’re done. Solve the problem at the right level and then stop. Less but better is a solid way to work.
14. Finishing mixes beats starting them
Starting ten mixes feels productive. It isn’t, not really. The learning happens at the end of the process, in that last 20% that most people abandon before they get there.
Joe compares it to a protein shake where all the nutrition has settled at the bottom, if you stop drinking at 80%, you get none of the benefit. Finish your mixes. Even if they’re not perfect, you’ll learn more from one completed mix than from ten abandoned ones.
15. Stop when you get goosebumps
When a mix starts giving you that physical response (the hair on your arms standing up, a genuine emotional reaction) that’s a signal, not a coincidence. Joe keeps an actual sign in his studio as a reminder.
Music is supposed to create an emotional response in the listener, and if it’s doing that for you while you’re still working on it, you’re close. Don’t keep pushing past that point. Land the plane.
The Real Work: Mindset Tips
Joe himself says these final five are the most important. Without them, the previous fifteen don’t do much for you.
16. Give up on certainty
The only certainty in this creative life is that doing nothing guarantees nothing. If you find yourself waiting until you know something will work before you try it, you’ll wait forever. Do the thing anyway. Some of it won’t work. That’s part of the deal. The alternative is worse.
17. You’re either winning or learning
There’s no real losing here, only not doing anything. When a song doesn’t come out the way you hoped, you now have specific, actionable information: the guitar was out of tune, the vocal performance wasn’t there, the guitar tone didn’t work.
That’s useful. Take it and move forward. Winning and learning are both good outcomes. Doing nothing is the only one that doesn’t help you.
18. Decide what you want, then go after it
A business coach recently asked Joe a simple question: what do you want? It stopped him in his tracks. It’s easy to have vague creative ambitions, I want to make more music, I want to get better at recording but specificity is where things get real.
What exactly do you want? When do you want it by? The answer might surprise you, and it might make you uncomfortable. That’s usually a sign you’re onto something.
19. You do have time
“I don’t have time” is one of the most common things Joe hears from people who are stuck. He’s direct about this: it’s probably not true. What it usually means is “I haven’t committed to this yet” or “I’m scared that if I try, I’ll fail.”
That’s a real and understandable feeling. But it’s worth being honest with yourself about which one it actually is. Time can almost always be found. The question is whether you’ve decided this is worth finding it for.
20. Set goals with deadlines
This one is uncomfortable, and Joe doesn’t pretend otherwise. Once you set a specific goal with a deadline, you either hit it or you don’t. He’s been doing this for the past six to nine months and describes the experience as uncomfortable but undeniably effective.
Vague intentions produce vague results. Specific goals with real deadlines produce movement, even when you fall short of them. Especially when you fall short of them.
Pick One Thing
Twenty tips is a lot to take in at once. Joe’s own advice is to pick just one and commit to it. Not all twenty, not even five. One. The one that either resonated most strongly or made you the most uncomfortable because those two reactions are often pointing at the same thing.
If you want to watch Joe walk through all of this himself, including a genuinely touching one-take performance of a song he wrote the day he asked his wife out 22 years ago, the original video is well worth your time.
What’s your one? Let me know.
