As a musician, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you’re only being productive when you’re writing, recording, or performing. But the truth is that your life in music will end up being far more fruitful and rewarding if you punctuate your hard work with breaks. Taking breaks is essential not only for preserving creativity and energy but also for sustaining your personal life. If any of the following four scenarios describe your current mindset, it’s probably time to take a break from music:

We all know that writing, producing, and recording one song is a ton of work, so it’s fair to ask why it’s worth the trouble of creating multiple versions of your tracks. But between music-hungry audiences, streaming algorithms that favor different versions of the same song, and big creative benefits, it’s worth trying out different approaches for your songs. Here are some of the biggest reasons why:

The situation of when a great new idea runs into a wall is all too familiar for serious songwriters. For countless reasons it can feel difficult or even impossible to finish a song, even if you love where it’s headed. Sometimes, it takes a couple days, hours, or weeks to realize that a promising song just isn’t worth finishing. But for the ones that are, but just aren’t there yet, you’ll need to find strategies for how to move forward and wrap things up. Here are five ways to finish songs:

A music producer is the creative leader of a recording project. This is the person who envisions what the finished song should sound like since hearing the demo for the first time. In the traditional music industry, the role of the music producer would usually start and end during the production stage of a song. Nowadays, with the rise of bedroom music producers to the mainstream stage, it is very common that the music producer is also the songwriter, guitarist, singer, and sometimes even mixing engineer and mastering engineer.