There’s no one way to write a song. If you’re a songwriter, you’re probably well aware of this fact. But when a musician comes up with a great idea, it can be difficult to remember this when a single idea fails to materialize into a good song. We often love musical ideas so much that we’ll do anything to protect and preserve them, even if it means ultimately wasting our time or sacrificing other ideas that actually work well in a piece of music.

But how do you know when to press forward with an idea and when to bail? This is a question that songwriters and composers have grappled with for as long as music has been around.

Music is a space where it’s tempting to approach things with an indulgent philosophy. If you think about it, everything from selling out shows to proving your music is being listened to over streaming platforms is dependent on numbers. The better numbers you can generate, whether it’s song streams, fans over social media, or downloads of your music, the better, right? I don’t think it’s that simple, and in an age where music is so intertwined with numbers, we run the risk of valuing musicians too much or too little because everything is attached to numbers now. Rather than adopting a “more is always better” mentality around your music, you could probably benefit in a big way from stepping back and embracing a more minimal approach––especially when it comes to songwriting.

It’s not easy to be musically creative, especially if you’re feeling crushed by the weight of expectations. From trying to follow up a successful song to not knowing how to get started making music, hitting a wall creatively is an easy thing to do in music. Here are five tricks to help you fight songwriter’s block:

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Back in the day, the ability to read sheet music was essential for composing, performing, and analyzing Western music.

The rise in popularity of alternative notations such as MIDI and tablature has changed this notion, expanding notation to be more idiomatic for musicians across different walks. That said, staff notation still remains as a universal standard, a common language that can be shared between any two musicians.

For this reason, even if you produce great music using solely MIDI scrolls, it never hurts to be able to read sheet music – one day you might have to transcribe a piano part to have it recorded by a pianist, and you wouldn’t want to have to learn for the first time then! This article will provide you a series of tips, tricks, and mnemonic devices to kickstart your ability to quickly identify some key aspects of a piece of music written in sheet notation. We’ll go through three cheat codes at three difficulty levels, spanning tricks helpful for absolute beginners as well as seasoned sheet music readers.

There is no single method or secret ingredient in the process for making good music. Things like years of experience and lots of familiarity with any given songwriting process can be just as beneficial—or detrimental—as sitting down with an instrument without much musical training. Because every songwriter’s process is a complex mosaic of things like natural musical intuition, experience, and musical philosophy, pinpointing and imitating what songwriting approaches prop up great music isn’t always helpful or even possible to do.

This is a guest post by Splice, a ReverbNation Marketplace participant. Expand your sound with access to over 2 million samples, loops, FX, and presets. Start today with a 1-month free trial to Splice Sounds.

There’s no right or wrong way to approach mixing, but there are some workflow basics that can help you be more productive at the process.

This guide to mixing is for the producer who struggles with what to do when tasked with a mix, or for anyone who wants to be a professional mixer one day.

In this first post of the series, we take a look at four steps you can take to prepare for a mix.