10 things I wish I knew as a new producer

Most "things I wish I knew" lists for new producers are really gear regrets: the compressor bought too early, the laptop that couldn't handle the track count. The things that actually slow people down for the first year or two are rarely about the studio itself.

Two of these are Mark's own habits, he writes SoundSchooled and releases music as Doomar. The rest comes from producers talking, on the record, about the same problems: taste outrunning skill, tracks that never get finished, and the gap between what a preset gives you and what you actually learn from it.

Your taste is ahead of your skills, and that gap is normal

Ira Glass, the broadcaster behind This American Life, described this directly in a widely circulated interview about creative work: "All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there is this gap." The version of a track you can hear in your head, shaped by years of listening to finished, mixed and mastered records, is always going to be more advanced than anything your hands and ears can currently make. That's not a sign you picked the wrong hobby. It's the normal state for the first year or two of any creative skill, and the only way through it is making more tracks, not waiting until you're good enough to start.

Comparing your third track to someone else's 300th doesn't tell you anything

EDMProd's guide to producer progression makes a simple point worth sitting with: every producer you're comparing yourself to also has a folder of abandoned projects and a first year that sounded rough. What you see online is finished, mixed, released and promoted, not their actual starting point. Comparing your third track to someone else's 300th is comparing a rough draft to a highlight reel, and it tells you nothing useful about how you're actually doing.

Finish the track even when you already know you don't love it

"One finished song is better than 100 half finished!" is how Tronic label boss Christian Smith put it to MusicRadar. Finishing a track, arranging it, mixing it, deciding it's done, teaches things a half-built loop never will. You also won't know which of your early ideas were actually good until you've taken a batch of them all the way through and can compare finished tracks against each other, not half-finished ones against a memory of how you hoped they'd sound.

Perfectionism doesn't make a track better, it just stops it existing

Producers who finish a lot of music tend to have a working answer to "how do I know it's done," rather than an open-ended search for perfect. Detroit techno producer Claude Vonstroke's version, from the same MusicRadar piece: "It's finished when I start adding things that do not affect the quality." UK producer Lone's: "The track is finished when I can listen to it without wanting to change anything." Neither is waiting for perfect. They're both watching for the point where more work stops being useful, and stopping there.

Feedback from people ahead of you catches things your own ears can't

Extended critical listening measurably reduces your ability to judge subtle differences in a mix, which is one concrete reason a second pair of ears matters. It's not that you lack taste, it's that your own ears are temporarily unreliable after hours on the same track, in a way someone hearing it fresh isn't.

Mark's own experience backs this up. Early on, track feedback from Syntho's community was, in his words, motivational at a stage when he had no other way to judge whether a track was actually working. Later, 1:1 lessons booked directly with house and techno producers Denney and Audiojack did something peer feedback couldn't: helping shape what he calls his raw sound into something more marketable, the kind of structural and mix feedback that's hardest to get from anyone who isn't already releasing records themselves.

Using loops and presets isn't cheating

We've covered this in more detail in our piece on sample packs, but it's worth repeating here: a royalty-free loop from Splice or a preset from a synth's factory bank is a licensed tool, not a shortcut you need to hide. KSHMR's commercial sample packs turned up, independently, in tracks by both Lisa of BLACKPINK and Hwasa of MAMAMOO in 2021; neither had copied the other, they'd both legally bought the same sound. Building a track around bought sounds while you're still learning arrangement and mixing is a reasonable way to start, not a lesser one.

Learn sound design anyway, even if you mostly use presets

MusicTech's guide to synthesis makes the case plainly: synths differ in interface, but they're all built from the same handful of principles, oscillators, filters, envelopes, so understanding one properly makes every other synth, and every preset inside it, easier to read and edit. A preset you understand is a starting point you can bend into something that's actually yours. A preset you don't understand is a wall you can only work around.

A DAW template saves more time than it looks like it should

Mark's Ableton template is fixed: a KICK group; a DRUMS group split into CLAP, SNARE, HATS and PERC racks, each a selector rack preloaded with a shortlist of samples he already likes; a BASS group with a handful of go-to bass VSTs; a SYNTHS group with six VSTs he reaches for often; and separate VOCALS and FX groups, each with the bus effects and compression he applies on every project already sitting on the chain. None of that is about limiting creativity. It's about not spending the first twenty minutes of a session routing audio and hunting through sample folders before he's written a single idea, and it keeps his tracks sounding like his tracks from project to project, rather than starting from a different signal chain every time.

EDMProd's workflow guide makes the same case in general: a ready-to-go template exists to shrink the gap between an idea in your head and hearing it back, which is exactly the gap that kills momentum on a new track.

A new plugin won't make you better at this

The belief that the next plugin is what's standing between you and a finished track has a name: Gear Acquisition Syndrome, or GAS, a term Steely Dan guitarist Walter Becker coined in a 1996 Guitar Player magazine piece about guitarists convinced their next purchase would fix their playing. It applies just as well to a synth plugin as it does to a guitar. A new synth can genuinely inspire a track, and that's real and worth allowing, but it doesn't teach you arrangement, mixing or finishing, and those are what actually improve between your fifth track and your fiftieth. If you do want a specific new tool, our free VST plugins guide covers what's actually worth having before you spend anything.

A laptop, headphones and one pair of monitors is a complete studio

We've made the full case for this elsewhere, covering everything from a $40 pawn-shop synth that helped invent acid house to Burial making a Mercury-nominated album on a "rubbish, dying computer": see expensive gear doesn't make you a better producer. The short version: a laptop that can run your DAW (see our laptop guide if you're not sure what you already own is enough), a pair of headphones for detail work, and one pair of monitor speakers to check how a mix translates off headphones, is a complete studio for learning the actual skill. An audio interface (see our buying guide) only becomes necessary once you're recording something external, a mic or a hardware synth, not before.