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Ego doesn’t always appear as obvious arrogance. It can shapeshift into modesty, feed your fear, and sap your power to act.

Modesty used as a reason to stay stagnant is not a virtue. It is hiding. You have a comfortable room in which to work. In your room, you are the expert. So why would you leave?

You don’t stay because you’re comfortable. Fear keeps you frozen in place. The fear of asking a question. The fear of a vocalist not liking your idea. You tell yourself you’re not ready yet.

Fear is not protection. It is direction. It points you to the room where you are not the expert, the one filled with people you can learn from. That gives you the confidence to enter the next room. Each time, you find yourself different from before. You share an idea with a vocalist who gives you a performance that finishes it.

Mistake fear for a reason to hide, and your ego takes control. It keeps asking: What if you fail? Ask the other question. What if you succeed?

For more on dropping the ego and following your intuition from Alsogood.

ProducerHead is a publication for independent music producers. Subscribe free and get access to Sonic Stimulus Vol. 1 — a free sample pack, The Invisible Instruments — a series of creative frameworks for producers, and The Pocket — behind the scenes production sessions from guests on the show.

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Surfer Dave believes everyone has a taste that is not shared with anyone.

Your job is simple: express it.

Doing so is less about acquisition and more about reflection. Your music is the medium for sharing your experience, preference, and perspective. The hurdle for honest expression is not the lack of tools or knowledge of subject matter, it is a distance from yourself. Decreasing that distance is the behind-the-scenes work of every artist (maybe every human). This never-ending process is how your music is made, the artifacts of your experience. You may never arrive, but each step relieves the listener of the responsibility to interpret, so that they can feel.

For more on artistic development: 053. Are You Making Art or The Idea of it? | feat. Matt Wyatt

ProducerHead is a publication for independent music producers. Subscribe free and get access to Sonic Stimulus Vol. 1 — a free sample pack, The Invisible Instruments — a series of creative frameworks for producers, and The Pocket — behind the scenes production sessions from guests on the show.

Share this with a producer who belongs here.

Whatever you delegate to AI is something you will forget how to do. If you neglect a muscle group, you expect to find it underdeveloped. Your creative skills are no different.

AI is not a solution to your problems as an artist. The more you lean on it for creative work, the more you sacrifice your own creative capability.

As an artist, your work remains constant. Make music. And if the blinking lights of an intelligent slot machine lure you into neglecting your creativity, you have decided that music is a scalable, manufactured good. That you prefer to be an unskilled laborer, responsible for nothing more than pulling a lever.

You may find yourself more “productive” as you find yourself with more “songs,” but you have surrendered your own creativity in the process. And the less you make music, the more your music-making muscles atrophy.

More on avoiding creative atrophy: Nothing Is Static

ProducerHead is a publication for independent music producers. Subscribe free and get access to Sonic Stimulus Vol. 1 — a free sample pack, The Invisible Instruments — a series of creative frameworks for producers, and The Pocket — behind the scenes production sessions from guests on the show.

Share this with a producer who belongs here.

Goals are un-experienced experiences. They are places we have never been.

Destinations are directional. They do not represent finish lines. Upon arrival we will select another. Choosing one is valuable because it focuses our attention, enabling us to discover the path. Choosing a destination does not limit what we can do, it is a mechanism to align our varied activities, moving us in a particular direction. The path is revealed to us as we move toward the desired destination—we do not choose it.

Keep this in mind as you encounter obstacles along the way. Bad weather, road work, and traffic jams are beyond your control. You are not lost, they are the conditions of your path. To leave the path would be to abandon your destination. Enduring will strengthen your conviction.

As Underbelly tells us: It is hard to be more than one thing to people on the internet.

So, the work is not to do everything at once, but to pursue a single destination at a time. Underbelly’s consistent effort as a teacher has split into various types of opportunities, including the collection of his experience offered through BeatSpark, an Ableton Live education app. This also represents a platform of stability that supports his ongoing pursuit of artistry.

ProducerHead is a publication for independent music producers. Subscribe free and get access to Sonic Stimulus Vol. 1 — a free sample pack, The Invisible Instruments — a series of creative frameworks for producers, and The Pocket — behind the scenes production sessions from guests on the show.

Share this with a producer who belongs here.

The marketing obsession leads artists to forget a fundamental truth: musicians make music. Content is about discovery. Catalog is about depth. Content is the doorway to the house that is your catalog. Good content is like a set of good directions – it makes your house easy to find. Giving good directions, however, does not necessarily make you a good host. Whether or not someone decides to stay depends entirely on what’s inside.

A house containing a well-curated collection of your work is a place for someone to spend time.

If you help someone find an empty house, how likely are they to return?

Spending all your time on content is like mapping a route without a destination in mind.

Be sure that you have something to share with your guests when they arrive.

ProducerHead is a publication for independent music producers. Subscribe free and get access to Sonic Stimulus Vol. 1 — a free sample pack, The Invisible Instruments — a series of creative frameworks for producers, and The Pocket — behind the scenes production sessions from guests on the show.

Share this with a producer who belongs here.

Gnarly is a finger drumming artist and producer based in the UK, ten years into a career she built without a single viral video. In this conversation we get into her five year goal system and why she puts it in a drawer, what full time independent music actually looks like month to month, the line between self-belief and self-delusion, and how she thinks about building an audience without chasing the algorithm.

Subscribe free at producerhead.substack.com and immediately receive Sonic Stimulus Vol. 1 (a sample pack), Invisible Instruments, and access to The Pocket (in-studio production videos from guests).

Chris Mazuera is a guitarist and producer based in New York whose work spans hip hop, R&B, and jazz. In this clip from episode 040, he makes the case that pursuing music at all requires a kind of healthy delusion — and that every artist you admire operates from the same conviction.

This Loop is from episode 040 feat. Chris Mazuera. Listen to the full conversation wherever you listen.

The essay accompanying this episode is up at producerhead.substack.com.

As a thank you for listening, subscribe at producerhead.substack.com and I'll send you two things for free: Sonic Stimulus Vol. 1, a curated sample pack, and access to The Pocket, an ongoing video archive of guests breaking down their process and workflow in real time.

In this conversation, Machado Mijiga explains the relationship between studying and making music, self-imposed limits as a creative tool, and what it actually felt like to play Lollapalooza and remain anonymous.

Machado Mijiga is a multi-instrumentalist, producer, and composer based in Portland, Oregon. He plays saxophone, piano, and drums across jazz, electronic, and experimental music. Machado has also performed with Portugal the Man at some of the biggest festivals in the US.

Connect with Machado Mijiga:

Machado Mijiga on IG

Machado Mijiga Official Site

Machado Mijiga on Bandcamp

Free To ProducerHead Subscribers:

Subscribe free at producerhead.substack.com and immediately receive Sonic Stimulus Vol. 1 (a sample pack), Invisible Instruments, and access to The Pocket (in-studio production videos from guests).

Your skills are either growing or decaying right now, there's no neutral. Let's talk about training creativity.

Part of a six-part series called The Invisible Instruments, this episode breaks down the parallels between physical strength training and creative development: why one session matters less than the streak, why talent is a gift but training is a choice (borrowing Jerry Seinfeld's "thoroughbred horse" idea), and why plateaus aren't dead ends but platforms for the next climb.

Also covered: the recency bias that makes growth feel invisible day to day, why most of what you make will be bad and why that's the process rather than a problem, and the one metric worth tracking instead of chasing daily proof of progress.

Subscribe free at producerhead.substack.com for all six Invisible Instruments write-ups, weekly curation through The Pocket, and the ability to submit your music to Beats in Progress.

You cannot achieve your way out of loneliness. Said another way, success won’t necessarily bring connection, which is the goal of art: to connect by demonstrating that individual experience is unique and universal.

Still, most of us work tirelessly, and alone, in pursuit of goals motivated by the idea that reaching them will bring us closer together.

I am not saying do not set goals. Goals, when thoughtfully defined, are useful to focus energy and develop skills. The expectations and beliefs in them as escape routes to a better life are misguided at best. When you achieve a goal, you will not stop what you are doing to catch the falling confetti. You are more likely to immediately pick another mountain and continue climbing. If the goal was 1,000 subscribers, the next one will be 10,000, and so on.

Extreme focus on the current goal is powerful. When you take aim at a bullseye, it is in your best interest to be staring right into it. And as you do, you are ignoring the rest of the world, including the people around you. In moments of obsession with a goal, it can feel easier to do it alone – and it may be. But, when we remember that this goal will be replaced with another, we remember that how and with whom we travel is more important than whether or not we arrive.

Set a goal. And see it for what it is: a tool, not a substitute for a life or relationship.

ProducerHead is a publication for independent music producers. Subscribe free and get access to Sonic Stimulus Vol. 1 — a free sample pack, The Invisible Instruments — a series of creative frameworks for producers, and The Pocket — behind the scenes production sessions from guests on the show.