TL;DR
I make the production decisions in my DAW (Ableton), but I don’t make music in a vacuum. Other artists, years of listening and people who give thoughtful feedback all leave their mark.
The most valuable criticism helps me hear something specific and decide whether to change it. It doesn’t have to be flattering.
An insulting reaction to a short social clip and a considered response to the full song aren’t the same kind of feedback.
I’ll spend hours on a sound that lasts a few seconds in the finished track. A bass note that needs more body. An arpeggio that draws too much attention when the vocal comes back. A reverb tail that hangs around long enough to step on the next phrase.
Even the artwork and visuals around a release take their own rounds of choices and revisions. I usually have a pretty clear picture in my head of what I want, but I suck at drawing. So yeah, I use AI for some of the artwork, along with Lightroom and other tools to help bring those ideas to life. Sometimes what looked great in my head doesn’t work nearly as well once I see it. Then I start tweaking again.
Back in Ableton, my digital audio workstation (DAW), I’m the one making the calls on the music. That part of the work can be solitary, and I like it. But the more time I spend on a song, the more I realize how many people helped shape what I hear, even when they weren’t in the room.
Some made the records I learned from. Some showed me what a particular groove or arrangement could do. Others are the people willing to listen to something unfinished and tell me what they actually heard.
Sometimes it takes a village to finish a song. I’m not talking about having a committee vote on every kick drum. That sounds miserable. I’m talking about what happens when the right outside perspective helps you hear your own music again.
The people who got there before you
Long before I open a project, I’ve already been influenced by a ridiculous amount of music. There are producers who taught me something by the choices they made, musicians whose performances stayed with me and records I’ve listened to closely enough that I can still hear their arrangements in my head.
That doesn’t mean I’m trying to make their songs. I can take away an idea about how tension builds over sixteen bars, how a bass part moves around a kick or how a vocal can carry an entire drop. When I make something of my own, those lessons are available to me.
Being influenced by another artist isn’t the same as collaborating with them. The same goes for people who share advice or listen to a work-in-progress. Don’t get me wrong: Credit for someone’s actual creative contribution matters. So does recognizing the less formal ways we learn from each other.
An observational study of two audio producers working together followed how they listened, talked about a problem and made changes inside their production software. The researchers show how playback, the software’s visual displays and conversation helped the pair get specific about what needed attention. Their judgments weren’t always clear at first, so the producers had to work out what they meant before deciding what to change.
That’s familiar territory in production. “Make it warmer” could mean less top-end bite, a different kick, a thicker bass or an entirely different arrangement. The person saying it may know exactly what they mean while I’m hearing four possible problems.
Talking it through can get us somewhere useful, but someone still has to play the track and decide what belongs.
When you’ve heard it too many times
I’ve written about what happens to your objectivity after a long mixing session. You can adjust the same passage for hours and gradually lose a reliable sense of whether the changes helped. Take a break, listen somewhere else or come back the next day, and suddenly you notice something that was hiding in plain sight.
A careful listener can do something similar. They don’t have the same history with every version. They don’t remember the synth you spent an afternoon building and then decided to remove. They hear the song that’s actually playing.
When I’m deep into a track, I may be thinking about the exact bass sound or a transition I still want to fix. Someone else may notice that the energy falls away at a particular point, or that the vocal loses its place once another instrument enters. That’s valuable even when the listener doesn’t know the technical cause.
My Patient Zero production notes follow version after version of the kick, bass, vocal effects and builds. At one point the kick was finally doing what I wanted, but the bass still didn’t have the body I was after. Later I took out a violin part because it didn’t belong.
Those notes document my own production decisions. They also show why I value someone who takes the time to listen carefully when a work-in-progress has been living in my head for weeks.
What useful feedback sounds like
Suppose I send someone the full track and ask what they’re hearing.
“The drop doesn’t work” tells me they didn’t connect with it. Fair enough. I’d still need more to understand why.
“The build feels crowded, and by the time the drop hits there’s not much contrast left” gives me somewhere to start. I can listen across that transition, compare the level and density before and after the drop, and try pulling something back. I may agree with the observation but choose a different fix.
Those are illustrative comments, not quotes from someone who reviewed my music. The difference is that the second one points to something I can actually investigate.
A 2024 study of eight electronic-music students found that feedback about the parts of a song people had invested the most in was often the hardest to give, yet the most wanted. It’s a small study in a classroom setting, not a rule about every producer. But I recognize the tension. The sound someone spent days building may be exactly the sound that needs another look.
I’m not looking only for technical notes. Somebody who follows the song from the intro to the last note may notice where it stops carrying them, even if they can’t name a frequency or an effect. That’s a real observation worth following up on.
Good feedback also takes some effort from the listener. Play the whole song. Notice what happens before and after the part that bothers you. If you can, give the time where it changes. Say what you heard before prescribing a plugin or a setting. Sometimes the problem is real and the suggested solution is wrong.
And I still get to disagree. A listener might dislike something I kept on purpose. Maybe the tension is meant to last that long. Maybe the bass is supposed to feel uncomfortable for a few bars. Being open to criticism doesn’t mean handing over the arrangement.
The comment section is another story
Recently I shared an excerpt from my unofficial Jolene reimagining on Instagram. I built that remix in Ableton around the original vocal performances and spent a ridiculous amount of time on it. A short social clip doesn’t show any of that work.
Some responses were nasty. Others accused me of using AI to generate the music. That’s frustrating, especially when the point of sharing the work is to let people hear an unusual musical idea and maybe get curious about how it was made.
I’m not asking everyone to like a country song reworked as electronic music. Some people will hate the combination. They can. A listener saying the original song is better is giving an opinion about taste, not a production note I need to act on.
A personal insult doesn’t help me hear whether the kick and bass work together. And an accusation about how the track was made doesn’t become evidence because somebody typed it under a Reel.
A 2022 survey of 135 online creators with large audiences found that nearly all could recall hate or harassment. Creators reported censoring their own content or leaving platforms as a result. The survey covered platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, not specifically electronic-music producers.
Still, I don’t want to make the mistake of treating every stranger as a troll or every friend as an expert. Someone I’ve never met might hear the exact thing I’ve overlooked. Someone close to me might be trying so hard to be supportive that they don’t tell me the truth.
The question I come back to is whether the person engaged with what I made, and whether their observation gives me something worth testing. I don’t have to reward cruelty with a conversation to recognize a useful detail if one happens to be buried in it.
I’ve worked through that distinction with feedback on Cascade. Two curators said the bass was weak. I listened on several systems and checked whether combining the left and right channels made the low end quieter. That let me test one possible cause. It didn’t settle whether the bass sounded good.
Let the listener into the work, not into the driver’s seat
Here’s a listening test I’d suggest for a track you’re still building. Send a full work-in-progress to one or two people who will actually spend time with it. If there’s a specific section you’re uncertain about, don’t tell them what you think is wrong before they listen.
Ask where their attention changes and whether any part feels out of place. Let them use their own words. If somebody says the second drop is weaker, ask what they heard differently in the first. A timestamp and a description of what changed can be more useful than ten minutes of plugin advice.
Then go back to the project and listen for yourself. Compare versions. Try one change at a time when that makes sense, especially if you’re dealing with a mix problem. You can keep the observation while rejecting the proposed solution, or decide that the original arrangement is exactly what you want.
I think about the artists whose records taught me to listen, the people who make time to hear something unfinished and those who care enough to say something specific when it isn’t quite working. That’s the village I’m talking about. They’re part of how I keep learning. I’m still the one who has to decide what belongs in the song.
If you’re producing something right now, whose ears would you trust enough to send the unfinished version to?
Resources
Deacon, Healey and Barthet, “It’s cleaner, definitely”: Collaborative Process in Audio Production (2022). Observational research into how two studio producers negotiate listening judgments and changes.
Røshol, “Putting the ego aside” (2024). Interviews with eight electronic-music students about peer criticism.
Thomas and colleagues, creator harassment study (2022). Survey of 135 online creators about hate, harassment and coping responses.