When an idea lights something up in you that response is your instincts, your taste, and your current creative state all arriving at the same place at the same time.

You didn’t have to think about it, it just happened.

A few months ago I had one of those moments where a chord progression showed up while I was doing something else entirely and I could already hear where it wanted to go. But it was late at night, I was tired, and I told myself the responsible thing was to wait until tomorrow when I’d have real time to give it.

By the next day it was just like a dream you’re trying to remember. I got the chord progression, played it back, and felt nothing like the night before.

The notes were there, but my initial vision for it was blurry, the original spark was gone.

I don’t think I lost a great song that day, I think I just lost the version of me that could have written it.

From experience, when these moments happen the work tends to flow differently, almost effortlessly with a kind of momentum that’s hard to create through discipline alone.

The music feels magical and effortless instead of manufactured and formulaic.

Just think about the last time you made something you were genuinely proud of. There’s a good chance it started with a special feeling, a moment, a memory, a sample from a song you’re enjoying or after watching a great movie.

In other words, you didn’t have to convince yourself to start or keep going, it just happened naturally.

Now think about the songs you’ve pushed through and finished out of obligation.

It probably turned out fine after some hours, days or weeks of tinkering and experimentation but maybe the process wasn’t as exciting or clear from the start.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with songs that need more effort to reach their potential because in the end they give us the experience required to help us finish the special ones when we come across them.

But here’s the part I want you to hold onto:

When you feel excitement that’s the signal.

Act on it quickly and work differently.

• Sketch it out as quickly and as much as you can.

• Don’t judge or edit, just let the ideas flow out of you and save them.

• Leave yourself a specific note about what excited you about this idea, be as specific as you can.

Lastly, just ride the wave. Resist the voice inside of your head trying to talk you out of it, don’t shelve it for later when you’re more “ready” or when you have more time. Take it as far as you can and appreciate it for what it is:

A special moment in time where you’re completely tune with the creative force.

Never forget, excitement is the signal.

— Hermes

P.S. The tricky thing about exciting ideas rarely shows up when you have 3 free hours in the studio. They show up in the most unexpected places: the car, at work, at 11pm with a sleeping baby in the next room.

That's why I built Song Ritual, a place where I can catch the spark when it lands, and write a note with specific context so I can revisit that spark and initial feeling. Beta is open if you want in, and joining also get you access to a private discord with 50+ other artists already using it. Learn more here.

It’s the app I wish I’d had for most of the last decade. It’s essentially a studio session prompt generator which draws from your own inspiration, as opposed to going in the studio with a “let’s see what happens” approach.

It contains a vault where every idea, voice memo, and napkin scribble lives in one dedicated place. You can create or pre-save Creative Sparks for the days you don’t feel creative and at the centerpiece a timer and year calendar that tells you the truth about where your creative hours go.

Lately I’ve been interviewing the producers using it to get a glimpse about what actually changed in the studio for them.

In today’s edition we give Tom Callahan the spotlight and hear his experience with Song Ritual and premiere his latest work Subliminal Midgard.

You Don’t Need A 4-Hour Studio Session

We’ve all been sold a similar picture of what the “perfect” studio session looks like.

• A clear evening.

• Nothing on the calendar.

• Four hours, minimum (because anything less isn’t worth opening the session for).

You wait for that window and when it finally arrives you sit down and realize you have nothing to say, you feel blocked.

Then by the time the window closes you tell yourself the same thing you told yourself yesterday, last week and last month.

“I just need more time”

Like many of us busy with life, work, and responsibilities Tom doesn’t get more time in his current routine and his album Subliminal Midgard was tracking in at ten months to a year for completion but after Song Ritual, it came in at nine.

It was finished ahead of schedule.

Let’s find what made this possible from his own words…

Tom Callahan’s Experience With Song Ritual

So what changed for Tom after using Song Ritual?

1) He saw the invisible time.

Flow is what we’re all told to chase. That creativity is about finding that moment where you lose yourself in the work and let time disappear.

But nobody mentions the time that disappears when trying to chasing the perfect circumstances to make flow happen.

This is the blind spot Tom was able to identify with Song Ritual.

What made you realize you were losing time?

Using Song Ritual. I could see the time I was using where I couldn’t feel it. You get into a flow state where time outside of the song’s timing gets lost when you’re mastering especially. It becomes about frequency and amplitude full stop.

The problem is, time does matter if you want to finish things, especially in my case. My cognition and memory give me about two useful hours at a time before I have to take an hour break, and the next time, I can maybe go for an hour before I need an hour break if I’m doing seated work. Covid tore up my body like a five year old sociopath with a hammer. If I work beyond those constraints, I start making really strange errors.

I would use this app, with or without those limitations, however. It lets you see what makes your music tick and makes the right space for creative processes to obtain focus. There are a lot of checklist apps and apps with creative prompts, but there were none that I’ve seen that set the stage to let you be creative using your own personal inspirations like Song Ritual.

2) He built defaults instead of blank pages.

Once you can see the leak you can plug it, and his fix wasn’t discipline, it was a starting point.

What did you notice once you started using it?

I noticed that I was taking hours to master a single song where it felt like less than an hour, sometimes even beyond the point of cognitive degradation. It was taking more time to master than to perform the part! It led me to reverse engineer my dabbling process and build a default process. No sense in building from the ground up when starting with a certain configuration will work 90% of the time and cut your load down significantly.

Your timeline moved up. What caused that?

It was the mastering thing, first, being a bit shocked at the fact I had run out a long timer. Streamlining knocked time off and left more time free to create the last three songs, which left more time to search for the right cover art. It became a cascade effect. The changes I made to mixing should bring the time down even more.

More time mastering than performing, it was clear that in Tom’s creative process the part where you’re actually being a musician was the smaller slice.

3) He consolidated his creative sparks.

His first days with the app were spent emptying his pockets (creatively).

• Napkins, scraps

• Phone notes

• Ideas trapped in books and spread across tables,

All of this went into the Inspiration Vault. Then he discovered why the vault is such a powerful tool.

I found something interesting about inspiration by using Song Ritual: If you’re feeling flat, an inspiration written down can bring you back to a memory of that moment, and lets you recall the feeling of that moment as if it were happening in the present. This may be basic to some people, but I hadn’t tried this before the app. It’s like importing a spark from the past to light the fire now.

And here are two more things he mentioned that are worth sharing with you all:

Anything that surprised you?

How much the rituals already there made sense, and how few I ended up adding in the end. I was also surprised at how smoothly the app worked for me. It was the first time I’ve beta tested where not once did I roll my eyes.

What would you say to someone who keeps starting but not finishing?

Put a one-track single out next week, on SoundCloud. Just do it, you’ll never learn to fly if you don’t step off the branch. It doesn’t have to be genre defining, it just has to reflect some facet of your life. Make it simple. Use your cell phone microphone if that’s your only option. Be silly if that’s your bliss.

Now it’s out there, you’re vulnerable. You just took the hardest step. Maybe you got trolled, maybe ignored, maybe it landed with a handful of people, maybe it’s very popular. Let all of that roll off like water off a duck’s back. Those things aren’t the point. The point is that you stepped off the edge and found you could fly. Build on that.

If you made it this far, stick along to learn more about Tom’s music.

The Music: Subliminal Midgard by Ursus Volans (Tom Callahan)

What kind of music do you make?

Under the Ursus Volans moniker I make noise/ambient music. My biggest influences for this genre are Vangelis, Patrick O’Hearn, Lycia, soulwhirlingsomewhere, Justin Bell, Yul Brynner’s Ghost, Claude Debussy, Thollem McDonas and Lustmord.

Under the Bloodware Overdrive moniker, I make cyberpunk music, a little different than the usual genre definition. The influences should give an idea of the vibe: Prince, Ministry, Coil, UNKLE, Unchipped, Collector of Dust, Roughhausen, Android Lust, Period Bomb, the composers of the Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack, and VNV Nation.

Both projects have significant inspiration in visual media, including video games. The illustrated edition of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, for example, or images from orbiting telescopes. The art installations and architecture where I live. The rhythm of my city and Night City. I think if you had to unify the principles of both monikers under one word, it would be “soundtrack.”

What are you working on now?

I’m about to release an album as Ursus Volans called Subliminal Midgard. In the process of physically making the CDs right now. While that is happening, I’ll be brainstorming for the Bloodware Overdrive album, which I’m calling Antaeus for now. The beats are already made, I’m getting ideas about what to build up from there.

What does finishing this project mean to you?

Finishing this project means that I can let it stand on its merits. No excuses, this is it. This is the best reflection of what I’m trying to communicate with my current skills and tools. It also means that my health doesn’t get to stop my expression yet: it can only slow me down. Still have a fire inside, not a pile of ashes, yet.

Listen to the sounds of Tom Callahan

➔ https://www.subvert.fm/barren-symmetry/subliminal-midgard

➔ https://www.subvert.fm/barren-symmetry/live-midwinters-improvisations

➔ Read the full uncut interview in the Song Ritual blog here.
➔ Learn more about the Song Ritual app here.

P.S. Have an album or music you would like featured on the Sound + Creativity newsletter? Get in touch with and let me know how Song Ritual helped you in your creative process.

The playlist curator.

The close friend whose opinion carries more weight than it should.

The audience we’ve imagined in our head out of comments, streams, and whatever we saw doing well last week.

None of them are in the studio, yet all of them are influencing our creative decisions.

The thing is you did it on their behalf, in advance and without being asked (partly because of our biological need to feel a sense of belonging, and to not be exiled from the tribe).

I spent years like this and didn’t know it.

I thought I was being strategic, but for the most part I was really just asking permission from people who had no idea I existed.

That’s the Approval Trap. When we’re optimizing for acceptance before the work even exists.

Don’t get me wrong, the trap isn’t caring what people think, it’s letting that care operate during the making when the only thing that should be in the room is your taste and your likes.

Here’s today’s reframe:

Making music for yourself is not self-indulgence, it’s the only condition under which your actual taste can show up.

Your taste is the one thing you have that nobody else can reproduce. It was built by a decade of songs you listened to, records your parents played, a scene you fell into by accident, a chord progression that made you sit down and deconstruct it.

That’s your Sonic Genealogy.

That musical inheritance is your signal, everything else in between that and your finished songs is just tools.

Because when you make for the imaginary room, you filter that signal through a guess. And the guess is always about the past, because it’s assembled from what already worked for someone else.

So the lesson here is simple…

The work has to be true to you before it can be useful to anyone.

Truth first, audience second. Most songs you love were made in that order whether the artist could articulate it or not.

In practice, this looks like three practices.

1. Make the first decision on instinct. The first ten minutes of a session are the most honest ones you get. Move fast enough that the imaginary audience doesn’t have time to convene. You can evaluate later, you cannot judge and create at the same time.

2. Notice the moment you lose your say. There is a specific moment where you stop asking “do I like this” and start asking “will they like this.” Learn what it feels like. It usually feels like hesitation, sometimes it’s just the literal thought. When you catch it, name it out loud, and go back to the first question.

3. Keep a record of what you actually liked. This is not about capturing what performed, it’s about collecting what you liked. Ideas, snippets, mixes, moments. Over a year that becomes a map of your own taste, and it’s more reliable than any trend report you’ll ever read.

Finish one song this month with nobody in mind. Don’t send the bounce, don’t post the clip, let it exist solely for you first. Do you like it?

Lastly don’t forget that the audience is real and they matter, they just come once you’re a fan of your own music.

— Hermes

P.S. Keeping a record of what you actually liked is the whole reason I built the Inspiration Vault inside Song Ritual. It’s a mobile app where you can collect the moments that inspire you without turning it into another folder you never open.

Song Ritual is currently in beta and being used by 40+ artists.

Subscribing to the app is also the most direct way to support the work I put out here.

If you’d like to learn more about Song Ritual and see if it can serve your creative process read all about it here —> Song Ritual website.

And I believe it’s a pattern worth paying attention to, because for a lot of us avoidance feels rational in the moment.

If melodies aren’t your strength, you lean on your drums.

If arrangement feels overwhelming, you stay in the loop phase.

You begin to build a workflow around your gaps instead of through them.

Over time, this gap doesn’t close, it becomes part of your identity. Maybe even a part of your signature sound and we begin to rationalize it with thoughts such as:

“I’m not really a melody person.”

“Arrangement is just not my thing.”

“I’ll just draw in MIDI notes instead of learning the keys.”

But that’s not always a personality trait, that’s just a skill you haven’t repeated enough yet. And this can be extremely limiting especially if there are skills within music creation you aspire to develop but you tend to put off.

Here’s the cycle we fall into when we become avoidant to our innate creative curiosities:

1. We never accumulate enough reps to get comfortable which keeps us in a phase where it feels hard and uncertain and frustrating.

2. We interpret that feeling as evidence that we’re not good at it, rather than evidence that we’re simply early in the process.

But the reality is that this discomfort isn’t a signal to stop, it’s a signal that learning is happening.

The Principle of Creative Yield applies directly here.

At least from my own personal experience, the number of bad melodies you write is directly proportional to the number of good ones you eventually produce. There’s simply no shortcut around the volume.

You don’t get better at melodies by writing one every few months when you feel brave enough, you get better by writing twenty in a week and letting most of them be genuinely bad.

This is what “face your weaknesses head on” actually means in practice.

It’s not about forcing yourself through pain, it’s about trusting that the path to mastery runs directly through the awkward, uncomfortable reps.

Every session where you sit down to write lyrics and hate everything you come up with is still a session where your brain is building the neural patterns that make the next session slightly easier.

So here’s a simple reframe worth keeping:

Whatever you’ve been quietly avoiding, that’s your next focus.

Not your whole session or a complete overhaul of your workflow. Just dedicate a small window, 10 minutes, one constraint, no judgment on the output, where you deliberately work the weak muscle.

• Write the melody.

• Sketch the arrangement.

• Draft the lyrics.

Let them be rough, that’s the point…

The artists who seem “naturally gifted” usually aren’t, they just spent more time in the uncomfortable zone than everyone else.

But many times, from the outside, what we perceive as talent is just a skill that’s been developed for showing up even if it didn’t feel good yet.

— Hermes

P.S. I built Song Ritual for exactly this kind of work.

The Ritual System lets you set a constraint, start a session timer, and just do the reps without overthinking or stalling on the “how do I get started” part of the creative process.

So if you've been avoiding a skill, or your music in general it's a great proven tool to keep you accountable and more intentional. If it clicks for you, subscribing to a paid account is also the most direct way to support my writing and what I'm building here.

Also it’s currently 47% off since it’s still in beta…

Learn more about Song Ritual by clicking the button below.

Song Ritual Website

You have an idea, and flash of inspiration, the kind that shows up uninvited at 11PM as you’re laying in bed. You tell yourself “I have to capture this” so you do.

A voice memo.

A concept for a song.

A note in your phone that says something like “dark piano, 90bpm, minor, the one that felt like rain on a summer day”.

You go back to bed, sleep and then life happens.

The idea sits, days pass and the excitement and momentum of the idea fades. You open your notes app days later and find 17 other notes you barely remember jotting down, all with the same intention but none of them started.

This is not a discipline problem, this is a structure problem.

And for a long time, I had no structure.

I had intent, I had desire and occasionally, streaks of productivity that I tried to replicate but couldn’t.

What I didn’t have was a system that made it impossible to lose the thread between the spark and the finished song.

That’s why I built Song Ritual, to solve my own problem.

What Is Song Ritual?

For the past several months a large part of my energy has gone into something I haven’t talked about formally until now…

Song Ritual is a creative workflow tool for music producers and songwriters.

It’s been in development for the past 3 months and tested quietly by a small group of early users (we’re at 40+ live users as of today). Now I want to officially introduce it to the Sound + Creativity community.

First, I want to explain what it is, why it exists, and what’s actually inside it.

But before you go there, I want to give you the context the app itself can’t give you, the why behind it. Because if you understand what problem Song Ritual was built to solve, you’ll understand exactly how to use it.

And then you can decide if it’s for you or not.

You Don’t Lack Creativity, You Lack Clarity & Song Ritual Helps You Realize That

Does any of these scenarios sound familiar?

• Dozens of unfinished songs piling up

• No clear path from idea to finished track

• Song ideas scattered across DAWs, notes, voice memos

• Starting something new instead of developing what you already have

Every single one of those is a structure problem dressed up as a creativity problem.

We tell ourselves we’re blocked because we’re not inspired enough, not talented enough, not in the right headspace, or we don’t have enough time.

But for a lot of us the real issue is simpler and less cinematic:

We have no container for the work. No system that tells us where we are, what we’re building, and what happens next.

It’s chaos.

As a result every session feels like it starts from scratch, and starting from scratch is expensive, not just in time but in creative energy.

All these unfinished ideas start to feel like evidence of your lack of discipline, rather than evidence that you never had the right system.

The container matters.

How Song Ritual Works & How It Helps You Go From Idea To Finished Songs

Song Ritual is built around one sentence:

Replace chaos with a clear creative workflow.

1. Capture your best ideas.

2. Organize them into actionable projects.

3. Use focused rituals to push through to completion.

4. Track progress for a more disciplined and consistent creative habit.

That’s the whole thing in a nutshell. Simple in concept, but the details are where it gets interesting.

The workflow inside Song Ritual mirrors the underlying philosophy shared across all of my writing The Musical Creative Process.

This is my five stage creative process that takes a song from idea to finished piece:

1) Capture: Collect ideas, references, and inspiration before they disappear.

2) Generate: Turn those inputs into new musical ideas and starting points.

3) Develop: Use structured rituals and focused sessions to shape ideas into real compositions.

4) Refine: Edit, improve, and evolve your work with clarity and intention.

5) Finish: Track progress, build consistency, and complete your music.

Form years of working 1:1 with artists I realized most producers live entirely in phases one and two. They capture, they generate, and then the ideas sit.

Song Ritual is built to move work through all five phases, not in theory, but with actual tools for each stage.

Even if you don’t plan on using the app, you can apply the following concepts without the app. You’ll just have to get creative and apply these systems manually.

1) The Inspiration Vault

The first thing that kills a song is losing the idea before it becomes anything.

• Voice memos in one app.

• References saved to another.

• Chord progressions noted in a folder somewhere.

• Lyrics in a text message to yourself from six months ago.

Moods, concepts, sample ideas, plugin discoveries, scattered across a dozen places with no way to connect them.

The Inspiration Vault is Song Ritual’s creative archive. It’s where every idea gets a home the moment you come across it.

What you can store there?

• Voice notes

• Song concepts

• References

• Lyrics (with syllable counter)

• Plugin discoveries

• Youtube tutorials

• Inspiration images

• BPM notes

• MIDI ideas

• Mood captures

• Chord progressions

• Preset names

• Sample packs names

• Epiphanies

• Genre explorations

• Arrangement ideas

That’s not all you can also create your own tags for a more personalized archive.

All tagged, all searchable, all in one place.

But here’s the part I want to highlight:

You can save any of these notes from inside Song Ritual, tag it, and add a note about why it matters to you.

It’s a creative archive, with your personal context attached to each idea, not just a another note-taking app.

2) Ritual-Based Workflow

This is the core of the product, and the reason it’s called Song Ritual.

A ritual, in our context is an intentional session with a purpose, a time block, and a set of prompts or constraints that remove the friction of starting.

The Rituals section of the app comes pre-loaded with rituals mapped to each phase of The Musical Creative Process. You’re not choosing from a blank list, you’re choosing from a structured menu of creative modes.

And you have the ability to create your own personalized rituals too.

Some examples:

Idea Sprint (Idea Generation — 30 min) — Rapid creation. Quantity over quality. No judgment. Prep steps: open a blank project, silence distractions, commit to output over evaluation.

Reference Stack Builder (Idea Curation — 25 min) — Collect references around one emotional direction.

Free Flow Writing (Idea Generation — 25 min) — Stream-of-consciousness writing to unlock subconscious creative threads.

Vault Dive (Idea Curation — Default) — Resurface buried ideas and reconnect with forgotten sparks.

And many more…

Each ritual tells you what phase it serves, how long it runs, what to do before you start, and what the intention is.

You’re not figuring it out at the beginning of the session, the ritual handles all of that.

There’s also a Randomize button on the home screen. If you sit down and genuinely don’t know where to start, one tap gives you a ritual.

The decision is made for you (but inputs created by you), all so you just show up and follow the sequence.

3) Focused Sessions

Next, there’s Creative Sparks.

A prompt generator that gives you a genre/style, key signature, and BPM at the start of a session (or any tags from your archive you want to be guided by in your session).

Constraints make starting easier, and serves as the direction that removes the paralysis of infinite options.

Once you’ve chosen your Creative Sparks, the session timer is where intention becomes action.

When you start a ritual in Song Ritual, a timer begins.

You see the ritual name, the phase it belongs to, and if you used a Creative Spark, your genre, key, and BPM (or selected sparks) on screen throughout the session.

This matters, let me explain how…

One of the most common ways a session dies is distractions. You start working on one thing, you get pulled toward another, and 45 minutes later you’ve touched three projects and finished none.

The Focused Session is a container for exactly this.

You commit to a ritual, the timer runs, and your creative parameters are visible the whole time. When it’s done, you mark it complete.

The session is a defined unit of work, not an open-ended “let me see what happens”.

A 30-minute Idea Sprint with a key of Dm, tempo of 121 bpm, in the style of house music is a commitment to specific output over evaluation.

That specificity is what turns a vague intention into a productive session.

4) Progress Tracking

This one is quiet, but it might be the feature that has the greatest impact.

The Progress section tracks every session you complete. Total sessions, total minutes, today’s sessions, today’s minutes, all identified by phase.

• Idea Curation

• Idea Generation

• Idea Development

• Idea Review

• Optimization

• Technique

Each one is tracked separately so you can see not just how much you’re working, but how you’re working.

And then there’s the grid, where each square is one day.

As you can see I haven’t been as dedicated to my music in the past couple of weeks, and there’s no way of hiding that fact from myself.

You show up, you complete a session, the square fills in. Over time, you build a visual record of your creative practice, not a streak you’re trying not to break, but a honest picture of your consistency in a given year.

This is what discipline and consistently looks like made visible.

The number of sessions and time you put in is directly proportional to the music that gets finished. The grid doesn’t lie, it doesn’t care if the session felt good or bad, it records that you showed up.

That record matters.

Especially on the days when Resistance tells you you haven’t been making enough, or haven’t been working hard enough, haven’t been producing anything worth hearing, the grid is the evidence that says otherwise.

Why Song Ritual & Why Now

Sound + Creativity has always been about one thing:

Helping music creators finish more music they’re proud of, without waiting for inspiration or burning out on grind.

Every framework I’ve shared over the years has been pointing toward a practice. A sustainable, repeatable, joyful creative practice for the modern music creator.

Song Ritual is the container for that practice.

It’s not a promise that the work will be easy, it’s a promise that you won’t have to start from zero every time you sit down the path will be there.

The rituals will be there.

The Vault will have your ideas.

The timer will hold your session.

The grid will show you what you’ve built.

You just have to show up and create, but now with less friction and more decisiveness.

I’ve been making music for over a decade and I’ve had long creative droughts and unexpected surges as many of you have. I’ve made embarrassingly bad songs by the hundreds and finished things I didn’t think I could finish.

Everything I’ve learned from that has gone into this.

This is because Song Ritual isn’t a theory, it’s the system I wish I’d had and now I’ve built it for myself.

Even if you feel this is not for you I will continue to use and push features because I’m creating this for myself first. If it helps you or other artists on a similar path, that’s just a the cherry on top.

Song Ritual Is Still In Beta (Here’s What This Means For You)

Beta means Song Ritual is still evolving.

We’re using it, we’re learning from it, and some things will improve. Some things we haven’t thought of yet will become obvious once more artists are inside.

If you join during this beta phase, you’re getting the early version of something built specifically for this community and music creators who want to finish more music with less friction.

But one of the greatest benefits of being a beta user is that your feedback shapes what it becomes next.

If this sounds like something that can help you in your creative journey you can join the Song Ritual beta by clicking the link below:

Join Song Ritual here.

Talk soon,

— Hermes

If you made it this far, I want to hear from you…

What feature stands out most to you?

What do you think would be the most helpful in your current creative process?

What feature do you wish existed but wasn’t mentioned?

Comment your idea below, I’m all ears.

The energy isn’t there, you’re not in the right headspace and you scroll for a bit, looking for something to spark it.

You reorganize your sample folders. You tell yourself you’ll start when the conditions feel right, when the mood arrives, when that elusive feeling of inspiration overwhelms you again.

And then the day passes and you carry on as usual.

This is one of the most common patterns in creative life, and it’s particularly insidious because it doesn’t feel like avoidance. It feels like self-awareness.

You believe you know yourself well enough to recognize when you’re not in the right state to create, like you’re respecting the process rather than forcing it.

And there’s a version of that which is true…

But there’s another version, a quieter and more comfortable one, that isn’t self-awareness at all.

It’s avoidance with a creative excuse attached to it.

The difference between the two is subtle, and most artists never examine it closely enough to tell them apart, because they feel the same from within. Both involve not starting, both come with a story about why not starting is the right call, but one is genuine discernment and the other is Resistance.

What Waiting Actually Costs You

Here’s the thing most artists don’t want to hear:

The feeling you’re waiting for rarely arrives before the work, it almost always arrives because of it.

Creatives know this pattern intimately, even if they’ve never named it.

• The project that stays in the folder for weeks.

• The session that never opens.

• The day that passes without a single sound made.

Not from laziness or distraction but from waiting. Waiting for the mood for the spark or the conditions to align in a way that feels right enough to begin.

The cost is obvious:

Time.

Hours, days, sometimes months of potential creative work that never happens.

But the deeper cost is harder to see, and in my opinion it’s the one that actually matters.

The real cost is the gap between where you are and where you think you need to be to start gets a little wider. The imagined version of “the right conditions” gets a little more specific, a more demanding.

Your confidence in your ability to create without those conditions, to just sit down and make something begins to wither away.

This is how creative blocks begin.

Not in a single moment of failure but in the accumulated weight of days spent waiting for a feeling that never arrived.

I’ve watched this pattern repeat across every kind of creative.

The producer who has a studio full of gear and hasn’t finished a track in six months.

The songwriter who has notebooks full of ideas and hasn’t recorded a single one.

The beatmaker who spends more time curating samples than making music with them.

And the common thread isn’t a lack of talent or ideas or time, it’s the belief that the feeling has to come first.

However for me the shift that changes everything comes from a simple and uncomfortable realization:

The state you’re trying to access through inspiration is usually the state that making something puts you in, not the other way around.

You sit down uninspired, open a session and start moving things around not because you feel it, but because you made a commitment to your craft and showed up.

And somewhere in that process something begins to shift…

A sound catches your ear and the work starts pulling you forward instead of you having to push it. It begins to take on a life of its own, developing its own gravitational pull.

That’s not magic, that’s just how creative flow works.

Resistance Is Loudest Right Before You Begin

The discomfort you feel right before you start is not a signal that you should wait, it’s almost always a signal that you’re exactly at the threshold.

The moment where showing up matters most.

Resistance doesn’t announce itself as fear or avoidance. It arrives dressed as patience, self-knowledge or respect for the process (at least that’s how it did for me).

It says:

Wait until you feel it.

Don’t force it.

You’ll know when the time is right.

And because those things sound wise, because they rhyme with genuine creative discernment, most artists believe them.

They frame the waiting as respecting the process, then they wonder why the music isn’t getting finished.

Here’s the pattern that keeps reappearing across every creative discipline and every level of experience:

Resistance is always loudest right before you begin.

Not after you’ve been working for an hour.

Not in the middle of a session.

Right before. At the threshold. At the exact moment when the decision to start or not start is being made.

This is not a coincidence, Resistance concentrates its force at the point of maximum leverage because that’s where it can do the most damage.

If it can keep you from starting, it doesn’t have to fight you through the whole session.

The artists who build consistent creative practices understand this. They don’t wait for inspiration to bypass Resistance, they start moving, and they let Resistance dissolve along the way.

Because here’s what Resistance doesn’t tell you:

It almost always dissolves once you begin.

Not immediately, sometimes it takes ten or fifteen minutes of uncomfortable, uninspired movement through a session before something shifts, but it shifts. And to me this is the only real distinction between a consistent creative practice and an inconsistent one.

Not talent, better ideas or more free time, just the willingness and discipline to begin before the feeling arrives.

From experience I know starting can be the hardest part, so how do we even begin to develop that consistency required to stay locked in on our work?

3 Practices For Showing Up Before The Feeling Arrives

This is where we get practical.

Next up are three practices, each designed to lower the threshold of beginning and rebuild your relationship with the starting from the ground up.

Practice 1: Lower the Bar for What Counts as Starting

Most artists have an unconscious standard for what “starting a song” means.

It involves having some sense of direction, a sound in mind, a mood to chase, a reference to work towards perhaps. Starting, in this framing, requires readiness, and readiness requires inspiration.

My advice:

Break that definition.

Instead try redefining starting as opening a project with a single element and having no concrete expectation of what it’s supposed to be (or where it goes).

Simply define starting as committing to:

• A sound.

• A tempo.

• A chord progression.

• A sample pulled at random from a folder.

That’s it, that’s the start of a song. Declare it, you’ve started.

This works because the pressure of needing a grand vision before you begin is one of the primary reasons sessions never open. When the bar for starting is “I need to know where this is going,” most days won’t qualify.

When the bar is “I need to open a project and place one element,” almost every day qualifies because it’s an easy ask.

The blank canvas is paralyzing but a canvas with a single brushstroke is a starting point.

In practice:

Next time you sit down and the feeling isn’t there, don’t try to summon it.

Open a project, place one element, anything, a kick drum, a pad, a sample you’ve never used, a tempo that feels wrong. That’s the session, everything that happens next is a bonus.

Because remember that the goal isn’t to produce something polished, the goal is to show up in the place where inspiration can actually find you.

Practice 2: Use The Momentum Of Small Decisions

Once you’re inside the session, even with nothing, even with one element that feels completely uninspiring, start moving things forward.

Adjust the sound.

Change the tempo.

Layer something unexpected on top of the one element you placed.

Move a sample to a different position in the arrangement.

Add something that doesn’t belong, remove something that does.

The specific action matters less than the act of moving.

Creative flow is not a state you arrive in and then create from, it’s a state the work puts you in. The engagement precedes the flow, not the other way around.

This is one the lessons I’ve learned in my own creative practice, and it runs counter to almost everything the current culture tells us about inspiration.

We’re told that inspired artists sit down and the music pours out of them and that the great sessions happen when everything aligns. That you can feel when it’s going to be a good day in the studio.

I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes that’s true, but more often the great sessions start exactly like the bad ones, with resistance, reluctance, and the sense that nothing is working until something finally clicks.

Suddenly you’re not pushing the work forward, it begins pulling you.

In practice:

Give yourself permission to make things that are bad. Move through the session without judgment for the first 10 minutes.

Don’t evaluate, don’t compare, just move forward.

Notice when something catches your attention even slightly, and follow that thread. The feeling will come, it will feel unmistakable.

Trust the process enough to stay in the room until that happens.

Practice 3: Treat The Session As An Experiment

This is the practice that makes the other two sustainable.

Separate the session from the outcome.

Most artists wether consciously or not, evaluate their sessions by what they produce.

A good session is one where something finished emerged. A bad session is one where nothing keepable happened, and this constant evaluation of output is one of the main reasons starting feels so heavy.

If every session has to produce something great then every session becomes a test, and tests are hard to pass when you’re not feeling ready or prepared.

The reframe here is that the goal of a session is not to produce something polished, the goal is to engage with the process and show up in the place where creative work happens and spends time there.

Some sessions will yield nothing worth keeping but I believe we must learn to not see that as failure, simply see it as part of the work.

When the session is a creative spark rather than a deliverable, the stakes of beginning lower. You’re not trying to produce a finished track. You’re trying to spend time in the creative space.

I’m convinced that over time, this practice builds something more valuable than any individual song:

A deeper relationship with the process itself but most importantly a consistent creative practice that doesn’t depend on the unpredictable feeling of inspiration.

In practice:

Before each session, set a single intention.

At the end of the session, evaluate not by what you made, but by whether you showed up and moved. Keep a simple log of what you explored and learned not what you finished.

Over time, you’ll notice that the sessions where you showed up without inspiration are often the ones that surprise you most. But most importantly you’ll learn that when each session is an experiment there is no way to lose, because the purpose of an experiment is not to succeed or fail it’s simply to learn.

Inspiration Is Real, Sometimes It Lives On The Other Side Of Beginning

Inspiration is real and it’s worth paying attention to when it arrives, it’s part of why we make music. But in my worldview inspiration is a byproduct of engagement not always a prerequisite for it.

I’ve noticed that the artists who wait for it or treat it as something that either shows up or doesn’t, are outsourcing their creative practice to a force they can’t control. They’re basing their ability to create consistently on a feeling that by nature unpredictable.

But time and time again I realize that the artists who build something lasting don’t do this, they simply show up day after day.

They lower the bar, start moving and they let Resistance dissolve in the doing.

And they tend to trust from experience and the accumulated evidence of sessions that started badly and ended somewhere unexpected.

All it required was beginning to finally unlock it.

Sitting down to create is almost always the hardest part, but once you’re in, the work takes over.

Start anyway, inspiration is already waiting there.

— Hermes

P.S. One of the reasons I built Song Ritual is because I kept noticing how much creative energy gets lost in the space between inspiration and execution.

• Ideas scattered across voice notes.

• Half-finished projects buried in folders.

• Sessions that never begin because starting from scratch feels too heavy.

Song Ritual was designed to reduce that friction. It helps you collect inspiration, organize creative fragments and use structured creative prompts + personalized rituals to begin making music.

If you want to learn more you can see what’s it’s all about here.

Somehow this freedom makes it harder to start.

You audition a few presets, nothing clicks, and 20 minutes later you’re still at zero not because you lack ideas, but because you haven’t given yourself anything to react to yet.

The sounds don’t excite you yet.

The melodies are not pleasant to your ears.

The vibe to take the idea further doesn’t seem to be there.

You try to solve this by just pushing through (even when there’s no excitement behind what they’re making). You accept this is just part of the process. Open the session, start something, and then see what happens.

Sometimes that works, but more often the blank canvas doesn’t spark creativity, it just creates unnecessary friction.

But there’s a better, proven method that changes the whole dynamic:

The 15 minute ritual.

This is how it works…

Before you start a new song, set aside 15 minutes for only curating the idea of the song. Not producing, not arranging, just gathering ideas and ingredients.

• Pull a chord progression from a reference track that has the feeling you’re after.

• Drop in a sample or a field recording that sets a mood.

• Find two or three reference songs that live in the same emotional space as what you’re trying to make.

Drag them into the empty DAW project and let them marinate in there.

The magic here is that now you’re not starting from nothing. You’re starting with something.

A direction, a texture, a reference point.

The session has a shape, an intention, and a vague purpose before a single note is even played.

This is how writers work before they write.

How directors work before they shoot.

The idea precedes the execution, and that order matters more than most artists realize.

But that’s not all, the main benefit of working this way is that creation starts to feel like assembly. Eventually this assembly of ideas will create sparks and help you come up new novel ideas.

You’ll come in with a chord progression borrowed from somewhere else, and halfway through the session you’ve taken it somewhere entirely your own.

You drop in a sample for mood and it ends up becoming the backbone of the track.

This is because the references you gathered don’t constrain the music, they give it a starting point, and starting points have a way of evolving into something unexpected specially when we put our twists into them.

A big lesson I’ve learned is that not feeling inspired isn’t really about inspiration, it’s about not having anything to react to. Simply give yourself something to react to, and the work starts moving on its own.

To get started with the 15 minute ritual in your next session, just keep it simple:

One reference track, one sample, one mood word written at the top of your notes. That’s enough to give the session a good foundation.

Begin to treat these 15 minute ritual before a new song as part of the session, and watch your songs come together more effortlessly.

— Hermes

P.S. This ritual became such an important part of my own process that I wanted a dedicated place for references, moods, field recordings, fragments, and unfinished ideas to live before they became songs.

That idea eventually turned into Song Ritual, the environment I now use to build momentum before I ever open a blank session.

Because I’ve realized the hardest part of creating usually isn’t making the music itself, it’s entering the session with enough emotional and creative direction for the work to start pulling you forward.

Learn more about Song Ritual here —> https://beta.songritual.io/

There’s an unspoken assumption most producers carry into the studio:

That a good session ends with something finished.

A loop, sketch, or at least a rough song idea with a name and a core concept. Proof you can look back on which tells you it was time well spent.

But what if that doesn’t happen?

What about when you spend two hours digging through samples samples, presets, or building out a chord progression which you just can’t make work.

It can feel like the session didn’t count.

Like you were busy but not productive.

Like you were circling the work without actually doing it.

But for me, framing it this way caused more harm than good, and when working with other artists I also realized it was a common experience.

Because the reality is music production isn’t a single activity, it’s a collection of distinct skills and actions that each require their own kind of attention.

• sound design

• arrangement

• harmony

• texture

• structure

• curation

Most artists try to do all of them at once, inside of one session, and then wonder why the process feels slow, scattered and overwhelming…

What I’ve realized over the years is that some of the most valuable work you can do in the studio has nothing to do with finishing a song. It’s actually about working on the individual pieces that will make finishing easier later.

The preparation for the work.

Building a couple of arrangement templates means the next time you open a session the scaffolding is already there, just choose one and use it as a guide.

Curating a sample folder means you’re not breaking creative flow to search for the right sound, it’s been pre-selected by you.

Dedicating a full session to simply writing chord progressions means you have raw material ready starting points when inspiration arrives.

These examples aren’t detours from the creative process, they’re part of it.

It helps to like a disciplined “meal prepper” for a second.

On Sunday night, you gather all of your ingredients to cook for the week. You don’t start by slicing up your carrots for each individual serving of the week, you slice all the carrots you will need for all of the servings that week.

Now think on how you can apply this concept to your own creative process.

Some sessions are for building, some for gathering and others are for organizing the tools. That way, when the moment to cook comes, the ingredients for the song idea area already there, prepped, ready and there’s nothing that gets in the way.

The linear model of music-making does work but it’s too limiting…

Open session → find sounds → write chords → arrange → mix → done.

Because it assumes you always arrive at the studio with the same kind of energy, the same kind of focus, the same creative appetite.

However, you don’t.

Nobody does, because every day is different. We’re humans and our biology, experiences and moods are constantly in flux.

Matching the type of session to the kind of energy you actually have is a more honest way to work, and more gentle on your mental health.

So what does this look like for you in practice?

Keep a running list of different kinds of studio sessions you can do on different days.

Execute them in compartmentalized batches.

Monday = Curate preset and sample folders.

Tuesday = Compose only chord progressions.

Wednesday = Create arrangement templates based on your references…

Get creative with it, remember this is for you.

This is exactly how my creative yield stays consistent even when the inspiration doesn’t.

— Hermes

P.S. Most artists keep everything inside one project file, and curation, sketching, arranging all blur together. That’s usually where the friction and overwhelm comes from.

I’ve been building something around this idea with Song Ritual where each type of session has its own space, and you can move between them depending on the energy you have that day.

Song Ritual is currently in public beta and can be accessed at a discounted price (when you sub, you lock the price in for life just for being early).

If you’ve been meaning to finish more music this 2026 you can explore how Song Ritual can help you do that here.

Most artists treat inspiration like weather, it either shows up or it doesn’t.

If it doesn’t, you wait, you scroll, you reorganize your samples. You tell yourself you’ll start when the conditions are right, when the mood is there or when something clicks.

It sounds reasonable, it even sounds like self awareness (knowing when you’re in the right headspace to create) but there’s a version of this that isn’t self awareness at all. It’s just avoidance with a creative excuse attached to it.

The feeling you’re waiting for rarely arrives before the work, it almost always arrives because of it.

This is one of the quieter truths about creative practice:

The state you’re trying to access through inspiration is usually the state that making something puts you in, not the other way around.

You sit down uninspired.

You open a session.

You start moving things around not because you feel it, but because you showed up anyway.

And somewhere in that process, something begins to shift. A sound catches your ear, or a pattern emerges. The work starts pulling you forward instead of you having to push it, it begins to take a life of it’s own and develops it’s own gravitational pull.

That’s not magic, that’s just how creative flow works.

The problem is that waiting feels like patience, and starting anyway feels like forcing it so most artists choose to wait. They frame it as respecting the process, and wonder why the music isn’t getting finished.

Here’s the pattern that keeps reappearing for every creative:

Resistance is always loudest right before you begin.

It’s not a sign that today isn’t the day, but it’s almost always a sign that you’re exactly at the event horizon, the moment where showing up matters most.

The artists who understand this don’t wait for inspiration to bypass Resistance, they start moving and let the Resistance dissolve along the way.

This is what separates a consistent creative practice from an inconsistent one.

Not talent.

Not better ideas.

Not more free time.

Just have the willingness to begin before the feeling arrives. In practice, this means lowering the bar for what counts as starting.

You don’t have to open a session with a fully though out vision for your song. You can open it with nothing, just a sound, a tempo, a single element and see what it becomes.

The goal isn’t to produce something polished, the goal is to show up in the place where inspiration can actually thrive.

Most of the time, sitting down to create is the hardest part of the work.

Inspiration is real and it’s worth paying attention to when it comes (it will), but it’s also a byproduct of engagement, not a prerequisite for it.

Start anyway and find inspiration there.

— Hermes

P.S. Most times the battle isn’t the work itself, it’s getting yourself to begin.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make that first step easier, something that removes the friction of “what should I do this session?” and just puts you into motion.

That’s a big part of what I’ve been building with the Song Ritual app. A simple way to sit down, start, and let the work take over from there.

If that’s something you’ve been struggling with, you can take a look here.

Most of my writing here has been longer, in-depth essays. I’m starting to mix in shorter pieces like these Studio Notes. More focused, easier to apply ideas you can implement immediately. Hope you enjoy…

There’s a version of creative work that looks like discipline but is actually just stubbornness.

You sit down with an idea, it doesn’t move.

You push harder, invest more time, and it still doesn’t move forward.

And somewhere in the friction you decide that the struggle is the point. That real artists push through, that the block is just your weakness as a creative.

But what if the idea just isn’t ready?

What if you’re not ready for it?

There’s a difference between an idea that’s hard to execute and an idea that doesn’t have energy behind it. The first one asks for patience and craft, the second one asks you to let it go (at least for now).

Most creatives have a backlog of ideas they feel obligated to finish.

A beat that made sense six months ago.

A concept that excited someone else more than it ever excited you.

A project you started because you thought you should, not because something in you had to.

That backlog becomes a weight, and the longer you carry it the more it starts to feel like the reason you’re not creating.

It isn’t.

The real move isn’t to force your way through uninspiring material. It’s to generate so many ideas that you always have something worth being excited about.

This sounds simple, but it’s actually a shift in how to think about creative momentum.

Most people treat idea generation as a phase, something you do at the beginning of a project, then stop. But the creatives who stay consistently productive treat it as an ongoing practice.

They’re always feeding the pool.

Always capturing, always noticing, always asking what if…

When you have ten ideas you’re genuinely excited about you don’t get stuck, you just move to the next one. Then the block dissolves, not because you pushed through it, but because you had somewhere else to go that stimulated you musically.

Here’s what I want you to take from today’s letter:

Excitement is signal.

When an idea lights something up in you that’s not just a feeling, it’s a signal that your instincts, your taste, and your current creative state are aligned with that idea. That alignment is what makes the work flow. It’s what makes the output feel alive instead of labored.

Forcing work on ideas that don’t excite you doesn’t just produce worse results, it trains you to associate creativity with resistance.

Do that long enough and the whole process starts to feel like a grind.

But when you follow the energy, when you let yourself work on the thing that actually has your attention, you build a completely different association.

Creativity starts to feel like relief, like the place you go to feel like yourself.

So how do you apply this practically in your creative process?

Keep a running list of song ideas that excite you and be honest about which ones still have magic within them.

Not every idea ages well.

Some were tied to a mood, a moment, a version of you that’s already moved on. That’s fine, learn to let them go.

And when you sit down to work, ask yourself:

What’s the idea I’m most excited about right now?

Not the one you’ve been putting off.

Not the one that seems most strategic.

The one that has energy behind it, start there.

The other ideas will either find their moment or they won’t, but the work you make from a place of genuine excitement that’s the work that will fill you with pure creative satisfaction.

— Hermes

P.S. If you don’t have a place to capture and revisit the ideas that actually excite you, they tend to disappear just as quickly as they show up.

I’ve been building something around this. A digital environment in your smartphone where your ideas live, evolve, and meet you when you’re ready to work on them.

If that sounds useful, you can explore it here.

You’re finally making a song you feel good about, you’ve cleverly shaped the chord progression, made a texture that came from random experimental resampling, and a groove that’s making you move in your chair.

And then quietly, a voice gets louder in your head.

What will labels think of this?

Is this too weird for the scene?

Would this fit on that playlist?

Will listeners feel the same as I do about this song?

And just like that, the session begins to change.

You don’t stop making music, you just course correct. Slightly.

You pull the weird chord back toward something safer. You tighten the groove into something more familiar.

You make a hundred small decisions, each one reasonable on its own, that collectively sand down everything that made the idea interesting in the first place.

This is the invisible cage every artist begins to build for themselves at some point.

At first glance, it feels like this pressure comes from the structure of the music industry itself:

• Genre tags

• Subgenres

• Scene politics

• Playlist gatekeepers

• Label aesthetics

I don’t believe these are good or bad, they simply are.

But these are real forces that influence budding artists and pretending they don’t exist is naive.

However in today’s letter I want to discuss the dark side of this story.

Which is the fact that most up and coming artists internalize these forces long before they ever interact with them directly.

In other words, long before an artist has the chance to explore and understand their own sound, they begin prioritizing validation, whether that’s from a scene, a label, or an imagined audience.

When your decisions are filtered through what others might think, the music slowly shifts.

It stops sounding like expression, and starts sounding like positioning, and the most detrimental part?

This is where perfectionism begins to take hold.

Because when you’re creating for an external standard, nothing ever feels finished, only “not good enough yet.”

Not right enough for you, or right enough for the imaginary listeners you’ve let in to your own creative process.

I’ll be the first to admit that in today’s world you can’t avoid or completely deny the influence of these pressures, especially if you want to build a fanbase or music catalog that can financially support you.

But what if we could transmute this pressure into something positive?

That’s what I want to explore with you today.

So if you’ve ever felt these external pressures influence your work, decision making or even mental health… consider today’s letter a practical breakdown of how I’ve dealt with these pressures and reframed them into positive exercises that actually help me develop my sound further.

What Happens When You Stop Outsourcing Your Creative Authority

I want to tell you about a specific moment, because I think you’ll recognize it.

Years ago I was deep in a session. The kind of session where time disappears and the music starts to feel like it’s writing itself.

Somewhere during this session I caught myself, asking:

What will labels want from this?

I didn’t ask:

• What does this song want to become?

• What am I trying to say here?

• Does this feel good?

• Do I like this?

Instead it was, what will labels want?

I sat there with that question for some minutes, because in reality I had no idea.

Because the truth is labels want different things, different labels want different things and sometimes even the same label wants different things at different seasons of their release schedule.

The question was unanswerable and I had been letting it run my sessions anyway.

The cost was my truest creative expression.

But funny enough the shift didn’t come from rejecting the industry, it came from recognizing that the question itself was the enemy.

Not the labels.

Not the scene.

Not the industry

The internal act of outsourcing creative authority was.

The act of letting an external judgment and validation come from a specific group of artists become the primary filter for creative decisions. That was the real problem.

Musical authenticity isn’t a luxury for artists who’ve already “made it”, at least from my perspective it seems like it’s the foundation.

It’s what makes the music worth making in the first place, and paradoxically it’s what makes it worth listening to. The music that moves people is almost always the music that moved the person who made it first.

What I’m trying to show you is that the sequence matters:

1) Create for yourself first.

2) Then seek a home for your music out in the world.

Not the other way around.

The Music Industry Is Not The Enemy, Resistance Is

Here’s the insight that changed everything for me, and I want to offer it carefully because it’s easy to misread.

What feels like industry pressure is often something else entirely…

It’s Resistance using the industry as its justification.

Steven Pressfield calls this force Resistance in The War of Art. If you haven’t read it, the core idea is this:

Resistance is the force that opposes creative work. It’s not external, it’s internal. It’s the part of you that would rather not make the thing, because making the thing means risking something.

That be exposure, failure, irrelevance, ridicule or a deeper fear.

Pressfield goes on about Resistance as being an intelligent force. It doesn’t say “don’t make music“, that would be too obvious, instead it says:

Make music, but make sure it’s good enough

Make sure it’s safe enough.

Make sure it fits.

Make sure it belongs.

It weaponizes your own ambition against you and it uses your desire to succeed as the mechanism of your creative paralysis.

Can you relate?

And here’s what makes Resistance so effective against up and coming artists:

For many of us it wears the mask of the music industry. It borrows the costume of real, legitimate forces such as label preferences, genre conventions, scene etiquette, etc.

And uses them to make its demands feel rational, reasonable and even professional.

But there’s a distinction that changes everything, and it’s the difference between what I call Unconscious and Authentic Constraints.

Unconscious Constraints: The kind imposed by fear, by the imaginary audience, by Resistance. It narrows your options without your consent.

Authentic Constraints: The kind you choose deliberately, from curiosity rather than anxiety. It focuses creative energy and creates the conditions for unexpected discoveries.

For example, the constraint itself can be identical...

“This song must be 115 BPM” means something completely different when it’s a rule you’re afraid to break versus a parameter you’ve chosen to explore.

Now let’s explore some practical exercises that will help us reconnect with our own authentic sound in a world filled with external and social pressures.

3 Exercises To Reclaim & Develop Your Authentic Sound

Each of the following exercises is designed to interrupt the approval loop and rebuild your relationship to creative constraint from the inside out.

Let’s begin.

1) The “Create For No One” Session

This is a dedicated session where the only rule is that the music must be bad, messy, or completely out of the ordinary.

Not “experimental.”

Not “avant-garde.”

Not “a creative exercise.”

Bad. Messy. Wrong.

The intention is simple:

You’re making music that you will not share, not export, not finish, and not judge.

The session exists for no one.

Not for a label, not for a playlist, not for your followers, not even for your future self who might listen back and find something useful.

Why it works:

The imagined listeners in your head only have power when there’s something at stake. When the session is for no one, the stakes disappear.

And when the stakes disappear, something interesting happens:

The unfiltered version of your creativity shows up.

This is the part of you that made music before anyone was listening. Before you knew what genres were, before you had followers, before you understood what “professional” sounded like.

It’s still there, it’s been waiting.

How to do it:

1) Set a timer 30 or 60 minutes (or a time of your choice)

2) Open a new project and make something. Anything, the worse the better.

3) When the timer ends, close the project.

Don’t export, share or listen back that day.

4) Notice how you feel after.

The feelings, lightness, the surprise, the occasional flash of something genuinely interesting. All of that is data.

The interesting part is that you’ll occasionally stumble into the seed of a real idea in these sessions.

In other words, it’s a great way to trick yourself into creating memorable ideas.

2) The Authentic Constraint Challenge

For this exercise you’re going to set constraint or a restrictive creative rule.

Here are some examples:

• Must be 128 BPM

• Must use only vintage synths

• Must fit in a 4-bar loop

• Must have no kick drum

Use your chosen constraint as a starting point, but explore it from personal curiosity, not utility.

The constraint is the same one that might normally feel like a cage. The difference is that you’re choosing it, consciously, as a parameter to investigate and build upon.

Why it works:

Constraints help steer our focus.

A blank canvas is paralyzing, a canvas with a rule is a concrete starting point.

But the rule only becomes useful when your relationship to it is one of curiosity rather than compliance or obligation.

When you choose the constraint, you’re asking:

What do I actually think about this rule?

What happens when I take it seriously?

What happens when I push against it from the inside?

You might discover you love 115 BPM when it’s your choice. Or you might discover you hate it and that clarity is equally valuable.

Either way, you’ve learned something about your actual sonic preferences, which is the raw material for your signature sound.

How to do it:

1) Choose a constraint that feels restrictive, ideally one from a genre or context that has felt like external pressure.

2) Spend a session exploring it with genuine curiosity.

Not “how do I make this work for the listener?” but “what is actually interesting about this constraint?”

In this challenge it’s all about using an external structure as a starting point for internal exploration.

3) The Sonic Genealogy Exercise

This is about mapping your actual influences, it’s what I call your Sonic Genealogy.

Why it works:

Most artists, when they’re honest, have wildly eclectic real influences.

When you make music from your actual Sonic Genealogy, it’s harder to copy. It’s more emotionally resonant and has a uniqueness that genre based music almost never achieves, because it’s drawing from a combination of sources that is genuinely yours.

How to do it:

1) List 10 songs that made you feel something before you cared about genre and go back as far as you need to.

2) Look at the list and notice the patterns. Not genre patterns, but emotional patterns, instrumental, sonic, stylistic, etc.

What do these songs have in common in terms of how they make you feel?

3) Now look at your recent work. How much of that sonic or emotional DNA is present?

4) Close the gap between what moves you and what you make.

If you’d like to go through the full Sonic Genealogy exercise you can read the full how-to article here:

The Music That Only You Can Make Is Already Inside You

The need to belong isn’t a flaw, it’s human.

It’s one of the most human things there is, we’re social creatures. We want to be seen, recognized, welcomed into something larger than ourselves and the desire to belong to a scene, a genre, a community of artists is not weakness.

But there’s a big difference between belonging to a community and outsourcing your creative authority to it.

The industry will always have gatekeepers.

The scene will always have rules.

Algorithms will always have preferences.

These are not going away, and pretending otherwise is a form of Resistance that doesn’t serve you.

The creative who makes music for themselves first doesn’t reject the industry, they arrive at it with something the industry cannot manufacture:

A point of view the industry can’t manufacture only recognize.

— Hermes

P.S. If this idea of creating from within instead of reacting to external pressure resonates with you, this is exactly what I’ve been building with Song Ritual.

It’s not another tool to make better sounding music. It’s a system designed to help you protect your creative process from the very forces we talked about today.

• Structured sessions.

• Intentional constraints.

• A space where the work comes first, not the approval.

If you want early access, you can join the waitlist here.

→ [Join Song Ritual Waitlist]

To build the largest collaborative online deck of creative cards in the world.

A truly living tool and resource for music creators (and creatives) around the globe.

Every card submitted becomes part of the global deck that music creators draw from when they’re stuck, drifting, or doubting.

Your idea might unlock someone’s chorus on the other side of the planet.

Your constraint might push someone in South America to finish a track.

Your question might shift the direction of a producer in Europe.

It’s infrastructure for creativity.

What’s New With The Creative Cards

1. Public Contributions

Every approved card becomes part of the global deck. When someone draws a card, they’re not just receiving a prompt, they’re stepping into another artist’s mind and their way of operating.

You’re not only getting inspiration, you’re becoming someone else’s inspiration.

2. Creator Attribution

Each card now gives you the option to link to:

• Your music

• Your website

• Your Substack

• Your social profiles

So when your idea resonates, the recipient can discover the artist behind it. This is what I call value‑based self‑promotion:

Letting your ideas introduce you.

(Each contribution is attributed to the artist and links to their URL of choice)

3. Live Leaderboards

There’s now a dedicated Leaderboards page showing:

• Total approved contributions

• Total artists participating

• A global map of where submissions are coming from

• Top contributing artists

You can see the project grow in real time, see where your country stands, and see who is building this with you.

How To Add Your Card To The Global Deck

If you’ve ever benefited from a constraint, a question, or a shift in perspective, now you get to contribute one to The Creative Cards.

Here’s how to join the cause:

1. Go to thecreativecards.com

2. Click “Submit a Card” at the bottom of the homepage

3. Add something that could change how another artist works (even if it’s just one sentence)

This deck only becomes powerful if the right minds shape it. Pass it on to one creator who needs it today.

Build the deck with us.

— Hermes

P.S. If you want a more guided way to keep your own songs moving forward and finished, I’ve been quietly building an note taking and song idea generation app for music creators called Song Ritual.

It’s a gentle, structured way to show up to your music regularly without burning out. I’m opening it up to the next wave of users soon. So if you want in on the early access list, join the waitlist here and I’ll send you all the details when doors open.

This was almost a year after I created the Sound + Creativity Instagram account at 0 followers around June of 2023.

At first I just shared clips of prolific and iconic artists sharing nuggets of wisdom about the creative process like the one below:

(This clip is from Lex Fridman Podcast #275)

My daily life consisted of searching, listening, mining, and cutting clips to share. However, the most important thing that happened during those months was repeatedly listening in on the conversations, insights and advice of world class creatives.

This is what gave me a crystal clear understanding about how the most prolific artists operated and thought about creativity.

Naturally, I started to notice patterns and recurring themes in what they all shared.

Soon enough this inspired me to start writing about my own process, what I’ve learned and how maybe I could bring more context, depth and build upon to their lessons so other artists can apply it in a practical way.

Slowly my body of work grew and I managed to grow a combined following of over 50k+ and counting followers on all social channels.

But beside the metrics, something deeper within me was taking shape.

A creative philosophy, a framework and comprehensive system which I began to use with success in my own creative process emerged.

Not just based on my own experience but from what I learned working with other artists and from what I had picked up from listening to countless hours of prolific artists speak about their process.

And while I fully agree with the sentiment that everyone’s process is different, my aim was to distill this creative process into universal fundamentals which any artist could apply and adapt in their own way.

Think of it like an open source creative process for music creators.

Fast forward to today...

Every article I’ve written.

Every framework I’ve shared.

Every concept, every exercise, every reflection on what it means to make music consistently and authentically all traces back to this one framework.

And for a long time, I’ve referenced it in my work in many ways. Sometimes I’d zoom into one or two aspects of it, but I feel now is a good time to show you the complete picture once again.

Consider this a reintroduction, a homecoming.

If you’re new here, consider this your orientation to my creative philosophy.

But before I share this framework I want show you why and how it came about. So let’s go back in time to the year 2020.

Creativity Is Not A Gift, It’s A Way Of Operating

For years, I thought my lack of creativity was a talent problem.

“Some people are just born with an innate talent and creative ability”, or so I thought.

I’d sit down to make music and feel that familiar weight of the blank session staring back at me, the cursor blinking, the options multiplying until they paralyzed me.

I’d open a plugin, close it.

Start a loop, abandon it.

Spend two hours tweaking a snare or perfecting a preset and call it a session.

I told myself I just wasn’t disciplined enough, that I needed more time. Then these recurring experiences haunted me and made me believe that maybe I wasn’t cut out for this music making thing.

And it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize the truth that it wasn’t a talent problem, a time problem, or even a discipline problem.

It was a clarity problem.

I didn’t understand my own creative process.

I was trying to navigate somewhere new with no map, no GPS, no one to ask for directions. And without a map, you can’t have a strategy or at the very least go in the best general direction.

Without a strategy, every session becomes a gamble.

Sometimes you win, but more often than not you wander and burn away the available time you had for making music.

The moment I started understanding how I actually created, and broke down the real sequence of events that needed to happen that’s when everything changed. It didn’t happen overnight, but steadily, session after session I began to make music with more intention.

But most importantly I started finishing more songs.

I started feeling less dread before sessions.

I started recognizing where I was getting stuck and why.

And slowly, I began to build a catalog of songs I was actually proud of, that felt completely authentic to me.

This framework became the spine of everything I’ve written here, I call it:

The Musical Creative Process.

What Is The Musical Creative Process (And What It Isn’t)

Before I walk you through it, I want to be clear about what this is.

The Musical Creative Process is not a productivity hack.

It’s not a rigid system you follow like a recipe.

It’s not about squeezing more output from fewer hours.

(Although it can help you with all of the above, that’s not the purpose behind it)

It goes much deeper...

It’s a creative operating system.

A way of understanding the fundamental phases of how music gets made, so you can mold this framework to your liking and preferences.

Here’s the definition I keep coming back to:

The Musical Creative Process

The sequence of steps and phases that music creators undertake to generate, refine, and complete a musical idea.

Simple on the surface, but the implications run deep. And here’s what most producers don’t realize:

You’re already moving through these stages every time you create.

The question isn’t whether you have a process, you do! The question is whether you’re doing it consciously or unconsciously.

Whether you’re navigating with a map or stumbling in the dark.

Awareness and clarity are your greatest weapons against creative procrastination. This framework is how you can get both.

The 5 Stages Of The Musical Creative Process

Now I want to walk you through each stage not as a checklist, but as a moment in the creative journey. Because that’s what they are:

Moments, states of mind and modes of being.

By the end of this article you should be able to identify each one in your music making process and have a better understanding of it as a result.

Stage 1: Idea Curation — Collecting Ideas

Picture this, you sit down to create a new song and you have nothing. No spark, no direction, just the blank canvas and the weight of infinite possibilities.

This is what I used to call Blank Canvas Syndrome.

And for a long time I thought it meant I wasn’t inspired. I thought I needed to wait for something to arrive.

What I didn’t understand was that inspiration doesn’t ONLY arrive, it can also be collected and engineered (to a degree).

Idea Curation is the stage where you seek, select, and save potential musical concepts and sources of inspiration throughout your day to day life or within dedicated sessions.

It’s about building what I call your Inspiration Vault.

Inspiration Vault

A living, breathing collection of reference points, sonic ideas, lyric hooks, voice notes, and emotional textures that you can draw from when you sit down to create.

So in reality the blank canvas can be completely avoided if you’ve already collected ideas to fill the digital canvas (your DAW).

That’s one less step you have to worry about when sitting down to create, therefore increasing your chances of taking your next song further into the process, and closer to finishing.

But here’s the catch:

Curation isn’t passive, it’s one of the most active, intentional things you can do as a music creator. It’s the raw input that will shape the music you make.

What it feels like when you’re doing it right:

You’re a collector, a researcher and you’re listening with purpose, saving ideas with intention, building a reservoir that will feed your creative sessions.

Where most artists go wrong:

They skip this stage entirely and wonder why they always feel uninspired. Or they curate endlessly and never move to the next stage using the “research” as the building blocks to actually start creating a new song idea.

Stage 2: Idea Generation — The Initial Spark

After you’ve collected ideas it’s time to finally create a new song.

This is the stage I used to call “unfiltered musical idea vomit”, and I stand by that description, because it captures something important. The goal here is not quality, the goal is volume.

You’re just shoveling sand into the playground.

You’re getting every idea out of your head and into your DAW, regardless of whether it’s good or bad. Remember that the inner critic has no place in this room.

No filtering.

No second-guessing.

Just unrestrained output.

This is because what I’ve discovered is that the path to quality occurs not in spite of quantity, but because of it.

You can always cut or modify ideas but you can’t get back the time you could have spent creating new ideas.

Ira Glass said it better than I ever could:

“Your taste is killer, but your skills need time to catch up.”

Idea Generation is where you give these skills the reps they need.

What it feels like when you’re doing it right:

You’re in flow, time disappears and ideas come faster than you can capture them. You’re not thinking about whether it’s good, you’re just focused on recording them and catching them.

Where most artists go wrong:

They bring the critic into the room too early.

They generate one idea, judge it, delete it, and start over. The session becomes a loop of creation and destruction that produces nothing. Or they stay in generation mode forever, always sketching, never developing the idea.

Stage 3: Idea Development — The Shaping Of A Song

Now that you’ve shoveled sand into your playground, it’s time to build the castles.

Idea Development is where raw sketches become real songs.

This is where loops become full arrangements, emotional arcs of a piece starts to take shape and the stage that separates producers who have hard drives full of unfinished songs from producers who have released albums.

It’s also the stage that requires the most courage.

Developing an idea means making decisions, committing to a specific direction, getting detailed with sound design, fleshing out arrangements, eliminating the ideas that aren’t serving the song, especially if they’re the ideas you love.

What it feels like when you’re doing it right:

The song starts to take a personality, a vibe, a mood and a clear intention. You can feel where it wants to go and you’re making decisions with conviction, not anxiety. The arrangement serves the sounds and ideas, and vice-versa.

Where most artists go wrong:

They get attached to the loop and can’t let it evolve, or they develop endlessly by adding, layering, rearranging without ever arriving at a finished piece.

Development without a destination is just a more sophisticated form of procrastination.

Stage 4: Idea Review — The Honest Reflection

This is the stage most artists avoid, or simply don’t make it to.

After pouring yourself into something, the last thing you want to do is sit back and hear it clearly to criticize it. This is because being critical of it means confronting the gap between what you imagined and what you actually made.

The key here is to reframe it:

It’s not a failure if it doesn’t match your expectations, it’s feedback on where you lack and where there’s room for improvement.

Idea Review is the stage where you evaluate and polish your work. It’s where you listen with fresh ears, seek honest feedback, and make the refinements that transform a good idea into a great one.

It’s where you develop what I’d call Creative Courage:

The willingness to revisit and cut what isn’t working, even when you thought it was finished.

What it feels like when you’re doing it right:

You can hear the song as a listener, not just as its creator. You can clearly hear what to keep and what to cut. The feedback you receive lands as useful information, not personal attack on your creative or technical ability.

Where most artists go wrong:

They skip it entirely and release work that isn’t ready.

They get stuck in it, reviewing, tweaking, reviewing again. They use perfectionism as a shield against the vulnerability of releasing.

Stage 5: Optimization — Becoming Prolific

This is the stage nobody talks about, in my opinion it might be the most important one.

Optimization is the continuous process of improving your habits, workflows, and environment so that the other four stages can happen more easily, more consistently, and with less friction.

For example, this can be:

• Creating project templates so you’re not starting from zero every session.

• Organizing your sample library so you can find what you need when you’re in flow.

• Learning your DAW shortcuts so the tool gets out of the way of the idea.

• It’s building the rituals, the time blocks, the pre-session routines.

• Creating the environmental cues that signal to your brain “it’s time to create”.

Systemizing your process is not always about the tools and software you use, sometimes it’s simply about understanding your process on a more intimate level and then building a daily schedule that is compatible with it.

What it feels like when you’re doing it right:

Sessions start with no resistance and you begin to spend less time setting up and more time creating.

The creative habit feels sustainable, and you’re not solely relying on motivation and inspiration because you’ve built a system that works even when they don’t show up.

Where most artists go wrong:

They optimize obsessively and never actually create. They spend more time building the perfect template than making music.

Remember that optimization is meant to serve the process not replace it.

The Stages Are Not a Straight Line, They’re Fluid

This Musical Creative Process is not meant to box you in or limit you, it’s actually fluid and adaptable to your way of operating.

You don’t always move neatly from Stage 1 to Stage 5 and arrive at a finished song (although you can).

What’s most common is that you revisit, and you’ll find yourself deep in development and realize you need to go back to curation.

You might be in review and discover a new idea that sends you back to generation.

The process has its own rhythm, it’s your job to find which way works best for you.

What matters is that you know where you are at any given moment, because each stage requires a different state of mind, a different mode of being.

The generative mind and the critical mind cannot occupy the same room at the same time.

The developmental mind needs commitment; the review mind needs detachment.

Shifting between these modes without awareness is like trying to drive in two gears at once. It creates friction, confusion, and the particular kind of creative exhaustion that makes you want to close the laptop and watch TV or scroll instead.

Knowing the map doesn’t mean the journey is always smooth, but at least it allows you to never truly be lost.

Why Awareness Matters More Than Ever

We live in a time of infinite tools and infinite distraction.

There are more plugins, more tutorials, more sample packs, more courses than any producer could consume in a lifetime, and yet more producers than ever feel stuck.

More unfinished projects.

More creative blocks.

More comparison, more doubt, more sessions that end with nothing to show for.

So it’s clear that the problem isn’t access to resources, the problem is the same one I had years ago:

A lack of clarity about the process itself.

In my biased opinion having an understanding of The Musical Creative Process is the antidote.

Not because it makes creativity effortless (it will take work). But because it gives you a deeper sense of awareness and understanding.

A way to orient yourself when you feel lost, a language for understanding what’s happening and what to do next with that song you can’t seem to finish.

Structure creates freedom, repetition builds identity, the ritual is the art.

As always, thank you for reading and for the support throughout the years.

— Hermes

P.S. For those who want to apply what you read practically (keep reading)…

After reading this you can probably identify where you get stuck.

Maybe you generate endlessly but never develop.
Maybe you curate obsessively but rarely sit down to build.
Maybe review feels like self-sabotage instead of refinement.

Knowing the 5 stages is helpful, but actually designing your workflow around them is the most transformational.

So today I want to introduce something that I’ve been quietly building behind the scenes.

It’s called Song Ritual.

Song Ritual is the music creator’s operating system. It’s a song idea note taking app and creative session timer built directly on the five stages you just read.

It’s a digital workspace for music creators where you can curate song ideas intentionally, generate them with less friction, develop with direction, review with clarity, and optimize without overthinking.

It turns your Inspiration Vault into structured sessions. It separates generation from critique. It creates time-bound rituals so development actually leads somewhere.

Below you’ll see a few screenshots from inside the app, along with feedback from the current beta group testers (this isn’t just a conceptual idea, it’s a fully functioning app with real users!)

This is not a DAW, and it’s not another productivity app.

It’s a structured environment in your pocket designed to help you move through your own creative process consciously.

If you’ve ever felt stuck between inspiration and completion, this is the bridge.
A clearer environment to move through your own process consciously.

If this framework felt like it put language to something you’ve been experiencing for years, Song Ritual is simply the applied version of that language into a beautiful web app experience.

You can now join the waitlist for the Song Ritual app and get early access when it’s time to enroll the next wave of producers.

If you’re in, learn more here.

See you on the next one.

The Creative Cards.

It’s simple, free online tool that gives you creative constraints and prompts whenever you need a little boost of inspiration, perspective or chaos in your creative process.

No login. No paywalls. No gimmicks.

All cards written, curated and inspired from my own written content over the years.

It’s super simple.

You just draw a card and see where it takes you.

But here’s a little more about it…

Why This Exists

If you’ve been reading my work you already know that creativity loves constraints.

We talked about this in depth in this article:

In there I showed you how limitations force decisions, and decisions create character. How the blank canvas is paralyzing, but a single rule can unlock everything.

The Creative Cards is that rule, on demand, at your fingertips.

It’s for those moments when you’re staring at your DAW and nothing feels right. When you’ve been working on the same idea for too long and can’t see it clearly anymore. When you need to break a pattern, challenge an assumption, or just shake things up in unexpected ways.

What It Does

The tool is extremely simple and intuitive (I hope!):

Draw a card, get a prompt, and let it guide you creative process.

Each card falls into one of five categories:

1) CONSTRAINT — Limitations that force creative decisions

2) PROCESS — Workflow shifts that change how you work

3) MINDSET — Mental reframes to shift your perspective

4) IDENTITY — Prompts that reconnect you to your artistic vision

5) TECHNICAL — Specific creative challenges and techniques

You can filter by category if you’re looking for something specific, or just hit leave the tab on the “All” category to draw a random card from all the decks.

You can copy the link to save a card or simply share it with a friend who’s stuck.

How To Use It

There’s no right or wrong way.

Some cards are constraints you apply to your current project.

Some are mindset shifts that reframe how you’re thinking about your work.

Some are technical challenges that push you into unfamiliar creative territory.

You might draw a card at the start of a session to set the tone, draw one when you’re stuck or maybe you might ignore the first three and use the fourth.

The point isn’t to follow every card religiously.

The point is to interrupt your default patterns and create space for something unexpected.

Think of it like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies (huge inspiration for this little project), but tailored specifically for music producers and creatives navigating the tension between technical skill, artistic expression and creative blocks.

Why It’s Free

Because why not?

It’s a creative instrument, and something you can return to whenever you need it, without friction, without commitment, without having to sign up for anything (at least for now).

I built it because I wanted something like this to exist for my own creative process.

However, if you do feel compelled to leave a small donation I’d be extremely appreciative since it will help me continue write more content like this and fund more useful web tools like this one.

(There’s a button to leave a tip in the footer of the site)

So bookmark it, draw a card, share it with other creatives and see what happens.

And if you use one and it leads somewhere interesting or completely derails your session in the best way I’d love to hear all about it.

Lastly, make sure to screenshot and share your draws on Instagram, Substack, Threads or any social platform and I’ll make sure to repost you!

Hope you like it...

Click here to draw your first card.

— Hermes

P.S. Let me know what you think of it. If you have any suggestions or would like new features, find any bugs don’t hesitate to report. Like everything I do this is very much an experiment, a work in progress and I’m expecting it to evolve after artists like you play around with it.

You’re sitting in front of your DAW with a new project open. Inside of your screen all the sounds, samples and ideas are there just waiting to be arranged.

But so is the voice that slowly gets louder...

“What will they think?”

“Is this too weird for the label?”

“Does this fit with current musical zeitgeist?”

Before you’ve made a single decision, you’re already editing in your head. You imagine all the different directions you can take this new song in. You’re already second guessing and creating for an audience that doesn’t even exist yet.

This is what I call The Approval Trap.

And it doesn’t just slow you down, it fundamentally affects what you make and how you make it.

The Invisible Judge In Your Studio

The Approval Trap roots begin with our human desire to belong. It’s hardwired and baked into us. Just think about it, it’s what kept our ancestors alive.

But the issue arises when this ancestral function bleeds into the creative realm. That’s when it becomes something else entirely.

Steven Pressfield defines it as Resistance.

Resistance is the force that shows up the moment you try to do something meaningful. It whispers doubt, amplifies fear and convinces you that the judgment of others matters more than the integrity of your own work.

For artists this can manifests itself as:

• Perfectionism that never lets you finish

• Mentally editing before you’ve even started

• The constant question: “Is this good enough for others?”

But the irony?

Music created purely for external validation often lacks a sense of personal satisfaction and authenticity.

Not only that but it invites the Impostor’s Syndrome phenomenon.

You know that feeling after creating something which makes you feel like fraud, like you’re not a real artist or like you’re work is just a half baked clone of a song that already exists.

It’s my personal opinion that the hollow performative quality to work designed purely for “the scene” or “trends” is simply made to belong and less to express.

• It checks boxes

• It follows formulas without pushing the mold

• Uses the same conventional presets and sample packs

There’s even research in creative psychology which shows that extrinsic motivation (creating for rewards, approval, or to avoid criticism) consistently produces less innovative work than intrinsic motivation.

*To be perfectly clear, this is not a bash on music that made to belong for a specific scenes, setting or purpose. All music has it’s place and even then music perception is highly subjective. What might be considered derivative vs. authentic expression is up for debate.

Confessions Of An Approval Seeker

As I wrote about in a previous letter, I spent years trapped in this approval seeking cycle.

It was a large blind spot for me.

Every project started with excitement a spark, a sound, a vision but somewhere between the idea and the execution the invisible judges would arrive.

“This melody is too simple for serious artists.”

“This arrangement is too weird for playlists.”

“This BPM is too slow for clubs.”

I’d adjust and compromise my true expression, sand down the edges until the music fit some imagined standard.

This resulted in music that didn’t feel like an authentic musical representation of myself or what I wanted to express. The songs felt like they were made by committee or a board even though I was the only one in the room.

The turning point came during a particularly frustrating session.

Out of sheer desperation, I opened a new project and made a deal with myself:

Create something you’d never release.

No rules, no genre, no audience. Just create something, anything.

What Happens When You Create For No One

That session changed something inside of me.

I made the “worst” song I could imagine, as quickly as I could.

Unconventional BPM, drums that made no sense, melodies that went nowhere, samples recorded on my iPhone.

But in all of this mess, something unexpected happened...

After 30 minutes or so of tinkering with sounds I stopped trying add elements and I got curious about the sounds I had already manifested into my project. I rested my ears for a couple of minutes and went back in. Suddenly, in this mess I began to hear whispers of potential. I began to hear what these sounds wanted to become.

What if I pushed this further?

What if I let this section breathe?

What if I layered this texture here?

The music that emerged after this felt eclectic, emotive, imperfect but most of all it felt authentic. Like it came from within me, instead of just modeling someone else work or paying homage to an already existing song.

It’s my sense that current music landscape doesn’t teach you this.

Instead, it teaches you to chase approval, to study what’s working, to optimize for algorithms and playlists.

But I see it time and time again, the artists who endure, who build careers that span years and decades (not months), are the ones who reach from their diverse musical influences and transmute it all from the inside out.

They’ve learned the revelation that took me almost a decade to learn:

External pressure isn’t the enemy, your relationship with it is.

Authentic Constraint vs. Imposed Limitation:

If there’s one lesson I want you take from this letter is that:

The external pressure exists, they are very real.

The industry has expectations.

Audiences have preferences.

Labels have agendas.

You can’t eliminate these pressures but you can reframe them.

Think of it like this...

A river doesn’t fight the rocks in its path. It flows around them, carves through them, uses them to create new patterns and rhythms. External pressure can be the same, not an obstacle to overcome but a force to channel.

This is the difference between what I call authentic constraint vs. imposed limitation.

Imposed limitation comes from fear:

• “I can’t make this because it won’t get signed”

• “I have to use this sound because it’s trending”

• “I need to fit this genre or I won’t get booked”

Authentic constraint comes from curiosity:

• “I wonder what happens if I only use samples from 1980s pop records”

• “What if I made an entire EP between 80-90 BPM?”

• “Can I create a song using only field recordings from my neighborhood?”

See the difference?

One shrinks your creative space out of fear, while the other focuses your creative energy out of interest.

A notable living example of this is Brian Eno. He created “Oblique Strategies”, which are random creative constraints flashcards which give him prompts to help him break through blocks and discover new musical territory.

The constraint isn’t the problem, the source of the constraint is.

When you choose your constraints based on curiosity rather than what’s trending, you transform external pressure from a paralyzing force into creative fuel.

You become an alchemist, not a victim.

Now that you understand the concept how can you begin putting it into action in your creative life?

Let’s get to the good stuff.

4 Steps To Transform External Pressures Into Intentional Creative Constraints

So how do you actually do this?

How do you shift from approval seeking to authentic creation?

Here’s the exercises I’ve developed for myself and taught to some artists with great success.

1) The “Create For No One” Practice

This is your foundation, the exercise is simple:

Dedicate regular sessions to making music with zero intention of sharing it. Ever.

Specific intentions:

• “Make the worst beat possible”

• “Create something in a genre you hate”

• “Use only sounds that make you uncomfortable”

When you remove the possibility of external judgment, you remove performance anxiety. Your brain stops creating for approval and starts exploring for its own amusement.

You begin to follow the sounds, rhythms, and textures that genuinely excite you, not the imagined audience.

Lastly, because of these sessions you build confidence. You remember what it feels like to create from pure curiosity and often you’ll find these “throwaway” sessions produce some interesting works.

Once you finish it you might just discover you actually do want to share it with the world after all.

2) Redefine Your Creative Constraints

Now that you’ve tasted freedom, it’s time to add structure.

Choose constraints based on curiosity, tastes and interests not on what’s “hot”.

Revisit my letter on Sonic Genealogy for the detailed guide.

But the general idea is that you ask yourself:

“What am I genuinely curious about?” not “What should I be doing?”

Constraints chosen from curiosity create focus without fear. They give you a clear direction while leaving room for discovery. This is the essence of musical authenticity, creating from genuine interest rather than external expectation.

The goal here is to develop a unique, timeless sonic signature so that your music starts to sound like you. Not because you’re borrowing from trends but because it’s built from your actual musical interests.

3) Build Your Preset & Sample Banks

Your influences shape your sound, but are they your influences, or someone else’s?

Begin to curate a personal collection of music, sounds, and textures that genuinely move you, regardless of whether they’re “cool,” “relevant,” or “on-brand.”

If you’d like a masterclass on curation read my most popular letter The Art Of Curation for the full breakdown.

Why is this so effective?

This combined with your Sonic Genealogy worksheet, you begin to give your work a unique and artisanal depth.

As composer Igor Stravinsky once said:

But if you want to create authentic music I believe you get the best results when you steal effectively from sources that truly inspire you.

Ultimately your references become a source of creative fuel rather than anxiety. You’re not chasing trends, you’re building on a foundation of genuine taste.

4) The Authentic Constraint Challenge

Now you’re ready to put it all together.

Set a 30-day creative challenge with self imposed constraints that excite you.

Example of challenges:

• 30 days of 80-90 BPM beats using only vintage drum machines

• One track per week for a month, each inspired by a different decade

• Daily 15-minute improvisations using only field recordings I capture that day

Get creative with it and put your own twist on these. These are just quick examples I came up with this moment.

These exercises combine the freedom of creative exploration with the structure of consistent practice. You’re building a powerful creative habit while also developing your unique voice.

The constraint provides focus while the timeline creates urgency.

By the end of 30 days, you’ll have developed new techniques, discovered new sounds, and most importantly proven to yourself that you can create prolifically without external validation.

Building A Sanctuary, Not a Resume

A lot of artists treat their creative practice like a job or task that must be done. Every track then feels like a resume line, and every release like a tryout for approval. This is both exhausting and unsustainable.

The artists who last (at least from what I’ve seen) are those who approach creativity differently.

They build a sanctuary around their creative process.

This doesn’t mean you ignore the industry. It doesn’t mean you don’t release music, seek opportunities, or build an audience. It simply means you create from a place of internal alignment first.

When your creative practice is rooted in authentic curiosity rather than approval seeking, your perspective shifts:

• You finish more music because you’re not paralyzed by perfectionism

• You handle rejection better because your worth isn’t tied to external validation

• You enjoy the process more because creation itself is fulfilling

This is the integration of your creative practice into a sustainable, meaningful creative life rather than treating it as a separate performance to be judged.

When you stop chasing approval, you often create work that’s more worthy of it. I believe this is because authentic work resonates and it has a quality that can’t be manufactured or optimized.

Ultimately, the music industry will always have expectations, trends will come and go, algorithms will shift, and gatekeepers will have opinions.

None of that will change.

However, what can change is your relationship to it and our own approach to it.

When you develop a creative process rooted in authentic constraints you transform external pressures into an intentional exploration of sound. It’s that, more than any trend any approval, or any external validation which creates a more meaningful and fulfilling creative life.

Thank you for reading, until the next one.

— Hermes

P.S. Escaping the approval trap requires a space where you can create without judgment.

One thing I’ve noticed after years of producing music: when your sessions start revolving around what others might think, creativity tightens. You second‑guess every idea, you hesitate, you polish before you even explore.

That’s exactly why I built Song Ritual.

It’s a creative operating system designed to protect the process of making music. When you open the app, you enter a focused ritual, a structured session with a clear objective and a timer that keeps you creating instead of evaluating.

No metrics.
No audience.
Just you and the work.

If you want a place where your creativity can breathe again, join the Song Ritual app waitlist here.

Not mediocre.

Not “needs work.”

Actually embarrassingly bad.

The kind of bad where you listen back to and wonder what you were thinking. The kind of songs that make you cringe a little and you promise yourself to never show anyone.

Even though I know this to be a fact, I’m completely fine with it.

Because if there’s a lesson I’ve learned from the last 10 years of making music, it’s this:

The producers who finish the most music aren’t the ones making the best ideas, they’re the ones making the most ideas.

However, most of us approach making music backwards (as I did for years).

We sit down at our DAW with the pressure of making something perfect. Every idea has to be “the one”, the song that finally breaks through, the one that defines our sound, or the one which reaches a production level that proves we’re a legitimate music creator.

So we start a new song, it feels promising for about twenty minutes and finally the doubt starts to creep in.

Is this good?

Is this original enough?

Does this sound professional?

We tweak, second-guess and compare it to our musical heroes’ work. Eventually, we save the project file and tell ourselves we’ll come back to it when inspiration strikes.

Except we never do.

So the problem isn’t lack of talent or ideas, the problem is we don’t have a system for managing the gap between quantity and quality. We’re trying to make every seed grow into a tree, when what we should be doing is planting a forest. Because just as it happens in nature, not every seed is destined to grow into a towering tree.

The Mathematical Approach To Musical Creativity

The breakthrough came to me when I stopped thinking about music production as an art problem and started thinking about it as a math problem.

I know this can feel counter-intuitive at first but bare with me. I promise that thinking about your musical output as a math problem will not suck the soul or magic out of making music...

In fact, for me it did exactly the opposite, it actually helped me create my best music.

Here’s the equation I was trying to solve:

I want to have an album’s worth of finished songs by the end of this year. Let’s say that’s 10 songs I’m genuinely proud of.

Songs that represent my sound, my growth, and my artistic vision.

Now, here’s the question most producers never ask:

How many ideas do I need to start in order to finish with 10 great ones?

If you’re like me some years ago, you’d say, “Ten. I’ll make ten ideas and finish all of them and make them the best they can be.”

But experience and learning about how other prolific artists create has taught me that’s not how creativity works.

• The Beatles performed live over 1,200 times before achieving international fame.

• Michael Jackson wrote more than 100 songs for each album, ultimately keeping only the best 10-12 and discarding the rest.

• Prince released 39 studio albums in his lifetime, and left behind a vast collection of unreleased work that could easily fill numerous more albums for years to come.

Because when you only have ten ideas, each one carries enormous weight. Each one has to be (or become) perfect. Each one has to justify the time you’re spending on it. This pressure builds over time and it becomes paralyzing.

I realized this when I was at the peak of my biggest 2 year long creative block in 2020.

During this creatively dark period of my life is where I understood that my output problem wasn’t about discipline or skill, it was about my own expectations.

I was expecting every idea to be worth finishing, but that’s not realistic at all. That’s not how any prolific creator works.

So I began to do the math differently (One slightly inspired by Michael Jackson’s approach above).

If I want 10 songs I’m proud of by the end of the year, and I’m being honest about my hit rate, I probably need to start 60 ideas.

Yes, six zero.

That means accepting that 50 of them won’t make the cut. That most of what I create will be scrapped. That the path to 10 great songs, it’s simply paved with 50 mediocre ones.

This felt counterintuitive at first.

It even felt wrong, like a waste of creative energy and time. But then I thought about it differently, a new perspective dawned on me:

What if those 50 “bad” songs aren’t waste?

What if they’re the cost of finding the 10 good ones?

What if they’re not failures but they’re the stepping stones to get to the good ones?

That’s when it clicked for me.

How Accepting Bad Music Unlocks Great Music (The Principle Of Creative Yield Explained)

Now the goal was crystalized in my mind’s eye:

Create more than you need, because most won’t be great.

It’s just like panning for gold. You don’t expect every scoop of dirt to contain gold flakes instead you expect to sift through a lot of mud, a lot of rocks, a lot of nothing. But ultimately you keep sifting because you know that somewhere in all that mess there’s something valuable you can extract.

The gold is there, you just have to process enough raw material to find it.

This is the truth that most music productivity advice skips over. We’re told to “work smarter, not harder.” To “focus on quality over quantity.” To “be intentional with our creative time.”

And all of that sounds wise, but it misses the fundamental reality of creative work which is that you don’t know which ideas are good until you’ve made them.

You actually have to create enough volume that the good stuff has room to emerge.

Now, I want to show you the thinking and math behind this Monthly Song Sorting System so you can implement yourself.

The Math of Creative Yield:

• Desired outcome: 10 finished songs I’m proud of

• Realistic hit rate: ~1 in 6 ideas will be worth fully developing (2 or more if I’m lucky - it happens!)

• Required input: 60 initial ideas

• Monthly breakdown: 4-5 ideas per month

• Annual result: 60 total ideas → 8-10 keepers

Those 8-10 keepers?

That’s enough for a couple of EPs or an album. That’s a year’s worth of music I actually want to release and genuinely feel proud to share.

This is the shift you have to make within yourself if you want to be more prolific. Instead of “make it perfect” think “make it abundant.”

When you’re working on idea #4 and it’s the only idea you’ve made this month, the pressure is crushing. In your mind you’re thinking “It has to work. It has to be good.”

But when you’re working on idea #37 out of a planned 60? The stakes are completely different. You can experiment, fail, try something weird just to see what happens because you know that even if this one doesn’t work out, you’ve got 23 more chances this year (maybe even more).

The paradox here is that quantity breeds quality, because it’s quantity that gives you permission to find quality without the paralysis of perfectionism.

Understand this and you will begin to see creativity in a whole new light.

How To Implement My Monthly Song Sorting System

So how do you actually generate 60 ideas in a year without burning out?

You break it down, create a rhythm, and turn it into a system that’s sustainable for you and your lifestyle.

Personally, I break down my yearly goal into individual months.

In my case, I have a full-time job which takes up my weekdays from 8am to 6pm so I build around this constraint. Not just music but writing these newsletters, creating content, family and other life responsibilities.

You might have a different schedule. Maybe you just work part-time job or work the graveyard shift, so it’s extremely important to calibrate this system with your unique schedule.

But if you’re following along with my system focus on the monthly goal of 5 songs for each month, it’s proven to work if you have a 9-5 and other life responsibilities.

If this still feels daunting, I’ll show you exactly how I achieve this and the logic behind it.

Let’s go deeper.

1) Week 1: The Idea Sprint

The first week of every month is dedicated entirely to idea generation.

My goal is 5 initial song ideas.

Remember these are songs that are finished, not incomplete arrangements. But quality of these songs or how much you like them is irrelevant.

Even if the song is just some drums and a bass line that is valid. As long as there’s a beginning, middle and an ending. Try not to overthink it.

To give you some more ideas, these song ideas can begin with:

• A simple chord progression

• A melodic hook

• A rhythmic pattern or even a textural idea.

The key is to create something with enough identity that I can build from it later.

I like to schedule five 40-minute sessions during this week. Usually Monday through Friday, first thing in the morning when my creative energy is highest or later in the evenings if I miss out the morning session.

5 sessions × 40 minutes = 3.3 hours of pure idea generation per month.

That’s all the time I dedicate to creating new ideas. Whenever I can I go for more I do and I consider it extra.

If you have more available time or still feel inspired feel free to do more.

The 40-Minute Rule

The timer is everything for me and if you’re going to give this system a shot I recommend you get yourself a timer as well.

A physical one works better than the one on your phone because the phone can suck us into a vicious doomscrolling black hole. It’s best to simply eliminate the distraction completely.

When I set that 40 minute countdown, I’m giving myself a constraint.

It’s a deadline that’s short enough to prevent perfectionism but long enough to create something real.

For me 40 minutes forces momentum.

It doesn’t allow time for second-guessing or endless tweaking. It demands that I trust my instincts and make decisions quickly.

It’s about creating a minimum viable song as soon as possible. The sooner you can establish the core elements and flesh out an arrangement, the more time you’ll have to come back to it and refine it.

I’ve found this process works significantly better when I come prepared with curated ideas.

(I wrote a full newsletter on curating ideas, read it here)

Before each session, I jot down and curate loose concepts:

• A style I want to explore

• A specific sound design techniques or presets

• A reference track I want to learn from

• A mood or emotion I want to capture

• A structural experiment I want to try

I did this so when it’s time to walk into the session I already have some direction, even if it’s vague. It makes those 40 minutes exponentially more productive.

Here’s the critical part when creating these songs under time:

Don’t judge them during creation, don’t compare them to anything (yet), just create.

By the end of week one, I have 5 new songs. Probably really bad songs, but they are songs nonetheless.

2) Week 2-4: Review, Selection & Development

After the first week, I step back for a couple days.

I listen to all five ideas with fresh ears. This exercise is meant to feel out which songs are the ones that pull at me.

This is where I allow myself to judge and be more critical.

I ask myself which ones feel special, seem like they might have potential or if any of them excite me.

What I’ve found is that if I’m not excited about an idea in its raw form, I definitely won’t be excited about it during the tedious middle stages of arrangement and mixing.

WARNING: The inverse can also happen, ‘meh’ ideas have blossomed into beautiful songs so be discerning.

With all this I’ve learned that sustained motivation is the fuel that carries projects across the finish line.

So usually I choose 1-2 ideas that feel and sound the most compelling. Those are the ones I invest my time in to develop for the rest of the month.

(If you listen back and none of them pull you, simply go back to the drawing board and create more ideas. It’s only 40 minutes for an idea. That’s a small price to pay for a potentially great song in the grand scheme of things.)

For the songs I reviewed and selected I take them through arrangement, sound design, mixing whatever stage they need. If you have mixing or mastering engineer this process might be different for you so use your own discernment.

But the key to understand here is:

I’m only working on ideas that genuinely excite me.

How about the other 3-4 ideas from that month that didn’t make the cut?

They go into an archive. Maybe I’ll come back to them later years down the line, maybe never.

Either way, they’ve served their purpose by giving me creative options.

The Finishing Habit

Finish your songs.

That’s my mantra throughout these monthly sprints. Even if they’re not strong or musically cohesive, strengthening this habit of finishing what you start pays dividends.

When you finish songs (even mediocre or bad ones) you’re training yourself to be a finisher. You’re building the neural pathways, the muscle memory, the identity of someone who sees projects through to the end.

I used to abandon tracks the moment they stopped feeling magical. If a song wasn’t immediately brilliant, I’d move on to the next shiny idea.

But I learned that was just fear.

Fear of finishing something imperfect.

Fear of confronting my own limitations perhaps.

The truth is, I’ve learned more from finishing a bad idea than from abandoning ten promising ones.

You learn how to solve creative problems, how to make decisions under pressure, and to find beauty in imperfection.

3) The Annual Review

Lastly, let’s zoom out and see what this monthly song making system creates:

• January: 5 ideas generated, 2 developed, 1-2 album potential.

• February: 5 ideas generated, 2 developed, 1-2 album potential.

• March: 5 ideas generated, 2 developed, 1-2 album potential

• ...and so on through December

By the end of the year:

• 60 total song ideas generated

• 8-10 songs I’m genuinely proud of

Those 8-10 songs?

That’s the gold, it’s what I was panning for. But I only found them because I was willing to create through the other 50.

Creating From Abundance

The reason why I like using math oriented approach to making music is because when you adopt this system the pressure evaporates.

When you’re working on idea #37 out of 60, you’re not careful and tip-toeing around every creative decision because you’re not asking it to be your masterpiece, you’re just asking it to teach you something.

Maybe it teaches you that a particular chord progression doesn’t work the way you thought it would or a new mixing technique was the lesson.

Maybe it just teaches you that you don’t like making that style of music or using that preset pack.

All of this is valuable information that moves your skills, sound and creative process forward.

This is the abundance mindset thinking, and it transforms creative pressure into creative play.

Instead of sitting down with the weight of “I need to make something great today,” you sit down with the curiosity of “I wonder what I’ll discover today.”

The stakes are lower, the experimentation is higher and ultimately the fear is quieter.

Paradoxically, all of these elements in conjunction creates the ideal conditions for our best music to emerge. This is because creativity doesn’t thrive under pressure to be perfect, it thrives under permission to be abundant.

A place where our creativity can flow freely with no restraints.

This is why I believe becoming a prolific music creator is more about your mindset, habits, and beliefs rather than your ideas, musical or technical abilities.

And when you peel back the layers you’ll notice that this system isn’t only about hitting exactly 60 ideas or exactly 10 polished songs at the end of the year.

It’s the journey, lessons and experience found in the pursuit of these quantified goals.

It’s about building the habit of finishing.

It’s about training yourself to see projects through.

It’s about creating enough volume that you stop treating every idea like it’s the last you’ll ever create and start treating your creative practice like it’s your sacred sanctuary.

The Path To Prolific Music Creation

What if this 2026 you stopped trying to make every idea perfect and started trying to make enough ideas that allowed more perfect moments to emerge?

Now you have the roadmap and with a proven system, all that is needed is your commitment.

By the end of this year, you won’t just have an album’s worth of music. You’ll have transformed into the artist who actually finishes songs, the artist who creates from abundance rather than scarcity.

Hope today’s letter was insightful, inspiring or useful in some way.

Good luck to you and your creative endeavors this 2026, and Happy New Year.

— Hermes

P.S. Systems only work if your sessions are protected.

The Monthly Song Sorting System works because it separates idea generation from development and forces you to produce in volume. But the real challenge isn’t understanding the system, it’s showing up for the sessions.

That’s exactly why I built Song Ritual.

The app turns your studio time into structured rituals. Focused creative containers with clear objectives and timers. You can run an:

• Idea Generation Ritual when you’re starting new ideas or a

• Song Finishing Sprint when you’re developing the strongest ones

Instead of staring at a blank session wondering where to begin, you simply open the ritual and start.

Because finishing an album doesn’t start with a masterpiece, it starts with one session.

Beta testers are already using Song Ritual alongside systems like this, if you want in you can join the Song Ritual app waitlist here.

The quote read:

So in today’s newsletter I want to take the opportunity to expand on these words and provide some more context.

How this quote came about and how my own experiences taught me this valuable lesson which many artists seemed to relate with. The surprising thing was that after speaking with other creatives about this I realized it’s actually a moment which haunts every serious artists at some point and it typically goes something like this:

You’re sitting in your studio, surrounded by the tools of your craft. Your high-end monitors, expensive instruments, and more plugins in your computer than you could ever need.

Not to mention the thousands of hours invested perfecting your technical and musical abilities.

But despite all this for some reason something in your music still feels off.

Like something in your music isn’t clicking just yet…

The best way I can explain is that it still seems like the music coming out you feels empty.

Technically and musically it might sound good, but somehow still hollow, like a shell with nothing living inside it.

After personally going through various cycles of this creative funk over the last decade I’ve feel I’ve come to recognize the patterns on why this happens.

So much so that I even named it. I call it Studio Monk Syndrome.

How Studio Monk Syndrome Affects Our Creative Life

Studio Monk Syndrome is a creative state where an artist becomes so consumed by the technical and isolated pursuit of making music that their work begins to feel hollow or lifeless.

I don’t believe this is neither good or bad, it simply is a feeling, a state of being.

It’s fleeting.

But I’ve also found that this trap convinces a lot of great artists into believing that the only ingredient for great music you’re proud of comes from one place only:

The time spent making music in the studio.

And while it is logically true that the only way to improve is by putting in the time in the studio, as I grow older and move through different seasons of life with my craft I realize that solely focusing on time spent in the studio and measuring productivity feeds 3 devastating patterns:

1) Narrows input leading to repetitive output - Drawing from the same limited well of experiences and patterns.

2) Technical obsession at the expense of emotional depth - Perfecting the craft while neglecting the soul.

3) Creative isolation that breeds stagnation - Cutting off the very experiences that could fuel breakthrough work.

The result is artists who can execute flawless and technically sound music but have nothing meaningful or authentic to express.

So what if the cure to Studio Monk Syndrome isn’t only more studio time?

What if your next creative breakthrough is waiting for you in a conversation with a stranger?

In the way light falls through your kitchen window at 6 AM?

Or in my case holding my newborn and creating new memories with my growing family?

What if another way to improve our music is building a better, richer lifestyle. A life that genuinely excites, stimulates, and is full of meaning and purpose?

This was the seed to my viral quote, but now I want to peel back the layers and go even deeper.

How does a fuller life actually helps us achieve a fuller sound?

How Not Having Time For My Music Made Me More Creative

A few years ago, I was feeling Studio Monk Syndrome creeping into my life again.

Naturally, I hit a wall creatively.

Before this I was spending nearly every free hour in the studio tweaking sounds, reorganizing sample folders, watching mixing tutorials, chasing that elusive breakthrough.

On paper, I was doing everything right.

My technical, creative and musical abilities improved as a result too.

My workflow was more efficient, my sound design was cleaner than ever. But I begin to hear this hollowness in my music once again. Every song I made started to sound the same (even though they we’re sonically and evidently different).

I could hear the effort, but I couldn’t hear me or a worthwhile message.

Then life forced me out of my comfort zone and taught me a valuable lesson.

I got married. My wife and I moved into a new place. Working a full-time job. Dreadful LA traffic commutes. Responsibilities grew exponentially.

And to top it all off Sound + Creativity had begun to rack up followers and subscribers faster than I could count and grew bigger than I had ever imagined (Thank you!).

Suddenly, the windows of time I was able to devote to my music became extremely limited.

But through all this chaos, something interesting happened…

Paradoxically, although I had less time for my music I began to produce music that felt richer, fuller and more alive.

It wasn’t because I was working harder at it, I concluded it was because I was living more and injecting more of my personal life experiences into my music.

I had more material and experiences than ever to draw from, and it was making all the difference.

I found inspiration in the quiet moments in the morning, the conversations that stretched past midnight, the hikes and small adventures outside the walls of the studio, they all slowly started finding their way into my sound.

I began to notice textures, moods, and rhythms in ordinary life that I’d been deaf to before.

There was a bit of this too:

Parkinson’s Law is a principle that states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

And as a result songs came together more easily, more effortlessly because a lot of them we’re tied to a particular experience or memory which excited me to work on them. This excitement helped me propel my songs all the way through the end as quickly as possible.

That experience completely changed how I view creativity.

I realized great music doesn’t just come from mastering tools or the studio, it comes from mastering yourself and the way you move through life. The studio will always be your experimental laboratory, but life outside of it is your source material.

When I began to live more fully, in the present moment I stopped trying to force inspiration and start channeling it instead.

The Paradox That Changed Everything

Naturally, what I concluded and began implementing with more advanced students (artists who understand the basics of the musical creative process).

The more you step away from music, the more you can say in your music.

And the more you can say, the more exciting ideas you will come up with, and eventually the more you will feel a pull to create and be more prolific as a result.

This flies in the face of everything we’re taught about mastery.

The 10,000 hour rule.

The locked in mentality.

The idea that dedication means single minded focus.

But think about the artists whose music moves you most deeply…

Do their songs feel like they come from someone who spent all their time in a studio? Or do they feel like they come from someone who has lived, loved, suffered, wondered, questioned and wandered?

I’m convinced that authentic music comes from authentic experiences.

When you limit your life to the studio, you limit your creative palette. It’s like trying to paint the full spectrum of human experiences with only a few colors.

But when you cultivate a rich life outside music, something magical happens:

• Physical experiences inspire rhythm and energy. The way your body moves through the world influences how rhythm moves through your music.

• Curiosity feeds creative concepts. The books you read, the ideas you explore, the questions you ask all become raw material for musical expression.

• Emotional depth creates resonant melodies. The feelings you’ve actually felt become the emotional core of your compositions.

• Social connections provide authentic perspectives. Real relationships with real people keep your music grounded in genuine human experience.

• Spiritual practices adds meaning and a mystical layer. Whatever feeds your soul shows up as depth and significance in your artistic work.

This doesn’t mean abandoning the habits that got your music to this place it’s about recognizing that creativity flows from the intersection of dedication to craft and lived experience.

In other words, your musical outputs are a direct reflection of your inputs.

Your technical skills are the vessel, but your life experience is what fills it.

Without both, you’re either creating empty shells or struggling to express profound feelings with the wrong tools.

When your life and your art begin to synchronize with each other, you stop being someone who makes music and start being someone whose music flows naturally from who you are and where you are in life.

And from my experience this is where the greatest breakthroughs comes from.

Not from perfecting techniques in isolation, but from allowing life to flow through your craft.

Now let’s move on to the practical steps you can begin to take today in order to live more and achieve a fuller sound.

The 4 Lifestyle Pillars For A Fuller Sound

So how do you build a life that feeds your music? How do you cultivate experiences that translate into authentic artistic expression?

Here’s the 4 pillars I’ve identified from my own personal experience.

1. Tuning Into Your Body

Treat your physical experience as fundamental to your musical expression.

Your relationship with your body directly influences your relationship with rhythm, energy, and flow.

This doesn’t mean you need to become an athlete, but I’ve found taking part in some form of physical activity helps me be more disciplined, focused and calm throughout the day.

As a wise man once told me:

Emotion = Energy in motion.

When you begin to have a deeper connection with your body, you begin to how you can apply those principles in your music.

For example, when you know how tension and release feel physically, you can create that same feeling in your compositions (or at least your artistic interpretation of it).

Choose one physical practice and try to commit to it for 30 days. Notice how it influences your energy and thought process when you return to the studio.

Lastly, understand that there’s really is no downside to more physical movement, and it’s a great investment for your physical and mental health longterm.

2. Seek Intellectual Curiosity & Feed Your Creative Mind

Actively seek out ideas and perspectives that challenge your current understanding of the world. Your music can only be as sophisticated as your thinking.

I find that when I read widely, ask deep questions, and engage with complex ideas I tend to create more layered, intricate works.

Reading about philosophy, science, history, literature becomes a fun way to look for interesting terms which can be used for song names.

Watching documentaries helps me learn about worlds and perspectives I’ve never experienced which eventually become seed concepts for albums and song ideas.

Conversations with interesting people helps me see the world through a different lens which can become the basis of a lyric hook or simply a new way of telling a story.

The exposure to all of these new ideas become new compositional possibilities. And different ways of thinking translate into different approaches in the studio.

What could this look like for you and how can you apply this practically?

Here’s what I recommend:

Choose a subject you’re curious about which is completely unrelated to music and spend one hour per week learning about it. Notice how these new concepts influence your creative thinking in the studio or your creative process.

Who knows, part of your artistic identity might just be a mashup of this new subject matter and the music you’re currently making.

3. Tapping Into Raw Emotions

Music is a language of emotion.

Artists who can access and articulate subtle and raw emotional states create music that resonates at deeper levels.

For me it’s the emotional experiences in life that tend to translate the best into wholesome musical compositions. The more you’re feeling and connecting with life, the more creative firepower you can access when it’s time to sit down and create.

But I get it, we don’t all live in a soap opera and most of our day to day is pretty mundane and repetitive. So how do we bring these emotional depths out of the darkness and into the light to reconnect with it?

Here are some that have worked for me:

Journaling practice - Regular reflection on emotional experience from the past.

Deepening relationships - Make it a goal to spend more time with connections you enjoy a create more memories with them (this can be professional and personal friendships, romantic relationships, having kids, family).

Artistic consumption - Engaging with films, books, and art that moves you and stirs something deep within your core.

These practices have helped me tap into raw and real emotions which I can later use as fuel to move my music forward.

4. Connecting To Something Greater

Develop a spiritual relationship with a greater force.

This doesn’t require religious belief. It more about recognizing that creativity touches something beyond our own pure technique or even self-expression.

This is because spiritual practice provides depth and significance that prevents your art from becoming merely clever or entertaining. It connects your work to larger themes and universal experiences which have been written about for millennia.

If you practice anything I want you to begin to notice how you can integrate it or hoe it might influence a sense of meaning and purpose in your creative work.

If you don’t practice anything here are some I recommend you try. All of these I’ve tried myself and have felt a sense of greater purpose and connection to a greater force as a result:

• Meditation, prayer or contemplative practice.

• Immersing yourself in nature (away from city and preferably technology)

• Service to others, charity, volunteering.

• Study of ancient, esoteric and occult traditions.

Integrating Your Life & Music

When you begin creating music from these pillar your music stops being something you do and starts being something you are.

Instead of sitting down to “write a song,” you sit down to express something you’ve actually experienced.

Instead of reaching for familiar patterns, you draw from a rich palette of lived experiences.

This isn’t about becoming a more interesting person to impress others, it’s about becoming a more complete human so your art can express the story that’s unfolding.

When you cultivate a full life, creativity becomes sustainable and it even feels as if it pours out if you more effortlessly.

You’re simply living fully and allowing that fullness to flow through your craft.

And that’s when people really start to notice. Not because you’ve mastered more techniques or bought better equipment but because you have something real to say, and you’ve developed the skills to say it beautifully.

Thanks for reading, until the next one.

— Hermes

P.S. A full life doesn’t automatically become music and that translation is where most artists get stuck.

You have the ideas.
The experiences.
The raw material.

But without a system to capture and turn them into songs, they stay scattered.

Song Ritual is the bridge.

It gives you a place to capture those moments and a structured ritual system to turn them into finished music.

Early beta users are already using it to close that gap. If you feel this problem, there no better time to join the Song Ritual beta than now.

Use discount code RITUAL47 for a 47% discount locked in for life.

[Join Song Ritual]

Schedules, calendars, and to-do lists run our lives and the only way to stay on track is through consistent discipline and endless grind which can be difficult to sustain. But the most damaging consequence of this is that in the context of our creative process every session turns into a test.

Did you win today, or did you lose?

Did you get something done, or just wasted time?

Did you create a decent song or yet another sketch you're unhappy with?

But here’s the paradox I've come across:

The more you tighten your grip, the less creative energy flows. The harder you try to force output, the more Resistance and creative blocks seems to emerge.

So what if the secret to finishing more music wasn’t about working harder? What if the key was play?

Play is the fountain of youth for creativity.

In fact, play is the system that has helped me generate the most ideas, produces the most output, and sustains my energy longer than hustle and grind ever could.

The problem is, most of us lost touch with play the moment our responsibilities begin to add up. Suddenly, perfectionism creeps in, fear of judgment takes over and what was once effortless curiosity became heavy labor.

But here’s the truth I've uncovered:

Creative work keeps you young because it requires you to consistently connect with your inner child.

And for an artist that connection isn’t optional, it’s essential to their creativity.

How I Rediscovered Play After Losing It to Grind

The inner child is not naïve, when you dig deeper you realize it’s the version of us that knew wonder before perfectionism and fear of judgment crept in.

When I look back at my earliest experiences with music, they weren’t about achievement. They weren’t about making something “good” or “marketable.” They were about discovery and having fun.

I clearly remember my early 20's when I was working odd jobs, commuting to college, hanging with friends every once in a while but what I really wanted to do was simply get home and boot up Logic Pro and start making horrible music that was taking me nowhere.

These early days were all about experimentation.

About losing hours tinkering with sounds, stacking melodies, or remixing the world around me.

And when you think about it that’s what childhood is:

Endless experiments without fear of failure.

But as time passed somewhere along the way, I lost that lightness.

Like most creators, I got tangled into full time jobs, more responsibilities, and productivity culture.

But discipline without joy becomes brittle, and structure without curiosity becomes a cage.

It wasn’t until I began developing frameworks like the Musical Creative Process, Reference Formulas, and 2 Step Creative Process that I found a way back to that childlike state, but this time with intention.

These systems weren’t about removing creativity of its magic, they were about creating conditions where play could reemerge and thrive. Coincidentally that’s when I realized play wasn’t the opposite of productivity, it was productivity in disguise.

In Creative Work, Play = Productivity

Here’s the lesson that took me years to understand:

Play generates abundance, pressure generates scarcity.

When you approach a session with a playful spirit, ideas seem to multiply. Sketches stack up. This is because curiosity is the fuel that keeps us engaged.

Even if 90% of those sketches don’t survive, the 10% that do carry your music further than most sessions forced under pressure.

When you let go of pressure and return to curiosity, you’re not just having fun, you’re literally improving your brain’s ability to generate fresh ideas.

When you pay attention to children they don’t hoard or overvalue every attempt, they move quickly, try again, and keep what entertains them. That’s not an accident, that’s efficient for them and it works.

How does this work in the context of music creation?

Because instead of staring at a blank canvas, you lay out toys on the floor (sounds, textures, influences) and see what happens when you combine them in novel ways.

No expectation, no outcome, just curiosity stacked on curiosity.

Suddenly your song ideas don’t feel the weight of expectation, they’re just dares and experiments. The result is more music which is inspired by your curiosity which yields more authentic results.

Play is not escape, it’s the most direct path to creativity.

5 Ways To Reconnect With Your Inner Child (Learning To Play Again)

Now I want to give you some actionable steps you can take away that can help you reconnect with your inner child and feel that sense of wonder once again.

These next exercises are a combination of what has helped me, students and what I've learned from other creatives over the years.

1) Create A Playground

The fastest way to stifle creativity is to treat every session like it's a job you need to succeed at.

Instead, see your studio as your personal creative playground.

Children don’t show up to prove anything, they show up to explore. You can do the same in your creative process. Like a playground, make sure you have toys (plugins, FX, instruments) that excite you and stimulate your curiosity.

In the short term this might mean buying that plugin you've always wanted but just haven't pulled the trigger on (just be careful not to fall into the habit of continuously buying new tools and gear - remember less is more in creativity). Or maybe it's as simply as changing the physical location of where you create or rearranging the furniture in your studio.

The purpose is to reawaken the spirit of curiosity which is where excitement comes from. In this state play becomes easier to access, and pressure fades away when our curiosity and excitement is engaged.

2) Curate Curiosity

Kids follow whatever captures their attention in the moment, but as adults we often sit paralyzed in front of a blank screen.

To break that habit, prepare and give your creative sessions a head start by curating a small stack of creative sparks before you begin.

A creative spark is any material that excites or stimulates you. It can be a sound, a sample, a field recording, an image or concept that captures a mood. Anything.

These ingredients can guide your new project without boxing you in. From my personal experience I’ve found that the best ideas rarely come out of thin air, they come from mixing influences in surprising ways.

3) Compartmentalize Your Creative Sessions

One of the biggest traps for creatives is trying to create and edit at the same time.

It’s like building a sandcastle at the beach while the waves keeps washing it away and they crash on the shore. Instead try separating your sessions. Spend one sitting generating ideas, then return later with fresh ears to curate and refine.

For example:

Create five short sketches in a single session, each under two minutes, and don’t listen back until the next day. Keep the strongest one and let the others go.

This practice not only helps you avoid perfectionism but also teaches you to trust your future self to recognize what’s worth keeping.

4) Reframe Challenges As Experiments

Children rarely see obstacles as problems, they see them as puzzles to solve.

You can bring that same mindset into your creative process by reframing Resistance and creative blocks as experiments. So instead of approaching your work like a burden, treat it like a test lab. Give yourself strange or playful prompts that turn the pressure of “I have to finish” into curiosity driven exploration.

For example:

Try making a loop entirely out of sounds recorded in your environment, or build a track that slowly evolves from silence into noise. These experiments don’t have to lead to polished tracks, but they often reveal unexpected textures and ideas you would never have discovered otherwise.

Originality tends to show up when you stop aiming for it directly and instead give yourself permission to explore without limits.

5) Create It For Yourself Only

One of the purest ways to reconnect with your inner child is to make something with the promise that no one will ever hear it.

Children don’t draw or sing for an audience, they do it because the act itself is rewarding. Give yourself the same permission. Sit down with the intention of making something deliberately messy, bad, or completely out of the ordinary.

By removing the pressure of creating something “good” you often free yourself to stumble into the most interesting ideas. Even if nothing worth keeping comes out of it, you’ll have reminded yourself what creating feels like when there’s no judgment attached to it.

Redefining Play As Productivity

Play is the system that keeps you curious, keeps you productive, and keeps you young not just in spirit, but in your creative work.

When you treat creativity as play, Resistance loses its grip.

You stop overvaluing each attempt, and you start producing more than you thought possible. Play doesn’t mean you avoid discipline it means you approach discipline with lightness and wonder.

Hope this letter brought you some more clarity, and see you in the next one.

— Hermes

P.S. Creative play is powerful because it removes pressure. It gives you permission to explore, experiment, and follow strange ideas without worrying whether they’ll become a finished track.

But here’s the paradox I’ve come to discover:

Play actually works best when it happens inside a structure. That’s the philosophy behind Song Ritual.

Each ritual inside the app creates a focused container for playful exploration. A timed session where your only job is to experiment, generate ideas, and follow your curiosity wherever it leads.

No overthinking.
No pressure to make something perfect.
Just creative momentum.

If you want your studio sessions to feel less like work and more like creative play again you can now join the Song Ritual waitlist here.

C major?

A minor?

Something exotic in F# Lydian?

The possibilities feel endless, which somehow makes choosing any single note feel impossible.

So you try to play something but after some time hitting the keys, improvising or clicking in MIDI notes, you close it with little to nothing to show for. You tell yourself you'll come back when inspiration strikes.

But after years of studying successful producers, students and my own creative process here's what I've learned:

Prolific artists rarely start new song ideas from scratch, they start with proven ideas and evolve them.

Why Starting From Zero Is Destroying Your Creative Flow

Let's be honest about what really happens during those creative blocks at the start of a new song.

You typically sit down to write a chord progression and your mind immediately goes to music theory (or your limited understanding of it)…

What scales work together?

Which voices should move where?

How do you create tension and release?

The analytical mind takes over, and suddenly making music feels like solving a complex math equation instead of a fun exploration of sound.

And from my experience and conversation with other artists this is the creativity myth that's destroying our musical output.

Somewhere along the way we convinced ourselves that "real" creativity means inventing something from absolute ground zero. That using existing harmonic structures is somehow cheating or "unoriginal".

But think about your favorite artists...

Do you really believe they're reinventing music theory every session?

• Kanye West didn't invent soul chord progressions, he reinterpreted them.

• Radiohead didn't create new scales, they found fresh ways to use familiar ones.

• Billie Eilish didn't write the first melancholic melody, she just put her unique spin on it made it feel like she did.

The truth is, most great songs are built on familiar foundations.

What Prolific Producers Know That You Don't

Every failed attempt to write "the perfect chord progression" from scratch reinforces the belief that you're not creative or musically talented enough.

Each abandoned project reinforces the idea that you don't have what it takes to make beautiful music you're proud of. You're caught in a vicious cycle.

But while you're wrestling with whether to start on a major or minor chord progressions other more experienced producers are already building their second verse using a proven chord progression from a song they've admired.

While you're still questioning every note choice, they're layering their own melodies over proven harmonic foundations.

They understand something you don't:

Music is a language of patterns.

And just like any language, fluency comes from understanding the patterns that already exist, not from inventing new grammar every time you speak.

Great artists aren't trying to "think of something new" every session. They're fluent in the notes, harmonies, and melodies that move people. They collect what works and reinterpret it in their own voice.

The difference between struggling producers and successful ones isn't talent, it's their approach to the creative process.

The MIDI Method: How To Use Your Favorite Music As A Creative Starting Points

Now that we understand that the most prolific artists borrow creatively instead of starting from scratch it's time to think about how we can systemize this into our own creative process.

So what if I told you there's a way to honor your influences while still enabling you to create more original music that sounds authentic to you?

What if a system could give you the creative constraints that actually enhance your freedom and access to flow states?

This is where the MIDI Method comes into play.

Think of it as building your sonic genealogy. It's collecting the harmonic DNA of music that moves you, then passing it down through your own creative interpretation.

This isn't copying, it's taking inspiration from the music we love and making them into creative catalysts for our own original works.

Here's the step by step method on how to create your own MIDI library for quick inspiration.

Step 1: Extract From Your Influences

Start with the music you love. These are the songs that already speak to you, they've passed your emotional filter.

Choose one song and extract its harmonic foundation using tools like:

• Chordify for quick chord recognition

• Basic Pitch by Spotify for MIDI extraction

• Supreme MIDI for comprehensive breakdowns

• Hook Theory for music theory and song breakdowns

Or you can even transcribe them by ear if you want to deepen your musical understanding. Both approaches work, choose what serves your creative flow and your specific skill sets.

Step 2: Organize Your MIDI Library

Save and organize these MIDI files in a system that makes sense to you.

I recommend you create folders by:

• Mood (melancholic, uplifting, mysterious)

• Genre (pop, house, ambient)

• Key/Harmonic function (verse progressions, chorus hooks, bridges)

Consistency in naming conventions is crucial. You want to find what you need when inspiration strikes, not waste creative momentum searching through poorly labeled files.

Pro Tip: If you use Logic Pro X you can save your own MIDI loops in your loop library and access them from within your DAW for a more streamlined workflow.

Step 3: Build Through Reinterpretation

Here's the most important part of this method:

These MIDI files are just starting points, not destinations.

When starting a new song idea transform your collected MIDI inside your project by trying the following (feel free to get creative with these):

• Key Changes: Move a progression from C major to F# minor, same emotional arc, completely different sonic color.

• Rhythmic Shifts: Take a ballad progression and give it trap-style syncopation.

• Harmonic Layering: Combine progressions from different songs in the same key.

• Inversion and Reverse: Play chords backwards or in different octaves.

Remember, you're not replicating, you're reinterpreting. While simultaneously honoring the patterns that move people while adding your unique voice to the conversation.

The Deeper Truth About Creative Foundations

Every great artist stands on the shoulders of their influences.

The Beatles built on rhythm and blues. Hip-hop was born from re-contextualizing existing records.

Even the greatest philosophers and composers of our time we're all linked by a direct relationship of apprenticeship.

This is because originality isn't about creating from nothing, it's about the unique way you combine what already exists.

Your MIDI blueprint collection becomes your creative vocabulary. The broader your vocabulary, the more fluently you can express your musical ideas.

When you have proven harmonic foundations at your fingertips, you can focus your creative energy where it matters most: arrangement, sound design, lyrical content, and the thousand micro-decisions that make a song uniquely yours.

The goal isn't to eliminate creativity, it's to channel it more effectively. When we can channel it more effectively we can create more music which is will allow us to create more original ideas.

Hope today’s letter was useful. As always thank you for reading, until the one.

— Hermes

P.S. You’ve got the MIDI, you’ve got the reference, but now what?

Most producers open their DAW, stare at the progression, and spend 30 minutes deciding what to do with it until the momentum dies.

The Song Ritual app eliminates that gap.

The Reference Stack Ritual is designed for exactly this moment:

You bring your MIDI reference, the app gives you a structured session with a timer running so you stay in motion. The blank canvas problem disappears and finally the music starts.

You can now join the Song Ritual waitlist here.

You scroll through countless preset packs, download yet another sample library, maybe even watch another tutorial about recreating a specific technique.

But what if I told you that this idea that your sound is out there is completely backwards?

What if your signature sound isn't waiting to be found, but you're already shaping it through the creative choices you're making right now, often without even realizing it?

After a decade of creating music, mentoring artists and observing the patterns that separate those who develop strong artistic identities from those who remain perpetually searching, I've discovered something profound:

Artistic identity isn't found, it's formed.

And it's formed through the creative choices you make, over and over again.

Why Most Artists Never Find Their Sound (The Search Trap)

Imagine this, you're standing inside a huge imaginary warehouse.

The shelves stretch beyond sight, filled with every sound imaginable. Synth patches from every VST in existence. Classic and modern drum machines and percussive instruments you've never seen or heard of before all at your fingertips.

This is the modern artist's reality, unlimited access to unlimited sounds (thanks internet and world wide web!).

And while all these options might seem ideal, it's actually paralyzing.

Most artists approach this warehouse like treasure hunters, convinced their signature sound is hidden somewhere in the obscure and less visited isles.

You dig through preset after preset, sample pack after sample pack, always searching for that one element that will suddenly crystallize your identity.

But here's what happens instead:

• You collect without curating and your hard drives become graveyards of unused sounds.

• You chase trends instead of curiosity and you download what's popular rather than what resonates.

• You mistake variety for identity and you think using more sounds will make them more unique.

The search trap convinces you that your voice exists somewhere external to yourself. It falsely reinforces the idea that identity is a product to be purchased.

This mindset creates hordes of artists who are always one sample pack away from "finding their sound".

But from my point of view identity doesn't work that way…

I believe identity is not what you find, it's what you consistently choose to keep.

Think about the artists whose music you recognize instantly. The producers whose songs you can identify within the first few seconds. Did they stumble across their sound in a preset pack or did they develop it through years of consistent choices?

When you hear a Burial, Daft Punk or Fred Again, you don't think, "Oh, he found some great samples." you think, "Wow, that's unmistakably them."

They do this through their creative choices, the ones they choose over and over again. Release after release.

Mindset Shift: Your Signature Sound Is A Filter (Not A Destination)

Here's the reframed that changes everything for me:

Think of your signature sound not as a fixed destination, but as a living filter.

Every time you encounter a new sound, hear a sample, or come across a creative concept, your filter makes a decision:

• Keep or discard

• Absorb or ignore

• Amplify or mute

These micro-decisions happen constantly. In fact, most of the time you're not even conscious of them.

But over time they're creating a pattern, and over time that pattern becomes your signature sound.

Now let's go back to our warehouse metaphor.

You're not randomly grabbing sounds off the shelves. Your internal filter is guiding you toward specific sections, specific textures, specific moods.

You’re being selective, because you’re human and will have unique preferences based from our unique life experience.

Maybe you find yourself drawn to:

• Soft textures and melancholic chord progressions

• Fragmented vocals that hint rather than make statement

• Dark ambiences that create space for contemplation

Or perhaps your filter pulls you towards:

• Crystalline digital textures that are sharp, sparkle and cut through the mix

• Vocal chops that function as pure rhythm

• Compressed drums that punch through dense mixes

Notice how specific these are.

Notice how they begin to form a coherent aesthetic.

This is your artistic identity emerging through your creative choices.

You didn't invent these elements, but you chose them and you kept choosing them.

That's the key.

That's identity.

That's your unique fingerprint as an artist.

And it's always happening, whether you're paying attention or not.

The difference between artists with strong identities and those still searching isn't talent or access to better sounds. It's simply the awareness of their own curation process.

The awareness to notice what makes it through their filter and what gets rejected.

The Truth About Unique Music & How Clarity Beats Complexity

When your filter becomes clear, something magical happens:

Your music becomes a beacon, a lighthouse.

Not because it's perfect or because it uses the most advanced techniques, but because it's authentically yours.

People feel this, even when they can't articulate it. They hear your track and something clicks. Not just "this is good music," but "this is your music."

This is why curation sharpens your filter, and ultimately your filter defines your musical identity.

It's less about being loud and more about being intentional and clear.

Think about your favorite artists again. What makes them magnetic isn't that they use sounds no one else has access to, it's that they use sounds in a way that only they use them.

Most artists don't have exclusive access to different synthesizers than other electronic artists, but their choices, the specific timbres they gravitate towards, the way they structures rhythm and melody, the particular kind of chaos they find beautiful creates music that is instantly recognizable.

The same principle applies whether you're making ambient soundscapes, driving techno, or intimate folk songs.

Clarity of vision and unique perspectives creates original art.

When you know what you're drawn to, and more importantly when you trust your intuition your creative choices become more coherent.

This is when your music begins to develop its own gravity.

This is because people don't just hear your songs, now they can feel your aesthetic.

This is why artists with strong identities often seem to effortlessly maintain their signature sound across different projects, collaborations, and creative periods. It's not effortless at all.

In reality it's the result of thousands of small choices guided by a clear filter.

So now let’s dive into the practical portion of this letter where I share actionable tips on how you can begin to achieve this yourself.

The 5 Creative Habits That Shape Your Signature Sound

So how do you develop this clarity?

How do you fine tune your filter?

It starts with recognizing that every creative decision is an identity decision.

Here's the system I've used over the years that helps me transform unconscious choices into conscious curation:

1. Notice Your Natural Attractions

Pay attention to what makes you stop scrolling, the songs you play on repeat or note which give you the feeling "I wish I wrote that".

When you're browsing samples, which ones make you pause?

When you're listening to music, which moments make you want to understand how they were created?

These moments of genuine attraction are data, they're your filter speaking.

Don't dismiss them as random preferences, they're glimpses of your artistic identity trying to emerge.

Creative habit:

Keep a "resonance journal".

When something in music captures your attention, write it down. Over time review it, you'll start to see patterns.

2. Follow Your Intuitive Compass

Your intuition knows things your analytical mind hasn't figured out yet.

When you're in the studio, notice which sounds create genuine excitement.

Which combinations make you feel that spark of "yes, this is it"?

Remember that this isn't about what sounds objectively good, it's about what sounds right to you.

Trust that compass even when it leads you towards choices that seem unconventional or risky or nonsensical.

Creative habit:

Before analyzing whether a sound "works" technically, ask yourself:

"Does this create excitement in my body?"

This is typically a gut feeling, you'll just know. If you don't know it's probably not it.

3. Embrace Repetition Without Apology

Here's where many artists get stuck:

They worry that choosing similar elements repeatedly will make them boring or predictable.

But tasteful repetition is how signature sounds are born.

If you're consistently drawn to certain textures, certain rhythmic patterns, certain harmonic movements, lean into that attraction don't fight it.

Remember that it's not what you like once, it's what you love repeatedly.

Your artistic identity lives in those repeated creative choices.

Creative habit:

Track your creative choices over several sessions, then ask yourself:

What elements keep appearing?

Instead of avoiding them, explore how to use them more intentionally in the next song and so on.

4. Apply the Scott Adams Principle

Not every creative impulse needs to become part of your signature sound. The key is distinguishing between:

• Experiments: Creative explorations that help you learn or find new sounds.

• Identity elements: Choices that feel authentically yours and worth repeating and saving for later use.

Give yourself permission to experiment wildly, but recognize which experiments reveal something essential about your artistic voice and keep those for later.

Creative habit:

After each creative session, ask:

"What from today felt most like me?”

“What felt like learning, and what felt like discovering?"

5. Curate Your Influences Consciously

Your artistic identity is partly formed by what you choose to absorb from other artists.

However, instead of passively consuming whatever crosses your path, become an active curator of your influences.

Seek out artists whose choices resonate with your own developing filter.

Study not just what they do, but how they make decisions.

Creative habit:

Choose three artists whose aesthetic sensibilities align with your own.

Study their choices across multiple projects.

What patterns can you identify in their curation? Look for their "behind the song" series on Youtube (If they have any available and take notes).

Use these techniques or creative choices in your next songs.

Building Your Identity Over Time

Remember, artistic identity isn't built in a single session or even a single project, it's the accumulated result of choices made consistently over time.

Some days your filter will feel clear and your choices will feel confident, but other days you'll feel uncertain and pulled in different directions.

This is normal, it's part of the process.

What matters is showing up to the choice making process consistently, trusting your intuition, and paying attention to your own patterns.

Over time, these choices compound.

They create a coherent aesthetic that becomes unmistakably yours.

And here's the paradox:

The more clearly you develop your own filter, the more unique your art becomes. Not because you're trying to be different, but because you're being authentically selective.

So the question isn't "Who am I as an artist?"

The question is: "What do I keep choosing?"

This question shifts you from passive searching to active creation.

From hoping to find yourself to consciously forming yourself.

Every time you're in the studio, every time you're curating sounds, every time you're making creative decisions you're answering this question.

Pay attention to those answers, let them be your guide, let them shape your path forward.

As always, thank you for reading.

— Hermes

P.S. I’ve been quietly running the beta round of the Signature Sound Workshop behind the scenes and the breakthroughs have been wild. Here are what some artists have to say about it:

“You’re blowing my mind!! Cracked me open wow. It’s like every sentence triggers so much realization.”
— Manny

“Even just reading it made me rethink my whole process. I’ve opened my mind a lot since then… now it’s time to put in the work.”
— Teychee

“It’s so useful for me. I feel like it’s exactly what I need.” — Yeadon

If you’re serious about crafting your signature sound and building a body of work that actually feels authentically you this is where we start.

Enrollment for the next cohort is opening soon. If you want to be notified when doors open again click here to join the waitlist.