TSHA advises leaving a track alone for a while to progress: “You could go on forever if you’re not careful.”
“I always like to leave my music for a little bit otherwise you can get stuck in a rut.”
Nicole Ngai
British electronic dance music producer TSHA has offered advice to fellow producers: to leave work-in-progress tracks alone for a long period of time before returning to them to keep projects exciting.
In her recent cover interview with MusicTech, the 2022 Producer Of The Year talks about her creative process, her setup preferences, how she overcomes writer’s block, keeps momentum and finishes tracks.
She warns: “You could go on forever if you’re not careful. When you hear it, anyone listening to the song will not realise how you might have changed the chord progression or arrangement. Only you will know that difference. I always like to leave my music for a little bit otherwise you can get stuck in a rut.”
The producer goes on to say that she will work on a draft of a track until she “hits a wall”, then, as she says, “bounce it out, download it, add it to a playlist. I will keep doing that with a list of songs and continually go back over them.”
In the interview, she also shares a handy tip for keeping creative juices flowing and not getting stuck on arguably one of the most painstaking parts of music production – the drums.
“My tip is to make loads of drum loops before sitting down to write and record. It sounds simple but when you go into that writing headspace, you don’t want to be fiddling with making drum loops – it slows the process down. If you have a bank of sick drums that you like, then you can just keep dragging and dropping them in to see what works. Then when you hit the right one, you’ve found the heartbeat of the song.”
Also, in 2022, TSHA was awarded MusicTech’s 2022 Producer Of The Year in response to her brilliant debut album, Capricorn Sun.
Read the full cover interview with TSHA at MusicTech.
