If there’s one thing that stood out in every interview on the Re-Ex blog this year, it wasn’t a specific plugin, a miracle workflow, or a secret compressor setting. It was something much simpler with every artist we spoke to, from Barcelona to Seoul, who said some version of the same thing: you need to stop overthinking your tracks.
Take Barcelona-based DJ and Producer, Emery Olker. He’s been producing since he was a teenager, surrounded by guitars, basses, and the early DAWs. He’s studied, collaborated, lived with artists, and built whole projects from scratch. But after all that, the thing he wishes he’d learned sooner is simply to trust his own instincts. “Do music with your feelings,” he told us.
Amapiano producer Vybz Empress agreed with her own straight-to-the-point way: to be yourself because people can feel it when you’re faking it. And then there’s Halim Zeid, a producer who refuses to start a track until he knows what mood he’s in. If he’s sad, he makes something dark; if he feels light, the track is light. He doesn’t think about genre, trends, or expectations. He follows the emotion first and lets the track unfold on its own terms. The moment you let go of sounding like someone else, everything gets easier.
Here’s the funny thing about “perfecting” a track: most artists regret how long they spent doing it.
Seattle-based house producer DILF is a great example. He used to pour weeks into perfecting one track, only to release a track he made in an hour, Zara, and watch it completely outshine the ones he obsessed over. That moment changed the way he works. Now, he gets the idea out fast, then moves on before he has time to talk himself out of it!
Veteran producer Dr Goo has the calm perspective that only decades of trial-and-error can give you. For him, the turning point was realising that adding more elements doesn’t make a track more interesting. Sometimes it actually makes people zone out. Once he stripped things back and stopped trying to impress anyone, his music started connecting in a deeper way, both on SoundCloud and in live sets.
One thing that came up again and again this year was the simple fact that life doesn’t pause just because you want to make music.
Emery Olker juggles work and production and has to fight for time in the studio, so he works in bursts whenever he can, even if it means adjusting his setup or routine.
LA-based Cy Kosis has a daughter and a packed schedule that leaves him drained on the days he finally has a free hour, so he keeps his approach small. Even on days when he’s exhausted, he opens Ableton for a few minutes.
DILF has the additional challenge of navigating bipolar highs and lows, swinging between days when ideas explode and days when opening a DAW feels impossible. So he journals ideas whenever inspiration hits, so he can return to them on the days when it doesn’t.
None of them waits for perfect conditions anymore. They work with the energy they’ve got. And that shift alone keeps them moving forward.
Several artists told us they wish they’d learned earlier that you don’t need to push every channel into the red to get a good mix. Cy Kosis was the most blunt. Looking back, he realises how many mixes he wrecked by cranking levels and forcing everything to compete. The solution was almost embarrassingly simple: leave headroom. Turn up your speakers if you want more volume. Don’t punish your project file for what your ears want in the room.
If you talk to enough artists, you start to notice something funny: nobody makes music the same way twice.
Halim Zeid starts with emotion, Seoul’s Rorang starts with chords and voice, and Dr Goo starts with loops. Emery Olker sometimes starts with drums, sometimes with melody, sometimes with whatever’s making the most noise in the room.
But none of them are chasing the right method anymore. They’ve all learned that process is personal. As long as the track gets finished, the sequence doesn’t matter.
Many of the producers we featured talked about how isolating the early stages of creating can be, especially when you don’t have other musicians around you, or when friends and family don’t understand the genre you make.
Again and again, they said the same thing: getting feedback from the RepostExchange community pushed their music forward in a way nothing else did.
Emery Olker uses it to hear how different types of listeners respond to his tracks: producers, DJs, casual fans, even engineers. DILF relied on it in the early days when his own circle didn’t “get” deep house yet. Dr Goo uses it to spot blind spots and get a sense of how a track might land before releasing it widely. And, Halim Zeid credits RepostExchange with helping him gain the confidence to keep pushing after releasing early tracks and seeing how the community responded.
RepostExchange is a platform where people listen because they love music and not because they know you personally. And that honesty goes a long way when you're trying to decide whether a song is ready, whether a mix translates, or whether you’re just stuck inside your own head.
Every artist we interviewed, regardless of where they're from, how long they’ve been producing, or what gear they swear by, came back to the same truth: they love making music.
They’ve all overthought things. They’ve all doubted themselves. They’ve all scrapped ideas they later loved. But they kept going, because the love of creating outlasted the fear of getting it wrong. You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to keep making music, even on the days when your brain tells you not to.
If you want a community that gets that, a place where your tracks actually get heard, and feedback that helps you grow instead of shutting you down, you already know where to find it.
Join the artists shaping the future of music on RepostExchange, and stop overthinking your next track.
