Stuck On A Song Idea? Why You Should Work With A Producer

A good producer can help you to find the missing piece to an idea you just can’t finish, help to give you creative direction when you get lost, and create an environment where incredible ideas can be realised.

What Do Producers Do?

Today most producers wear many, many hats. Mixing and mastering alone used to be two separate areas covered by different people. These days producers juggle songwriting, composition, arrangement, and more—PLUS mixing and mastering.

If you are a songwriter, vocalist, lyricist, or other musician, producers can be a powerful multi- talented addition to your creation process.

This article gives you a whistlestop tour through some of the benefits of working with a producer when you are stuck on an idea.

1. Providing the Missing Puzzle Piece

A producer can provide the missing piece to a song that completes it, or—catalyses a chain reaction of creativity that gets it there.

Whether it’s a melody tweak, an intro idea, a verse composition, or something else. Producers could give you that missing element. You may strike gold together in a live session, they could make something on the fly, or find something from a host of ideas on their hard drive.

2. Steering the Ship in the Right Creative Direction

Alongside songwriting, mixing and mastering skills, a producer can offer a big picture, zoomed out view. Asking the right questions about your thoughts on a song—where you see it going, your style, and your story. They can help to steer it in the direction you want to go, and get it to a place of completion, whether that’s in real time in a session, or a back and forth over a longer period of time.

3. Laying Down a Musical Canvas

Creating in a musical vacuum can be hard work. A good producer can create a musical canvas, landscape and space to nurture creativity, and capture the pivotal moments. With pads, chords, reverb, delay, and more at their fingertips.

4. Multiple Takes, Multiple Ideas

Working with a producer can help to piece together the bits of a song that you already have into a complete song. Whether this is combining and editing different chorus, or verse ideas, comping out a vocal, or guitar part, or something else. Also, if you are recording everything you can try on different ideas for size, and the producer can quickly edit them in the session to see if you are feeling it.

5. Electronic Music Skills

Maybe you think your song could work as an electronic music track, or have a few elements in it, but you don’t have the skills to make it happen. This could be the key that turns your song from ok to incredible.

6. Know-How to Finish Song Ideas

Experienced and proficient producers will be well practiced in the highly sought after skill—finishing song ideas. They will have the experience, skillset, and workflow in place to work with you and get tracks finished in an efficient way. From arrangement to mixing and mastering, they should be able to help you get there.

7. A Different Perspective - Four Ears Are Better than Two

Working with an experienced producer gives you someone to bounce ideas off of and offer ideas, doubling brainpower and skillset, and helping you make decisions that push your song closer to finished. Check out Verse-Chorus’s article on collaborative songwriting techniques for advice on working with other musicians. Plus it gives you another set of trained ears that will probably hear things that you don’t.

8. Different Tools

As a songwriter you probably have a few tools in your belt when creating songs, a good producer will have a mountain of different ones to help unlock creativity, and optimize how you work. Want to switch up a melody quickly, or add synth chords and a pad alongside your piano? Want to put your vocal in a sampler and mix it up? Maybe you think a song would work better in a different genre style? A producer could help.

9. Collaboration

Collaborating with producers, and other musicians—including vocalists, singers, composers, and guitarists—is a powerful way to expand your skillset, ideas, profile, and enjoyment when making music. Verse-Chorus is a collaboration platform where you can find producers, and many more musicians to connect and create with, in one place. You can set up a profile with a portfolio, browse ads, and connect with thousands of musicians on Verse-Chorus.

10. Experienced Helping Artists Get Unstuck

An experienced and accomplished producer will have worked with many musicians that were also stuck on songs, and will have the know-how to navigate these situations, alongside many tools, and techniques to help.

11. Help You Expand an Idea

Got an idea that is currently very small? An acorn of an idea that you know has potential to be something great, but you aren’t sure how to make it larger. Producers can help you to expand ideas into arrangements, sentences into choruses and transform tiny ideas into full songs.

12. Atmosphere and Polish

Producers can add atmosphere to your tracks, and rapidly make your vocals, instruments, and other elements sound better. This can help some musicians to visualise the end product, helping to kick off creativity when writing, or give more confidence and improv ideas for a track when singing, or playing an instrument.

Written by Nick Stephens, a music production tutor, music marketing writer, and down to his DNA—music obsessive. When he isn’t making music you can find him at live music events, DJing up and down the UK, including Glastonbury, and the gym—sometimes.