The Process Is The Product

When producing a tune, it is easy to look at the end result as 'the product'. The final track is what you produced, and the fiddling with DAW's and synths are the means by which you produced it.

But when learning, it is the other way around. When learning, it is the learning process that is the product: the mental patterns learned and grooved in by repetition. Only when you can produce a track from start to finish, in a short time, with little mental effort, is the learning task truly finished.

When producing, it is important that the producing and learning process is fun and rewarding (even if frustrating: the hit you get when you defeat a source of frustration is both beneficial and addictive). Once you've produced something, share it, then bin it.

In line with the Be A Musician philosophy, once you have played a piece on an instrument, that performance in its entirety is consigned to history: all that remains is the memory of having played it. If you want to hear it again, you play it again. It is like that when learning to produce: the more you repeat, the more you remember. Moreover: what you practise, you become: if you practise quickly and easily finding sounds and making clips, then you become good at quickly and easily finding sounds and making clips. If you repeatedly practise arranging, then you become good at arranging. If you practise reproducing sounds, melodies, and harmonies by ear, you become good at that. And if you don't, you don't.

Related to this is the philosophy of Focus On One Thing, Cheat For Everything Else. If you're not striving to learn arrangement, then don't waste any time on it, but if you are striving to learn arrangement, then practise arrangement and don't spend much time doing other things. The more focussed your learning activities are, the more yo intensively practise a small number of things, the more those things you focus on are burned into your brain.