It happens all too often, doesn’t it – you just can’t end up satisfied with what you put down, no matter how many hours you spend trying to extract your best performance and record it impeccably. You end up feeling disappointed in yourself, questioning your passion for music and abandoning plenty of perfectly fine sounding recordings and ideas because, as it turns out, you are quite the little perfectionist!

Don’t worry, it’s common among all artistic types. Drooble users know your pain and discussed it in the Communities section. Some helpful, feel-good tips for solving the situation emerged from the discussion and we collected them for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

1. Being self-critical is a positive trait

Tom Langan argues that being self critical – within good reason – will help tremendously by making you “push” yourself and your music. Nobody got to sound better because they got complacent and 100% comfortable with their musical ability. Rather, the music always suffered in some way. So embrace the uncertainty, keep working to achieve better performances, and you’ll eventually feel better about your playing!

2. Stop when the recording sounds good, even if not perfect

Johan Vegna suggests to stop recording and trying to put down a better-sounding part when what you hear sounds just good enough to make the pass. Get things sounding close to ideal as possible when recording, then make them sound “perfect” in the production stage with some light editing and timing correction.

3. Let your ears rest

Yvalain Debodinance rightfully suggests letting your ears take a break. This is something you should be doing every 45 minutes of audio work, taking 10 to 15 minutes of quiet time to let your ears return to their normal, non hyper-focused state of hearing. Otherwise, you are a few hours away from getting into the dreaded situation where a mix or recording which sounded just fine while you were working on it actually turned out quite horrible and must be deleted forever…

4. Appreciate more of what you do

Cesar Cruz chimes in with a helpful reminder: while being self-critical helps a lot, so does being appreciative of whatever you managed to accomplish. Be proud of the hard work you put in as a musician and producer striving to improve the quality of their output. Little by little, you are doing the right thing and growing into a big, talented musical monster. We hope you’ll never lose the time and inspiration!

5. Ask friends what they think of your stuff

Luca Vignali says – when you are entrenched into self-critical doubt, go ahead and ask your friends what they think about your stuff. It may very well turn out the result of your work sounds objectively better to other people than what you thought of it. And this will give you a much welcome boost in confidence, not to mention impressing your friends and feeling good because you sound cool! If you don’t… well, at least you will be certain about it and able to proceed by asking where and what you could improve. So you win, again!