Most producers will eventually encounter a situation where a piece of music doesn't feel finished, but they aren't sure what to add. I have come to find that oftentimes the answer truly lies in what you can subtract.
It sounds abstract, so I'll elaborate. The job of a producer is to crank out ideas, but we all should recognize that even the best of the best don't strike gold every time. With this in mind, we should try to contextualize our music in the frame of a similar artist. At least 80% of my ideas end up going into the recycle bin, only seeing the light of day when I need a bridge or something that isn't the heart of the new project. I'm not suggesting that you change the amount of projects you scrap, but rather that you consider changing the amount of elements you scrap within the project.
With this line of thinking, you can start actively evaluating the most important parts of your composition. Once you have decided on the core elements, it's much easier to build around them effectively. Sometimes we get bogged down by the idea that as a producer, we need to saturate our tracks. There's this thought many of us have (myself included) that we need to have a lot going on for a piece to be interesting. That simply isn't the case. Take a moment to think about some popular pieces in a more acoustic style, such as Lewis Capaldi's "Someone You Loved". There are countless songs that use silence and minimal sounds in their instrumentation and see incredible success.
This isn't an incredibly complex idea, but I understand how hard it can be to change your production headspace or your ideas of what "should be". I'll leave you with this: next time you get stuck on an idea, instead of adding a bunch of things, try to see how much you can take away and still maintain the core of the piece. You might be surprised at how less can be so much more.
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