How many production tutorials have you watched this month? Now, how many tracks have you finished?
For years, my answers were “a ridiculous number” and “please stop asking.”
I watched hundreds of tutorials and only finished three or four songs a year. And I had a perfectly reasonable explanation: I was learning.
If you’re feeling triggered so far, that’s your cue to lean in and pay attention.
Because if you’re like me, learning let me feel productive without the deeply unpleasant experience of being judged.
Yes, by an audience, but also by me.
What I was actually doing was avoiding the struggle. And it took wayyyy too long for me to figure out that the struggle was the entire point.
Sometimes practice just sucks
In 1994, a UCLA psychologist named Robert Bjork gave this idea a name: desirable difficulties.
The idea is that practice that feels hard and slow tends to stick, and practice that feels easy and smooth tends to vanish.
That same year, a college baseball team in California put it to the test.
Two groups got extra batting practice twice a week for six weeks. Every session had fifteen fastballs, fifteen curveballs and fifteen changeups.
One group got them in blocks: fifteen of each, then move on. The other group got the same pitches, shuffled.
You can guess how practice went.
The blocked group looked like pros. By the tenth fastball they knew exactly what was coming and were driving it. Everyone walked off the field feeling great.
The shuffled group looked like they’d never held a bat.
But in the end? The shuffled group hit markedly better. The extra struggle paid off.
Learning in a vacuum
A tutorial on its own is a fastball you knew was coming.
Someone else’s track, someone else’s problem, already found and already solved. You nod along, and it all makes sense.
But applying it to your music? That’s the shuffled pitch, and it’s where the actual lesson gets learned.
And now AI makes that part easier than ever to skip, conveniently handing us answer after answer.
So when something in your mix bugs you, try solving it yourself before asking ChatGPT or Claude. Make the call (“I think the kick disappears because the bass overlaps it”), change one thing, and listen.
You’ll be wrong a lot at first. That’s the struggle doing its job.
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Besides, when you’re in a real studio with real musicians, you’re not going to be pulling up ChatGPT. So you might as well get the reps in now.
That’s how we built the Hyperbits Masterclass. Every lesson gets applied to your own tracks, and our instructors listen to the result and tell you what to fix next.
The struggle stays yours. We just make sure it’s the kind that pays off.
If you’re ready to stop practicing fastballs, here’s how the Masterclass works.