when I first started making music, I thought getting better meant learning more.

another tutorial.

another plugin.

another songwriting technique.

another mixing trick.

and to be fair, all of those things helped.

they taught me how to create.

but over the last few years, I've realised the biggest breakthroughs in my career didn't come from learning new techniques.

they came from learning how to think differently about the techniques I already knew.

this really hit me over the last couple of weeks.

my second leon taro. release, sacrifice, has had a much stronger start than the first.

not because I became a better producer overnight.

I simply had another release behind me.

I understood what worked.

what didn't.

where I'd over complicated things.

I also had the privilege of becoming a Recording Academy voting member last week, which was a real honour.

more than anything, it reminded me that careers are rarely built on one defining moment.

they're built on thousands of small creative decisions that compound over time.

when I first started producing, I thought the people making records I loved simply knew more than I did.

the best producers, artists and songwriters aren't necessarily more talented.

they've simply spent years training themselves to recognise the right decisions.

they know when adding another layer is making the record worse, not better.

when the vocal doesn't need another plugin, it needs a better performance.

when to keep pushing.

and when to finally stop.

that's the part YouTube struggles to teach.

a tutorial can show you how to EQ a vocal.

but it can't tell you whether your vocal actually needs EQ in the first place.

it can show you how to make a chorus bigger.

but it can't tell you whether making it bigger will actually make the song better.

those are creative decisions.

and creative decisions aren't developed by collecting more information.

they're developed by making music.

making mistakes.

getting honest feedback.

by surrounding yourself with people who challenge your thinking.

and by watching experienced creators solve real problems while explaining why they made one choice instead of another.

eventually, you stop asking,

"what plugin did they use?"

and you start asking,

"why did they make that decision?"

that's the question that changes everything.

because once you understand why, you stop copying techniques.

and start developing your own instincts.

that's where taste develops.

where confidence grows.

techniques can be copied.

taste can't.

taste is built.

and I think that's the part of creating music we don't talk about enough.