From Doom-Scrolling to Done: One Producer's Story of Finishing 15 Tracks
Dylon used to spend hours per session searching for sounds. Here's the full story of how he went from doom-scrolling Splice to finishing and releasing 15 tracks.
7 min read · Updated June 2026 · Written by real, human producers
Dylon has been making beats out of his Brooklyn apartment for six years. He's good — genuinely good. His ear is sharp, his arrangement instincts are solid, his melodies land. The problem was never talent.
The problem was that he couldn't finish anything.
"I'd have a track that was, like, 80% there," he says. "The vibe was right, the melody was working. But I'd spend the rest of the session looking for the right drums. Two hours later, I've got nothing new in the track and I'm frustrated. I'd close the laptop and the next day I'd start something new instead of going back to finish the old one."
He pauses. "I had like 200 unfinished sessions."
The search loop he couldn't break
Like most producers, Dylon subscribed to Splice. He had thousands of sample packs. By any external measure, he had everything he needed to make music.
"That was the thing that confused me. I had all these sounds. I couldn't understand why I couldn't finish anything. I thought it was a me problem — like I wasn't focused enough, or disciplined enough. I started thinking maybe I just wasn't a real producer. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for it."
What he was experiencing is something most producers know but few name: the sample search loop. You need a sound. You search for it. The search never ends satisfactorily. The creative window closes. The session dies.
"I'd spend the whole session auditioning kicks and snares. Hundreds of them. And at some point, they all start sounding the same. You stop being able to tell what's good anymore. And you end the session with nothing finished and six sounds you half-liked downloaded to a folder you'll never open again."
What changed
Dylon found Just 4 Kicks through a comment thread — someone in a producer forum mentioned switching from Splice to AI generation and being satisfied with the result.
"I was skeptical. I'd tried other AI music tools, and they felt like novelties — fun to play with once, but not something you'd actually use in a real session. But the concept made sense: describe the sample, get the sample. Skip the whole search step."
He bought Just 4 Kicks and tried it that night.
"The first thing I noticed was how fast it was. I typed 'deep 808 with a slow tail and soft attack' and had a sound in like 2 seconds. It wasn't perfect, but it was close. I tweaked the sub body knob a little, adjusted the decay, and it was there. That whole process was maybe two minutes."
"And then I just... kept making the track."
The output shift
In the two months after switching to AI-generated kick drums, Dylon finished 15 tracks. He released 8 of them. For context: in the two years before, he'd released 8 projects.
"It's not that the kicks sound better than what I was finding on Splice. Some of them do, some of them are about the same. What's different is that I'm not losing 90 minutes of session time every time I need a kick drum."
He describes the change as momentum: "When you're in a session and the music is flowing, the worst thing you can do is stop and go hunting for a sound. That kills the momentum completely. Now I describe what I need, I get it, and I stay in the flow. The tracks get finished because I never fully leave the creative state."
On the sounds themselves
We asked Dylon whether the AI-generated samples actually sounded different from what he'd been finding before.
"The thing that surprised me most was how unique they felt. Like, the sounds I was finding on Splice — I'd hear them in other people's tracks. You recognize them. These samples, nobody has them. It's a weird feeling to know that a sound only exists because I described it. It's mine in a way that a downloaded sample never was."
He's since started using Just 4 Kicks for all his kick drums and is waiting for Just 4 Snares to drop.
"I'm not going back to scrolling. I don't have the time, and honestly, I don't have the patience anymore. Once you've worked with a tool that just gives you what you asked for, going back to searching through thousands of options feels insane."
The 200 unfinished sessions
We asked about those 200 unfinished sessions sitting on his hard drive.
"I've gone back to some of them. Finished a few — swapped out the drums, rebuilt the foundations. It's like seeing old sketches that just needed someone to complete them. The ideas were always good. The workflow was the problem."
He laughs. "I'm probably never finishing all 200. But I've stopped adding to that pile."
Just 4 Kicks — €99 one-time. Generate the exact kick you hear in your head. No scrolling, no searching, no subscriptions.
