Hi Dan. How do you know, before releasing music, that the sound/genre you working on with an artist is the one who really identofies them?
When making music with an artist, we spend a lot of time talking about and experimenting with different sounds as we’re writing/producing. I’d say a large portion of the time spent in the studio isn’t physically making music but actually just talking about it and seeing what styles they like/gravitate towards. Also, when working on a song with an artist I will usually try multiple different ideas on the song to see which one we both like the best. Sometimes that means making a piano version, a guitar version, a synth version, etc. So by the time we reach the end product, we are both pretty confident in the sonic identity.