Anyone in any creative field, be it art, music, sculpture, or literature will tell you that the moment when you come up with a great idea is one of the most satisfying a creator can have. It’s like finally solving a difficult puzzle that you’ve been working on for months, and this elusive stroke of inspiration makes up for all the dry spells we all experience (a phenomenon better known as “writer’s block”.) No creator, no matter how talented or experienced they are, can escape writer’s block, so conquering it is a subject that all creators have a vested interest in.

I don’t claim to have a surefire, cure-all solution - if I did, I’d be swimming around in a vault of gold coins a la Scrooge McDuck - but there are some techniques and strategies that musicians can use to mitigate the symptoms of writer’s block and conquer it faster.

I. AIR (Always In Record)

The concept behind this one is simple. If you play any sort of instrument, and that instrument plays some role in your composition process, then don’t play it in a writing session unless you’re recording! The idea here isn’t to produce amazing performances or takes at all times, but to capture ideas that might be spur-of-the-moment. How many times have you hit some weird chord or played a progression that sounded great, only to find that you can’t remember what you did? This isn’t uncommon, folks!

If you’re working with MIDI, it’s even easier since you don’t have to worry about hard drive space. You can record tons and tons of MIDI data, filing it away every so often without ever coming close to filling up the smallest of hard drives. Some sequencing programs today even offer a sort of recording buffer by default, which captures recorded data at all times just in case you get a great idea before you hit the record button.

II. Recycling

Closely related to this concept of AIR is the idea of saving all of your sketches and works-in-progress, even if you don’t feel like they could ever become full-on productions. In many cases, you might come up with a great chord progression, riff, or rhyme, but you can’t think of what else to do. Don’t scrap it, save it for later. You might start another project later where you can drop that same progression, riff or lyric.

Here’s a great anecdote. While working on my 2007 album Antigravity, I went through a period where I was producing a lot of short, 20-30 second loops and sketches that I just couldn’t seem to finish. I not only saved each one, but also rendered the drum patterns that I had written for each song. A few months later, I started a song that I was very confident about and ultimately ended up integrating several drum patterns from those older projects to create the rhythms. The song (”Breathing You In”) went on to be the most popular on the album!

If you feel guilty about recycling material… don’t. The most successful songwriters produce huge volumes of material annually, yet only a small percentage of those go on to generate income for them. Do you think each of those songs is completely unique? They don’t have to be! In my opinion, making music is more about refining your techniques and ideas - an evolutionary process - than it is about coming up with entirely new material with every piece.

III. Break Your Routine

Have you ever heard the advice that you should “try something new every day”? It’s not some empty maxim. Our brains in many ways parallel muscles in the rest of our body. They can be exercised and stimulated to “grow”. The primary difference is that our brains really crave this stimulation, which we don’t often give to them. While this might seem quite abstract, it has direct effects on our ability to be creative.

If you do the same things every day, taking the same route to work, eating the same food, playing the same games, watching the same television programs, and so on, then you’re simply not providing adequate stimulation to your brain. This is because our capability to imagine is fundamentally linked to our perception. In other words, if you’re not feeding your brain new material on a regular basis, your ability to create your own new material is weakened.

The remedy for this is easy. Force your brain to create new neural pathways by doing new things all the time. Take a different route to work. Get a cookbook and make a dish you’ve never attempted before. Rearrange your studio room. It doesn’t matter whether or not these new things are related to music at all. When your brain creates the new neural pathways, those SAME pathways will facilitate your creativity.

IV. Listen to New Music

In many ways, this suggestion is similar to the above suggestion to do new things. However, in some ways it’s actually even more beneficial, so it merits its own section. Many writers and musicians fall into the habit of only listening to music in genres that they themselves create. Electronica artists tend to listen to electronica, punk bands tend to listen to lots of punk, postmodern classical composers tend to surround themselves with other postmodern classical composers.

You’ll be doing yourself a huge favor if you actively seek out music in genres that you don’t normally listen to. Maintaining this wide breadth can be very helpful in your creative process. Consciously or subconsciously, you’ll end up synthesizing elements from everything you’re listening to.

I’ve noticed that the most well-respected and popular artists of any given genre tend to have influences that range far beyond that genre. For example, legendary video game music composer Nobuo Uematsu writes epic music for roleplaying games, having scored the bulk of the Final Fantasy series. His influences? Elton John, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Pink Floyd and Tchaikovsky, among others.

Needless to say, even without hearing his music, it is reasonable to assume that with those influences he would be writing much more interesting music than a video game composer who is only influenced by… other video game composers!

V. Go With the Flow

Many people suggest that you should not try to force creativity. I’m not sure I agree with this, because many great pieces of music have been created under the looming spectre of deadlines and overbearing directors, producers or patrons. I think a more accurate piece of advice would be to go with the flow. By this I mean that musicians should follow where their inspiration takes them.

It’s tempting to sit down with a preconceived notion of exactly what you want to write, in what style, at what tempo, etc. Maybe you’ve been given guidelines by somebody else. If your inspiration starts pushing you in a slightly different direction, don’t fight it! It’s counter-productive to let the “rational” (left) side of your brain dictate what the other side does. I’ve personally had very little success writing music when I try to set excessive guidelines on what I ’should’ be writing.

Of course, this can be a very frustrating rule to follow. You might actively want to write a heavy rock song, but all the progressions and melodies you keep coming up with sound more like they belong in a slow ballad. It’s OK to try to refocus your creative urges; just don’t shut them out and ignore them. In a worst case scenario where your inspiration is way off what you want (or need) to do, save what you come up with and use it later (see Recylcing above!)

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.