It’s an interesting subject and one I’ve discussed at length numerous times on other forums. I think most of us have been here at one point or another. Though much has already been touched on here and there, outside of just good ol’ fashioned discipline and hard work, I’ve often noticed two common factors at play which greatly affect productivity. Infinite-possibility-syndrome and horizontal thinking.
As we are continually bombarded with more and more inexpensive and easily attainable tools/instruments, so has our mastery of each lessened for there is never enough time in the day to truly learn them so well that they become purely intuitive because there always seems to be a “greater, better sounding, more powerful” alternative around the corner; constantly in search of that “holy grail” instrument or plug-in which will somehow elevate your music ever higher or a shortcut to make things easier. We’ve all heard the term “less is more” before and while this obviously does not apply to everyone, I can at least speak for myself in saying that having a more limited selection of tools can actually be less inhibiting in the end for me. Though fewer in number, I understand them more deeply and can get the kind of sounds I hear in my head out of them without having to think about the technical details. My inspiration is never interrupted because I understand the tools so well that they don’t get in my way. That is the true holy grail, in my opinion. Not so much the actual tools themselves, but getting to know them so well that they become an unconscious extension of your creative self. Nothing dampens my inspiration more quickly than rummaging through 100s of synth presets or sample libraries in search of that “perfect” sound. Historically, I’ve noticed that I almost never find it, but when I’m creating or processing my own sounds with tools or instruments I deeply understand, it is simply another part of the creative flow and the vibe doesn’t die.
The other issue is horizontal thinking. It is very easy to get so wrapped up in the moment, building up a pattern with track after track of sounds, that you can lose sight of where you might be going. This is vertical thinking and while it is obviously a valuable part of the music making process, the horizontal is equally, if not more important. Have you given any thought to an overall plan? What are you trying to achieve? Where would you like the song to go? Is there a certain mood or emotional journey that you’d like to convey? One of the most common and fundamental elements to the majority of the music in our culture is the existence of tension and release, in some form or another. If you think of music as the building up and release of energy, it can really help when mapping out your song structure. Obviously, everyone approaches this side of music making differently, but another aspect is theme and variation. Humans usually like some element of repetition or pattern that they can recognize. We’re pattern seeking machines. Introducing musical themes or motifs (either melodic or rhythmic) and bringing them back later either identically or with some familiar variations is usually very appealing. Having this in mind can also help you flesh out your songs.
Well, this subject could go on and on, but I think it’s a really valuable discussion because it’s an issue that I think everyone has struggled with at some point. Keep at it and don’t give up. I personally find the creative process intensely rewarding and would love to see everyone share that feeling.
In the case of VSTs I tend to agree with you, though I am still a leecher of most freeware VSTs I can get (stopped w4r3zing some long time ago) because I often find myself having to do rather generic music for some project (movie or art) where I just need (for example) “a pad”. It’s nice to have alot of VSTs with alot of presets for those cases.
But on the other hand I wrote some basic synths and effects myself in reaktor (namely a Bass and a Pad-Synth aswell as some effect that would normally need a chain of effects (gated delay and stuff like that)), the great thing is that I understand those completely and can edit them if I need something not yet possible. Something thats hard with “as-is”-software.
So its a good idea to pick a few “work-horse”-VSTis and spend some time with them.
As for samples, my advice is to get as much basic material as you can get (and organize it).
Because drums and rhythm are a major part of my music I have an extensive collection of single drums, i even went so far to run most of my loops trough waveknife to chop them up. This huge amount of samples is quite will organized (in kicks, snares, open hihats aswell as again in “real” and “electronic”) and I regularly spend hours to organize new material. The point is that atleast for me it doesn’t work to have 10 claps and then just tweak one of those until it’s right, I prefer 100+ claps so I can browse them fast and find one thats near perfect (after abit of tweaking of course).
Back in the old days I had many .xm, buzz and .rns files that were incomplete and mostly 1 minute loops, but at one point I simply started to finish my songs to get more experience in building a better song structure. Nowadays I almost every time finish a song when I’ve started it. It helps a lot if you really like the stuff you compose. If you don’t then just forget the project or spice it up somehow to make it interesting. Listen to other songs how they are built and try to make a similiar structure, but use your creativity, too! I don’t like all of my finished songs, but they sure have given me experience in making better songs. So, just do it, finish the best loop you’ve built to get started! Perhaps it’s not laziness, because you do compose a lot? Believe in yourself I tend to have 1 or tops 2 projects running at the same time and like to compose 8 or more hours in a row. An easy way to make a finished song is to make one pattern which has one whole theme (drums, bassline, riffs a melody or two) and then build how the song evolves into that theme, and then just compose how the song progresses and goes perhaps into the second theme etc. There must be dozens of ways to make a song, you can start straight from intro and build the song to the end, but that’s not the easiest way, at least not for me. I’ll give you a tip: use notepad to make remarks which parts should be changed, I mean write everything that doesn’t sound good to your ear and fix them. It’s easier to finish your song with the help of notepad.
! i couldn’t believe it so i had to google it.oh my… this explains a Lot.
when i stop tracking to look around, i have these surges of excitement. tho after that i usually lose focus.
I reckon a lot of this is personal preference though, to be honest.
Collabs are often a good way to keep things rolling (if the other person is not too busy).
What you can do, is download a massive sample bank from a genre completely alien to you and try to make a track using your own cuts and manipulations of the sounds.
This is all chit chat though.
Go out to a party, get stoked, come back, have a few more beers and get it on.
Seriously, though, it’s a discipline for me to complete tunes because I have a habit of the same thing. To break this, at least for me, I give myself a deadline to have a finished product. If I start the tune on a monday, I tell myself, “By Sunday night, I am going to have a full draft from beginning to end of this loop as a song.” If Sunday night comes around and I’m still not done, I step it up, or cut the song short. Then I set another goal; to have all the effects and mastering type nuances done by the next week. If I don’t have it complete, then I just keep what’s done. I notice that when I get onto it like it’s project to get completed or it’s scrapped, it really motivates me to continue and I generally always make my deadline. I work best under pressure, though, so that may be it. If I don’t feel the pressure, I don’t feel like doing squat.
At any rate, I used this philosophy to record an EP…I had 1 month before I was to be shipped off to boot camp (USN for anyone who gives a rodent’s rear) so I set my goal to be completed with the 4 track EP by the day before I left. I almost made it (got halfway through the last song), but it’s probably the work of which I’m most proud, not only for the music but for the fact that I had a goal and damned near reached it, even with all the business and partying that was going on during my last month as a normal mofo.
Again, personality types differ for what motivates them into completing a tune. Look for yours. Also, if it helps, don’t look at a track and think, “man, this is a crapload of work.”…try to think, “man, this will friggin’ jam in my car stereo when it’s done!” That works for me, too.
Well put… Totally agree on this… I’ve been thinking this stuff alot lately too.
There are so much other things in life that can affect this stuff. It might be something not related to computers or music at all that makes the inspiration go away… Those things too need to be fixed before the art = receiving inspiration stuff can happen again.
To Happy Milkshake Man:
Maybe you should find out if there is something what is keeping / holding you back in general?
Or on the other hand… I’ve noticed that sometimes just conquering a technical restrainer in music making helps as much as having the side of life affecting arts receiving in balance. So possibly learning some cool new keyboard shortcuts to easen the workflow might also do the trick for you.
Step 1. BEGIN
Step 2. TRY to complete
IF stops going…
Step 3. … try to DESTROY it creatively!
Step 4. Repeat steps 1 and\or 2
Seriously, it helped me so many times when I felt like my song is coming to a halt! I suddenly snapped out of it with - “ah, to hell with it!” attitude - and gave the track some “spanking”, began to twist, erase, squash, slice and otherwise mangle the patterns until… Until the track got some new life or was trashed completely - at least I got some joy out of it!
Sometimes the results were more than surprising!
More often then not this “block breaking technique” helped me to move on, also in the directions I’d never have found otherwise.
I’ve learned that there’s not only Shiva in me, there’s Vishnu as well! I like to let them both dance!
Anyway, i suspect that’s how things like breakcore and glitch were born. It’s all about a balance of chaos and creation.
PS There’s also a very interesting tip about writing fiction which can sometimes be also useful in tracking: “If it’s going well - stop.”
I find that getting nowhere with the same loop can ultimately suck away all your creativity and passion for making music. It sometimes gets to the point where giving up totally seems like the only possible solution.
Very rarely do I have a crystal clear vision of what I want to achieve, just a rough idea, maybe I want to make an upbeat track with some breaks, then I’ll start adding some synth (The sounds themselves can be inspirational for certain melodies). If it doesn’t come together quickly I start obsessing over the overall sound, the production, why doesn’t it sound as good as professionally mixed and mastered tracks. I could spend days doing this.
My point is that I’ve learned not to do this in future. I’m glad it’s happened in a way because it’s an experience that I’ve gained something from even though it felt very negative at the time. If a tracks not working I’m quite happy to move onto something else. I’m treating my initial ideas as concepts. It’s like designing anything really; a few concepts must be made before the final piece is achieved. Sometimes it just works! Last night I started something and within an hour I had a full 5 minute track pretty much finished whereas last weekend I spent it all working on a single bar loop and I’m not even happy with it.
Being your own worst critic is not a bad thing if you learn and take positive things from it. I don’t think it’s easy but it’s the challenge that keeps most of us going and the reward that you get from making something that you are happy with.
dunno if this has been mentioned before, but designing your own texture-sets for use in renoise is a nice deviation when bored with a track. Lately I’ve picked up my hexeditor fetish again and been filtering out values from or adding them in supplied textures in the renoise folder. This combined with photoshop and you can get good results.
I’d like to share some of the textures I’ve made, but my uploading site seems to be down
I go though mental blocks all the time. I think the best thing you can do is join a compo! Setting your own deadline doesn’t work. If you have a compo with a theme, like BeatBattle, it should be easier to visualize and hear music in your head as you track. See if you can’t get a song done for BeatBattle 5.
Imposing limitations on yourself, such as a theme, deadline, or only using certain samples should help bring out your creativity.
Here’s another thing that helps, it was already brought up but I’m seconding this: Change your state! Making Renoise look different can bring different ideas.
First of all, there is no need to violate yourself to do something (I doing that very othen and all i have after - is tired ears and eyes:) ). I have lots of unfinished tunes in renoise.
My cure is:
Open and listen your unfinished works.
While listening, select what you want to finish this time and there may come some ideas about what you want to do further with it.
DON`T look in renoise, running patterns, rows e.t.c.! Just listen, it helps you to percept complex feel of your track you want to finish. Listen it llike you listen your favorite CD!
Relax and do what you feel. Let it flow by itself. Don`t think, just do and listen what you do.
Finish it and thats all. Go sleep, or something else, don`t think about music, release yourself.
After some time listen what your finished and master it. And forget it, because you have yet a lot of work to finish:).
thats exactly what i do alot of c-cold.
eventually you have so much material, that it starts compounding upon itself.
i like & try to look at my tunes as separate entities, as a sculptor looks at his pieces. so much that sometimes i slip and call them my peices, as if they were solid sculptures. time is irrelevant to me anymore. i believe its better to sit back and influence than tap out 100’s of disposable tunes.
I’m still in a similar state myself as far as completing tracks. I tend to get bogged down in details too often, trying to get a bassline sounding just right for far too long, so I end up getting sick of it and just deleting it or starting a new project.
I’ve noticed I finish far less projects since switching exclusively to Renoise which is a bit troubling, because I actually love Renoise otherwise. It’s just that the arranger view from sequencers made it easier to move forward I think. Even though I started dabbling in trackers originally, I find it hard to move forward using the numerical sequencer, because if you decide to modify the structure later it becomes much more difficult… you kind of have to plan ahead more so than if you’re used to the typical arrangement in sequencers.
Needless to say I’m very much looking forward to an arranger view in Renoise… but lately I am making some progress using a variety of new tactics, some of them from this very thread, mostly by focusing on the most basic aspects of the track first, cloning sections often, saving multiple copies of the project (great for those experimental jams gone wrong), listening to similar “real” tracks for a while whenever I’m distracted or bored, forcing myself to ignore any details including effects, and planning where I want to go with each project and section ahead of time. Making notes also seems to help, even if they are vague.
often, when i’m going through unfinished work, even if i don’t particularly like an idea as a song anymore, i end up rendering portions of it to disk so that i can use the neat bits in other stuff i do want to finish. i think it’s important to recognize that not every renoise file is going to become a heartbreaking work of staggering genius by itself.
I never render,i just make a few patterns with beats and synths,some with brakes main parts whatever,get the production right then press record in sonar or wavelab and just jam live!,then go back to the recording and edit.
My friend, here is the easy way to solve your problem:
Beatbox, hum, and otherwise make noise into a multitrack audio program like Cool Edit / Audition via a microphone. Write your song this way – so that you don’t get caught up with tools and details, and you can focus on SPEED SPEED SPEED.
// Important: Be sure to use a click track (metronome) so that your noise making matches the BPM!!! //
This is the “abstract”. Mix it down to a wav/mp3 with low sample rate and/or bit rate (to keep the file size small). Import it as a sample into Renoise. Give it its own track, and start it at the beginning of your first pattern.
Now, while listening to yourself going weeee warrrrr doof doof etc, replace these sounds using Renoise!
BAM! You are done with the beta version of your WHOLE song.
(You might also consider importing the multitrack/mic/beatbox stuff as individual wavs per track, instead of one monolithic mixdown wav… That way you can start eliminating your “abstract” a bit at a time as you replace it with Renoise. Trust me, you will get sick of hearing your stupid self making stupid noises, so this is the better way.)
Now that you have completed your Renoise ‘beta’, you can focus on details all you want without letting that get in the way of completing your work. You will become a songwriting ninja.
