All good. Go read it. Either find somewhere with a good view, or pull one up on your screen use a site like Pexels to find good photos. Alternatively, you could use a visual cue to write a melody. Work your way through your Spotify library and find two stylistic ideas that complement each other and inspire you, then get to work. For more help with this, check out the Song Palette Strategy. This will be your last resort when you lack inspiration.
Go into your studio, close your eyes, and put the playlist on. Sometimes you just need new source material and tools to inspire you. Grab something new and treat yourself. Do this sparingly. Need suggestions? You might not come up with anything decent, but at least you sat there and fought the resistance.
This is also a good time to mention that sleep is important. Create a routine and stick to it. Jump on the decks and mix a few tunes together. Just relax and see what comes. And if you do neither, get yourself a cheap MIDI controller so that you can jam around. Try to take a complete break from music. You want to reset. You can sit around all day thinking about producing new music or you can just get right into it.
You can probably imagine which option is most likely to produce new music. So, sometimes just getting started is enough to get the creative juices gushing again. Stop the thinking and just do it! New music, especially great music, can kick-start your neurons into action.
Find a good playlist for new music in your genre and listen to that. Or, try out genres you don't know. Take some notes. Or, just listen. After a while you may just want to make something new so bad that you have no choice but to hit the studio and produce. A good story in the form of a well-produced film can work wonders for inspiration. Use this to your advantage by opening up your DAW right after you've watched the movie and the emotion is still kicking about inside you. Channel it right into your musical inspiration and produce like a beast until you've captured it!
Meditation may or may not help straight away. The real inspiration however comes when you've made it a daily habit and you've stuck to it for a while. The daily break you take just to do and think nothing is at the very least a good break away from the problem-solving mind-state, a state which is the exact opposite of the playful state of creativity.
Great art has the ability to spark creativity in us. So, if you're lucky enough to live in a city with good museums and art galleries then you should use this fact to fan the flames of your own musical inspiration. It's easy to lose a sense of urgency when you produce your own music.
Side-step this tendency with the use of strict deadlines. With strict I mean it's a final cut-off. No ifs or buts. You reach the deadline, you stop and it's done. Get out in the streets or hit the park. Oh, and keep your phone or a notepad handy because some of the best ideas come when your feet are moving!
A night out to see a new act can remind you why you're in this game of music production. It's also a great way to get out of your own bubble in the studio and re-ignite your passion for production. A weekend at a festival has the same effect of seeing a good show but with more acts and therefore more variety which leads to greater chances of finding musical inspiration.
Set up a Pinterest account and use a secret board to gather images that provoke or invoke musical inspiration for your next track, EP or album. This is great way to get in the mood for some spectacular studio sessions!
Force yourself to write a list of 20 ideas for songs when you drink your first coffee in the morning. This practice will get the gears of musical inspiration spinning within a week or two. Keep at it! I'll finish a new track every week for 5 weeks. I'll finish an EP in 2 weeks. Goals work very well for many producers and have the added benefit of a built-in deadline.
Create a basic plan of action for your goal and then get to work. Think of it a bit like an NLP hook and trigger. Devise a little ritual you can do every time you start a work session in the studio. Your brain will start to associate the ritual with playtime and soon you'll find it easier to get into the flow state in the studio.
Light a joss stick of incense. Do a little dance. Maybe do some simple stretches. What you do doesn't matter as much as the gesture of doing it. It's a great way to empty your head and make room for musical inspiration to visit. It's also a great way to record your ideas, dreams and concerns in a safe place for future reference.
Make a time every day for writing. Mornings seem to work best for many creatives like me and you. Consider this to be a bit like musical self-reflection. You may want to improve or take a new direction completely.
A long break from an old track can spark quick inspiration when you hear it again. The ideas for improvement just seem to pop-out instantly on the first listen-through. Can you create a finished track in 1 hour? How about a full-length album in a week?
You won't know unless you try. Just be ready to jump out and head to your home studio half-wet in a towel. Great ideas seem to like to come around when you least expect it. Expect them! It can be a musician or producer's bio or not. The life and times of a great human has the ability to make you reconsider your own life and what you want to achieve.
It can, in other words, be a nice kick in the rear-end to get you going in the studio. Imagine your life 5 to 10 years from now. Where do you want to be?
What don't you want to regret? What's the list of achievements you want under the belt by then? Try to make a track with one sample. Limit yourself to one synth. Only allow yourself to use 8 tracks in your DAW. A visit to another town or country can create the contrast you need to get out of a creative rut.
Choose a track you like and try to recreate it. You won't be able to perfectly. Sometimes you'll come up with something different because you took a detour while trying to recreate the track. Congratulations you've tricked yourself into musical inspiration by not looking for it! So, decide to just jam a bit for fun. No pressure! Take 90 minutes and get into jamming it for it's own sake.
This is a great way to introduce the power of the random into your world of routine stultified musical habits. The strategies are available in physical card form but there are also sites available that offer a digital version. It may be a life-long friend. It may be your mom. It may be your girlfriend. It could even be a pet. What would you produce if you had to put your love for them into music?
Instant musical inspiration! Not all musical inspiration comes in the form of fluffy bunnies or rainbow-maned unicorns. Sometimes you have to get a bit angry! Think of someone or something you hate and then channel it into a new track. Jay stopped writing his lyrics down after his first album, claiming that writing forced him to rethink his words too many times and arrested the flow of his ideas. His best songs are those that he writes in five minutes. Even Pharrell, king of pop, was amazed by Jay's process: "Jay-Z mumbles when he writes his songs; he mumbles for minutes, then he comes back with like 16 bars of one of the most comprehensive verses you have heard in a long time.
He does it every time. But again, there is some sort of skill set to accompany his madness. But Jay told Oprah that he had to build this mental stamina by practicing every day.
He described this practice as "exercise. Lamar's creative method is totalizing. He sleeps little and works a lot. Up at 9, ate some type of breakfast, did a couple phone interviews, played some beats on my computer prior to me comin' back up here, so I could be ready and know what I wanted to get into. Came to the studio, laid down what I wanted to write, and then straight to the Kanye show.
The man is constantly writing out snippets of lyrical ideas in notebooks, on his phone or on napkins. He surrounds himself with staff who understand that if he gets hit with a lyrical idea, he'll "need a studio ASAP to get this off. Image Credit: Tumblr. Ocean, on the other hand, tries to downplay the role that spontaneous inspiration plays in his music. He only writes while at "work," and when he leaves the studio he puts music out of his mind completely.
If he's not feeling what he's writing, he'll " abort mission ," pack up and drive around the city, or binge-watch TV to recharge — he has cited Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones as two of his more useful creative tools.
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