Day 207: How to be endlessly creative.

Nothing worse than setting some time aside to finally work on that masterpiece only to stare blankly at your DAW without a clue.

Drag a few on beat kick drums into the drum rack, create a one finger stab... listen to it go round a few bars... yeah, it's not happening is it.

Sometimes it just don't flow like you want it to. Though don't fret all is not lost. While there is no such think as creative magic dust (tho the Rolling Stones might tell you other-wise) there are some things you can do to start the ball rolling.

Synthgear came up with 170 of them:

1. Stop thinking of drums as KICK/SNARE/HIHAT
2. Use more 16th notes!
3. The relationship between percussive sounds and rhythmic noises can be a melodic relationship
4. Turn it into a melody
5. Turn it into percussion
6. Turn it into a pad
7. Think about a bongo player sitting in the street
8. Select a new random tempo
9. What Would Joe Zawinul do?
10. Make a cliché

11. Put in something off-key
12. Get reckless
13. Less logic
14. List your standard process from start to finish, now reverse it
15. If you dismiss an idea, stop and ask yourself why
16. Skip your first impulse and use the second one
17. Do something that isn’t 4/4 now
18. How can you make this fall apart
19. Play it backwards – the part, don’t reverse audio.
20. Pretend your mom is sitting next to you

Check the rest on the original post, but some real good ideas in there, anything to start looking at things from a different angle...

2/365

p&&l

bang!