Help in getting creativity back into my composition

[Eridu]

are you writing the melodies with your mouse or playing it with your keyboard? Two very different things... Sometimes playing in a new key will open up new doors. For example I like f minor and most of the time I played it in f minor. Playing the f minor chord in c# major created so many different combinations. Chord inversions etc...

[Dub_Fiend]

I tend to write stuff on my keyboard really - I play out the tune in my head and then convert that into the melody on the piano roll normally...

Problem is, I'm dog shit at writing on a keyboard. I used to have a big MIDI keyboard but I never really used it that much so I sold it on. Might have to re-invest in a two octave one just to jam on though, I'm becoming more "into" the idea of recording in and then quantising afterwards but I'm just hopeless at it, have no skills at a practical level with playing any melodies so I struggle to convert what I have in my head to a meaningful performance on the keys.

[nowaysj]

I struggle to convert what I have in my head to a meaningful performance on the keys.

Okay, as good a time as any - so this is it right here. You have a melody in your head, and you try to bring it into existence through the piano roll.

I see this as the central problem.

You have a melody in your head, and you bring it into the real world.

Let me tell you something about your head.

It is dumb.

Let me tell you something about the universe: it is stunningly intelligent, it is bewilderingly complex and meaningful.

Your thoughts! Haha, some times I see two people arguing in a professional capacity about some very important issue and I'm like, haha, fucking apes. You've lost most of your hair, but you're a wet, sloppy, ape whose been kicked out of nature, capable of understanding only the simplest of concepts.

Humans are dumb bro. Yes we've achieved quite a transformation of this planet through our collaborative effort, granted. But as individuals, even the brightest amongst us, are fucking knuckle dragging apes.

So what to do about it? How does an ape-human expand their consciousness?

Well by collaborating, for starters. We used to have bands, where four or so people, who each were very good at one thing would come together and make something far greater than themselves. A whole chain of people, and stacks of finely tuned technology was used to capture the performance of these musicians.

If you are capable of 100 thought units, and your best buddy over there is capable of 100 thought units, and working together you guys can output 180 thought units of musical value, you've just achieved something greater than either of you could have.

That is one way.

But if you're really into bedroom production, don't know anybody, don't know anyone with a similar musical vision, or are completely unable to compromise a portion of your musical vision, you're going to need to find ways of expanding your consciousness beyond your general 100 thought unit level, cause there are a lot of people collaborating, either above the board or below, ie collaborations that we never really hear about.

So how to?

Well, one way is learning a musical instrument. Of course if you learn a musical instrument, you can translate musical ideas from your head into your daw with ease. But, my wet ape, if you learn a musical instrument you may start expressing musical ideas that don't originate in your relatively pea sized brain. Instead they may originate in your nimble and crafty fingers, or from that spinning, burning fireball of your heart, or from your twitching, plaintive ass. Who knows where it will come from, maybe all these and more. And it will be more, trust me, than your silly little ideas that you craft in your head.

OR

If you're a die hard computer nerd, and just have to click your days away, find ways to introduce chaos or randomness into your writing process. There are vst's for this. Vst's that diminish your control, and introduce randomness to your musical phrases. Now I'm not saying just strap that on you master! BUT, use a device that will introduce random elements into your work, and then reintegrate those random or unexpected elements into your piece. Make sense of them. Work them. Human ideas that originate in the brain are just so simple - a few elements of randomness can be significantly more complex and novel and interesting than anything simply thought up.

Some people concerned with their ego may say, "oh but you are losing intention!" Whatevers. What if you lost all intention? What would your work be then? Would it be more or less interesting? It very well could be more. But, the point is not to completely lose intention, it is to diminish your intention so new and greater ideas can enter you consciousness. Then, reassert your intention as you incorporate those greater ideas. Forget this concept, or need really, of strict control of the universe. The greater your sense of control, the greater your delusion. We are floating on a great and powerful current. To think we are masters of that is a folly only conceivable in the fore mentioned pea brain.

Open yourself and your work to randomness, the unexpected. You will arrive at destinations you could not conceive of otherwise.

Would like to say more, cite examples, but, again, gotta run to work on music. Talk is cheap.

[Rezzo]

Deep. Is all I have to say to that nowaysj. I'm gonna take some of that advice and use it myself. Big ups.

EDIT: Sorry if this post didn't actually contribute but I found that extremely thought out and deep. Peace.

[ARTFX]

I always try to make a track from start to end and just listen to it and think to myself: "What does this track need next to become even better?". Then I just add that and move on, that way I've completed more tracks than before I thought of making music that way.

[Jizz]

Yess, noways nailed it. I love collaborating and exchanging ideas. And when i do produce, i never like to translate whats in my head verbatim to daw. The real excitement lies in exploring the unknown bro, i would hate restricting my creativity to only the things that could be imagined by my simple head

[nowaysj]

i would hate restricting my creativity to only the things that could be imagined by my simple head

And that is precisely the world we are building for ourselves. As is, look around you. Pretty good chance that everything you see in every single degree of 360x360x360 is completely designed and made by the mind of man.

[Tekk]

Shouts to noways - he got it.
Collaboration is super powerful. I play in a couple bands and every time we jam or have a gig, new ideas come to me off tha hizzay. Whether it be in a jazz combo or in a punk band, playing with other people exponentially increases your experimentation and improves your writing ability tenfold. If you are totally stuck on your own check out http://blend.io/ it's a super cool collab resource.

But yeah on another note - don't listen to electronic music when you're trying to make electronic music. Listen to anything else. Jazz / rock / punk / soul / hip-hip / funk. Don't try and make a song based off of other songs, make a song based off another genre that you're bringing into the electronic realm. There are as many harmonies, melodies, and chord progressions that you can think of in your lifetime in a single big band tune. In my eyes, big band music is the highest level of composition - steal from it.

On (again) another note here's a quote from SOPHIE (https://soundcloud.com/msmsmsm) in an interview with pitchfork: "Aesthetic aims should be secondary to conceptual aims, otherwise you end up with music that is driven by stylistic references rather than its conceptual or musical ideas, or actual content—I’m speaking from experience here. The music or image—the same applies to both—should be built outwardly from conceptual core to aesthetic appearance in order for the conceptual roots to be present and visible in the final product. If you’re working the other way round and trying to force the ideas or content into a pre-existing stylistic mold, then the concepts become warped and deformed."

Steal what you like from others and combine it like a painter combines colors into something new. Keep an aesthetic in mind when composing and immerse yourself in it. The soundscapes you want to hear in that aesthetic will come to you if you dig deep enough.
Good luck.

[Jizz]

i would hate restricting my creativity to only the things that could be imagined by my simple head

And that is precisely the world we are building for ourselves. As is, look around you. Pretty good chance that everything you see in every single degree of 360x360x360 is completely designed and made by the mind of man.

easier to make paper this way br0, if we got control then we can dictate how it flows (APPARENTLY)

[Dub_Fiend]

Some quality advice there noways... much, much kudos.

I find that I'm really eager to collaborate and expand my horizons that way... I just find that there is usually something that is stopping it from happening;

1. We use different DAWs.
2. Things get in the way.
3. One of us loses interest.

Putting that into words though it just sounds like excuses. I don't know, things seem to be coming back to me now but I have a very fragile kind of X-Y scale where my happiness and effort need to be in a 'Zen' to get anything done lol.

[Jizz]

1. not an excuse, believe me

2. maybe they do yes, and if that seems like a genuine restriction then maybe the project wasn't good enough to hold your interest above them anyway so forget about it. but keep trying, it was only by about my fourth collaboration that things actually started to get finished but the first three didn't put me off the idea

3. yeah this goes back to 2, if you lose interest then that's fair enough, but keep trying; and remember it doesn't always have to be just the one collaborator at a time, when i say fourth i mean the fourth person i attempted to collab with hahah

[fragments]

I have a mountain of failed collabs. The one that finally clicked for me was for a collboration compeition for a VA compliation. The other guy worked out the basics of the track. Melody, the synth patch, drums, a pad and some arrangement. He sent me all the audio and MIDI files. I fleshed out what was left and added the bass. I ended up mixing it as the proejct was already in my DAW, but he made a lot of mix decisions by listening and sending feedback.

He was on Reason 5 I think, I was on FL 10 so setup wise we couldnt have been further apart.

The key was not passing shit back and forth a million times. Not saying this works for everyone, but in the past constnatly uploading, downloading, getting the project set up again just for someone to make a few tweaks here and there is pointless.

[Dub_Fiend]

I downloaded Ohm Studio thinking that it would be a good place for collabing within but it just seems a bit... shit lol

Guess I need to get a good workflow going for collabs with other people - that said, I'm going to be doing some stuff shortly with someone else on their system so I guess that's another way around it

[hubb]

Big thread.

Seems a good place to mention what some of those random 'modules' could be.

For me melodyne introduces a lot of new ground to production.

Like in the usual case of wanting to sample something because it sounds great, but you kind of feel that the hiphop looping bits against each other > approach is too convoluted. Then turn it into a midi file instead of working with the wav. You will probably notice that the program interprets the tempo incorrectly and that a few single tones within the chords are off (they don't belong in the scale).
But try to see that as an opening or opportunity for something different, because if you then change that to something that makes sence within your logical grasp, some of the original 'being' or magic of that whole composition you sampled, will still be there, but you get to decide which instruments play what notes and you would have to decide where the note hits rythmically in a new grid. But the complex relationship between notes in a scale is still there and if you just change one, you wont notice the original composition anymore.
In a way it's more about stealing than sampling is, but it forces you think more about a genuine composition than just beats with chords, if that distinction make sence?.

I talk way too much about melodyne.

[Jizz]

you can do a similar thing with Live 9 too if you drag a sample into a midi track, it asks you if you wanna get it harmonized or whatever. i really should explore that a bit more

[nowaysj]

9 is unfolding for you, very nice!

[hubb]

you can do a similar thing with Live 9 too if you drag a sample into a midi track, it asks you if you wanna get it harmonized or whatever. i really should explore that a bit more

is that ableton? sounds super cool. Melodyne is well annoying when used as a track effect inside the daw. Or actually it is for me in the very old version of logic I use where there's a 1 gigabyte ram restriction in the coding ( ).

[Jizz]

yep, ableton... this is what i'm talking about:




yes noways, it certainly is

[hubb]

The thing though, is how the program 'interprets' what is going on in a wave and what those miscalculations also can lead to and taking advantage of that. But definitely similar.

I've noticed via melodyne, that there are quite a few (under normal circumstances) inaudible things inside a recording, that you can then turn up and use as samples on their own. I bet that is down to how complex the programs algorythm works in 'interpretting' what tonal qualities physically exist within that recording. Don't know. But it's not exactly just determining pitch like for example a guitar tuner.

[Jizz]

yea them hidden resonant frequencies are the best, sometimes you can unearth a brand new melody that was hiding behind the original one