I was watching Bill Bailey the other night and seeing him do one of his skits with the whole live performance thing (think it was Daytime DnB Babylon) and it just triggered something in my head, so went next door and cranked something out...it's currently hovering at the 3min mark and I'll probably need another couple of hours to finish it off in terms of structure and bells & whistles.
EDIT - was hoping to find a video of this, but only thing Google is throwing up is the Mp3 -
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=D195HVVD
Inspiration is whereever you get it tbh. Only couple of tips I can really give are;
- Keep a note pad with you at all times to write stuff down
- If you're feeling stuck, fire up the DAW and have a session of sound design. Make templates, dick around with crazy effects chains, do some patch design work, bounce out everything. This has the added benefit of not only triggering off some "oooo...that sounds good!" moments but also building up your sound library
- If you get really stuck, listen to a song you're loving at the moment and try to recreate it.
For this last point, I did this for a Shackleton tune a while ago on here;
wub wrote:Listen to a song you like, and make notes on it's arrangement on a pad of paper as you're listening to it. So for example
this Shackleton tune I had the following notes;
Vinyl crackle in background
Bongo loop
Vocal sample
Synth/deep pads
Synth/Higher bleeps
2nd vocal sample
Piano hook
Drop into synth bleep, different pattern
synth pads build
bass drop, gradual with [can't read my handwriting here]
sub kick & stuttery snare
Bongos come back
vocal samples on heavy delay
Variation in bongos
Bass drops
Piano comes back
2nd vocal sample
Bongos in and out
Piano variation
Synth bleeps
Drop, roll out, strip out
Syntax is a bit off in some of them, and haven't used the 'correct' terms for some of the elements, but the main thing is that I associate my notes with what I was hearing as the tune progressed. Then fired up FL and tried to recreate what I'd heard, using the above as a template. Didn't sound anything like the original, but it was enough of an excerise to give myself a grounding in a few new methods, plus had a pre existing structure to base things on, even if the finished product was quite far removed from the original.
Try and replicate the structure to give you an idea of what changes make on the feel of the tune. When you're happy, do it with another tune. Repeat.
This technique not only makes you think about how existing tunes are put together and thus aids with understanding structure, it also frees you from creativity chasing as you already know (roughly) what you're going out to achieve. When I did the above example, it sounded nothing like the Shackleton tune I'd set out to recreate, but it was a fun little exercise and a couple of the percussion loops I'd developed for it I really liked the sound of, so they got bounced out and set aside for inclusion in a future project.
Kaiori's thread is also pretty fucking next level as far as inspiration goes -
http://www.dubstepforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=176281 - though it's more beating you around the head with the stick of inspiration than suggesting you lie down and sample the grass growing hippy style bollocks.
<--- assuming this is a "saluting" yellow circle man.
