Here we go again – you are reading this because you stare at an empty file in your DAW and don’t know how to start with your new project. Trust me, I have been there several times before, and every one of us is so. I, too, looked up some blog posts for ideas but never found actual good input.
I found a few workarounds for me to break the so-called “writers’ block” and decided to put them on display for you.
Inspiration is not like a fully stretched-out theme that at some point magically shows up in your brain. Music develops from tiny, fragile ideas. It is now the composer’s craft to carefully organize these ideas and arrange them so they can show their full potential.
1. Inspiration - wrong expectations and ways to give it a better spin.
Inspiration is a myth, according to people working in creative jobs. If you are an architect, you can’t just delay the project because you didn’t find the right mood to work. But there are barriers and blocks out there that keep your progression back. Often, it’s a barrier we put in front of ourselves because we think that the current idea is not good enough.
And that’s a common misconception.
You don’t lack of inspiration, but of imagination to where this small idea can lead you. I have this terrible habit of opening up a new project and bombard it in the first half an hour with tons of new instrument voices, diffrent progressions, melodies, etc. But every element implemented gets deleted later on because I think it isn’t good enough. After half an hour, my inspiration stagnates, and it becomes harder and harder to come up with new things. After another hour of nearly zero progress, I close the project in frustration.
Let’s say you try to come up with a new musical theme for ten minutes every day. After a week, you would have maybe ten fletched-out ideas in front of you. If you spent more time in a single session, like 5 hours in one day, I’m sure you would have stuck after the first three.
We tend to be perfectionists, and that’s the real barrier, not the lack of new ideas.
To make this habit a bit better, it would help to actively try not to be over picky at the start – because the track at the end usually goes a diffrent direction than initially thought. It also would be a good habit to write new themes for ten minutes right at the beginning of your composing session. Use it as a warmup for your fingers, or do this while your current project gets loaded.
2. New Sound Sources
The most energetic moment when writing music is when we open up this newly purchased library for the first time. Fiddling around with all those knobs and sliders, zipping through a ton of new french horn sounds (even if we already have fifty others in our library), and playing around with this one excellent drone SFX.
That’s all nice, but the problem is that after an hour of playing around, we stare at the same white piece of paper as an hour ago. But this time, we have picked two or three stunning new sounds we want to implement. So let’s say I have a new solo oboe I fell in love with. I loaded it up and love the melancholic sound it makes – especially when I’m landing from an A to a D. And tada: We have our first small musical idea.
With an A and a D, I already have two parts of my chord progression and from there on it becomes easier and easier.
Getting new sounds is the easiest way to get access to a ton of new ideas. But it can become quite expensive – so look out for freebies or use the second trick below.
3. Record your own Sound
“Create your own sound” is a phrase you might have read a thousand times before. And it always felt like you are looking for a solution for your toothache till your visit to the dentist, and someone recommends: “Drinking water can prevent caries.” Yea, nice tip.
At least I was thinking this way for a long time, till I came across a Trailer-Music producer who explained this in detail. In this Industrie structure and artistic freedom are heavily reduced to fit the needs of the editors. Therefore, at the beginning of nearly 99% of the tracks, you have a calm start with some percussive hits to set the viewer in the mood. This is really hard because you are forced to write the same track as all the competitors, but you need to find a way to give the track a character right at the beginning.
So what a lot of Trailer-Composers do, is record an organic sound like their voice, a broken instrument, or some percussive hits of the utilities in their kitchen. They then import the sound to their DAW, throw a few effects on it, and create their own signature sound for their trailer.
After hearing that, I tried it out myself. I don’t have the gear of a professional Trailer Composer, so don’t expect this to be brilliant (i only used a few effects that came native with Reaper). I recorded my voice to make a deep drone out of it, a hit against my heating radiator to make my own “Boom” and scraping teacups to create a high-pitched scratching sound.
Usually, composers in this industry tend to write an entire album out of these ideas, so they have more tracks with the same sound should the editor like it but need another tempo or atmosphere. So there is a ton of inspiration to be found within.
4. Muscle memory is your enemy
In the case, you don’t know what muscle memory is: It’s the habit to press the same keys and patterns on your piano over and over again because your fingers are used to press them. This is a problem that I face especially when I try to write a chord progression. I just tend to fall back to the same chords over and over.
Inspired by the Sound design process I described above, I tried once to record a whistled melody to see what I could make out of it. While recording, I made a science-breaking discovery: My hands don’t play the piano when I’m whistling.
It’s unbelievably easy for me to come up with ideas for melodies only by humming. I try to get in the mood of the track I want to write and just start humming away a few minutes.
This works especially well when I am in my car on the way to work. I turn off the radio and just start humming. If I have a good idea, I pull out my phone and record it. That’s it.
5. Limiting yourself
Advertisement companies do a really good job of selling you all the nice-sounding libraries, effects, plugins, and so on. As I already described, it is a really good way to give your work a new spin. On the other hand, inspiration doesn’t come only with new sounds, it also comes when you are limiting yourself. Whenever you get confronted with a change to your usual surrounding, Inspiration occurs.
By limiting yourself I heard tips like “Only strings” or “only brass”, but also things like “Only use libraries that start with the letter A” or “only use 10 voices in your DAW in total”. This forces you in a certain direction and out of that you need to try and make the best out of it.
6. Adapt Structures
I for myself get a ton of inspiration from the mood and atmosphere I feel when listening to other tracks. A big bonus on my daily work as an engineer is, that I can work in the office with headphones on. I can’t count the number of times the score to “Lord of the Rings” passed through my ears the last years. But I always try to find new songs, so I let Spotify pick a random queue based on my interests – and oh boy I found some real treasures.
One track stuck in my mind the whole way home, I just loved the mood and the simplisity in it. I wasn’t that familiar with this genre so I tried to focus on a typical structure. To make this even easier i loaded up the track and tried to recreate ist structure.
I am not talking about using the same notes and chords. I just tried to use the same build-up. That means, that if the track starts with a cello ostinato, I did that as well. Eight bars in the strings extend to a more significant number, so I did that as well.
After rearranging, the structure shifted more and more, and after the intro section, they both ran in a completely diffrent direction. I’m sure that nobody notices the correlation, even myself, while writing this sentence. But that’s good. I just used the track as a reference to get started. Once I am a few bars in I follow my own road and look where the track takes me. But it helps me to get quickly over the beginning phase till I have a foundation to build my track on.
Reference Track: “God of the Drow” (Audiomachine release). Take a look at the section around the transition at 0:25; which gave me the inspiration for my track.
The finalized track “Inner Path to Justice“. The transition at 0:30 and 0:40 is the point where I got inspired by Audiomachine’s “God of the Drow“.
7. External media
At the beginning of my journey, I used to open an artwork I liked on my second monitor while composing. The artwork usually tells a story in itself, and writing a track underlining this story can be an excellent way to get started. This method doesn’t give you a musical start fire but sets you in the mood for a specific story. This made it really easy for me to come up with ideas for the instrumentation. If the artwork shows a scary vampire, I play around with church organs; if there is a feudal japan scene, I look at traditional Japanese instruments.
Trying out instruments you usually don’t use sparks inspiration upon you. And it is pretty interesting to see the results. If you hadn’t done this, or would you have chosen another image at the beginning, the results would be utterly diffrent from another. That’s the joy of writing to picture.
A similar effect occurs when you’re composing right after watching a particular movie. In my case, that works well to put me in the mood, but it’s harder for me personally not to copy the existing work and to get back in the mood after a few days passed.
As a result of a documentary about the expeditions in the Himalayas I wrote the track “The Summit”