The Creative Process

StauntonLick · 2012-03-10T14:18:59

Hi Everyone, I was thinking it might be useful for people to share their creative processes - how they build, develop and finalise ideas into musical masterpieces. If you're having a creative block, or just need a bit more juice, trying someone else's technique might work wonders for you! For what it's worth, I'll kick things off: - Normally an idea will spring into my head, pretty fully formed - generally a few seconds of music. I then go and try to replicate it in real-life and end up going down a totally different path. Unfortunately this normally happens when I'm just falling asleep (as your brain is least inhibited by the "day to day" processes you have to think about, freeing up creative space) so I forget about 90% of the ideas I come up with. - A similar technique - sometimes I set out to emulate a particular piece or composer's style. I generally find quite early on that I diverge from my preset path, and come across some other cool stuff instead. - Sometimes I'll have an idea for a technique - e.g. this piece started off as me thinking "What would happen if I reverse a snare and mix it in with the original signal?". I then had a similar idea about chopping up a piano recording, and the rest of the piece came fairly naturally. I wasn't thinking about what I was writing, just building something up around a certain technique - If I'm feeling a bit creatively dry I'll just jam around using some drum sounds. Eventually I'll settle on a beat I like, and loop stuff on top of that until I've built up a whole texture. I can then chop it up and "sculpt" it over time into an actual piece. Anyway, hope that helps someone - looking forward to hearing all your techniques as well!