How Do You Create?

Telefunky

@audiblevideo oops, had to lookup Jeff Buckley and found a nice interview with him saying about himself ... shaping sound in order to fit a feeling.
I much agree on that (and feel honoured)
@tja thanks for listening

in this case the surprising sound of a 30 year old digital reverb was simply a trigger, like others mentioned with a certain beat, melody or noise.

DrAds

Hi, I’m putting out Youtube videos of my creation process
I think it’s great to watch these things as it gets complicated sometimes!
Hope this helps!

andowrites

@audiblevideo said:
I’m going to try an experiment at some point of reading some of my poetry into the mic, in several takes, and run the results thru TE Tuner and see what melodies I make in the process of speaking.

Anyone else going to forward their next experiment?

As a poet, I love this. I'm wondering if you ever did this? Do you have a link to it?

Jamie_Mallender

@Daveypoo said:
The process is as varied as the tools. Music creation comes differently depending on the medium for me.

Playing an instrument will provide certain results - I write singer-songwriter/folk/country/pop on acoustic guitars, on electric guitars I write rock tunes and play blues licks, on synth it's all 80's synthpop or synthfunk, piano ends up being more singer-songwriter stuff...

My programmed output (as you all know) leans very heavily towards 80's funk and pop.

As a bass player, I'll play anything. As a "session" player or "mercenary" or "guy for hire" or whatever you want to call it, I've played everything under the sun so my output reflects that.

All this was intended to illustrate that there is no "standard" workflow for me any more. You all see how I build up grooves in my videos - this is the quickest way for me to generate a loop but it's not the only way.

Often times when I feel "stuck" (which is often), I'll deliberately change my workflow to instigate different results. Rather than write a chord progression I like, I might sit down and write.....

LYRICS!

[gasp!]

...which then will inevitably lead to a melody which will then dictate the chords. Or, if I'm building up a groove - rather than always start with drums, I'll start with melody. Or if I find I've been reaching for a specific sequencer lately to start jams (Autony comes to mind) - maybe I use a different app. Or try something counter-intuitive with the app I always use.

I'm CONSTANTLY on the search to not repeat myself, which is why I take so damn long to write anything worthwhile. I just want to keep pushing myself and not settling on the rinse-repeat musical mindset.

Ok - lots of brain vomit right there. I'm done for now - see the Pandora's Box you opened, @LinearLineman ?

Same! I have literally no process at all. I have written things in most genres. Nothing is off the table - I just love music so - anything can trigger off an idea. Last night I was teaching a bass lesson. The guy wanted some help with figuring out bass lines to fit to drum grooves. So I used the AR909 so he could see the grid and fooled around with moving the kicks, snares and hats and helped him put a groove together to suit the drums. It was a lot of fun actually! Anyway, at the end of the lesson I was trying to program a beat, slipped and put in a really weird groove. I just had to see if I was up to putting something to it and what I jammed out just sounded cool. It’s the start of a new thing. I have the chords in my head - I’m sketching them out in Cubasis - I’ve got midi of the bass line - it’s coming together in a rough sketch state on my iPad and later I’ll go to the studio and jam real instruments on what I have so far. Music is beautiful, made much more so by the freedom to work anywhere that iOS brings.

TheOriginalPaulB

At the moment, I’m into setting up my various sound sources (mostly keyboard controlled) so that I have a palette of different timbres and jamming until I have the rough outline of a piece with sections of related material. I then record a live run through in AUM. I then have the option of playing that file back while recording more parts, before moving the results to Cubasis for editing, correcting mistakes, etc. I can then add more parts and FX in Cubasis before mixing and EQing and mixing down to stereo.

All that only works if the piece is fairly easy to play in the first place. Tricky stuff gets pieced together jigsaw fashion as MIDI tracks in Cubasis...