Overcoming Writer's Block - Options Paralysis

distantstar

My advice is, choose an instrument, either physical or virtual, that only does one thing (has one sound, for example). Could be a ridiculously basic piano plugin, with nothing to tweak. Or an actual acoustic guitar, say, played “as is”. Or an electric, plugged straight into an amp on one setting only, with no fx.

Anyway, you get the idea. Focus on creating some melodies, harmonies, rhythms, etc. - without even thinking about patch creation/tweaking, effects, sequencing, multitracking.. or really, hardware/software of any kind whatsoever.

It might not be easy at first, but IMO it’s worth going through.

klownshed

@animalelder said:
Damn @klownshed I have never related so hard to a post on this forum haha. But, yeah, I aimlessly play around a lot. Here’s the many GarageBand projects I have on mobile

845, not including ones that were deleted. And that’s just the one app.

I’d love to become more focused, though, and come with a cohesive finished set of songs. But who’s gonna even hear it hahaha

845! Blimey!

What got me to the next stage was to put lots of loops (individual stems of each instrument) into BlocsWave on my phone. That way I could listen back to stuff I was working on instantly wherever I was but also make new frankensongs with bits and pieces from different projects. As BW automatically time stretches and pitch shifts to match the key of the Bw project lots of happy accidents can occur when mixing and matching.

Also as BW has multiple sections it let me try out different sections of songs and see how they went together — exporting to launchpad made it possible to jam out art segments too.

And once I had a grip on what I was doing BW would export all the stems already tempo and pitch mapped which could be imported into a DAW.

I would often use NS2 for that and put all the stems into Slate tracks in my phone.

By the time I got them into Logic on my Mac the song had a direction and then it was relatively easy to finish.

I’m far from prolific though. 3 or 4 songs a year is good going

HotStrange

Regarding the “who’s gonna hear it”. At this point I just release stuff for the fun, joy, and feeling of accomplishment from doing it. If a 200 people on SoundCloud want to listen to it, cool. But I’m not expecting to break into the top 100 with my harsh noise and drones 😂

HotStrange

@klownshed said:

@animalelder said:
Damn @klownshed I have never related so hard to a post on this forum haha. But, yeah, I aimlessly play around a lot. Here’s the many GarageBand projects I have on mobile

845, not including ones that were deleted. And that’s just the one app.

I’d love to become more focused, though, and come with a cohesive finished set of songs. But who’s gonna even hear it hahaha

845! Blimey!

What got me to the next stage was to put lots of loops (individual stems of each instrument) into BlocsWave on my phone. That way I could listen back to stuff I was working on instantly wherever I was but also make new frankensongs with bits and pieces from different projects. As BW automatically time stretches and pitch shifts to match the key of the Bw project lots of happy accidents can occur when mixing and matching.

Also as BW has multiple sections it let me try out different sections of songs and see how they went together — exporting to launchpad made it possible to jam out art segments too.

And once I had a grip on what I was doing BW would export all the stems already tempo and pitch mapped which could be imported into a DAW.

I would often use NS2 for that and put all the stems into Slate tracks in my phone.

By the time I got them into Logic on my Mac the song had a direction and then it was relatively easy to finish.

I’m far from prolific though. 3 or 4 songs a year is good going

Yep! BW is a really underused app, imo. It’s great for that. And if you’re more into clip launching you can automatically port all that into Launchpad and “play” your track instead and record the performance within the app. I use them both quite a bit and you’re right, they’re great for bringing life to things that may be deleted or forgotten about down the road.

HotStrange

@klownshed said:
My philosophy is if I fancy making some music but don’t find myself in the mood for working on anything I particular and don’t feel creative is to just spend time jamming about and playing with the hundreds of instruments and fx I can’t stop myself buying but have never really used yet.

I’m sure many of us have folders full of stuff we’ve squirrelled away when on sale ‘just in case’ then completely forgotten about.

It doesn’t usually take too long before something interesting comes out of the headphones, and I try and then make a quick export of little bits and pieces and dump them into blocswave on my phone.

Then one day they’ll resurface when I keep jabbing that random button and before I know it I have the start of an idea.

Most of those ideas come to nothing but the most important thing for me is not to worry and just enjoy spending time making noises regardless of whether a N°1 international smash comes out of it or nothing worth expanding upon. It’s

I learnt not to worry about the end product a long time ago and treat playing about with synths and drum machines in the same way as I would picking up a guitar and just playing away with no ulterior motive.

Making noises is fun. The end product will come when I’m ready as long as I don’t try and force it.

Just allowing myself to enjoy farting about is key for me.

But that’s just me. We’re all different and whatever works for you is cool

My only real advice would be try not to put pressure on yourself to make finished music and just enjoy making any old noise.

In my case even if I finish a track it’s not like anybody will ever listen to it anyway!

Woah I never thought about hitting random in BW to mix mine and their loops for something crazy/different. Thanks for the tip 😂

Another thing I like to do is screen record all my jams in AUM. Then I’ll save that and load it up elsewhere as a loop or chop it up to sample and use somewhere else.

After that every once in a while I’ll go through my old screen recordings and find something I’d forgotten about and next thing you know, it makes it way into something else lol.

Another cool thing for me is to run me entire AUM jam into Koala, Gauss, Neon, etc and just use that app to mangle, pitch shift, etc the entire project for some crazy sounds.