Mess around

I honestly think a lot of creative is built off of play. Playing around. Messing around. Sitting down with your instrument or DAW and just trying stuff out. Thinking “I wonder what this would sound like?” and then trying it.

At least that’s how creativity works for me. I often just sit at the piano and improvise, and completely mess around. No one ever has to hear it again so the stakes are low, but I get to hear what it sounds like. I can try out new ideas and see how they sound and see if I like them. Sometimes it’s atonal. Sometimes it’s tonal. Sometimes it’s nonfunctional. Sometimes it’s functional. But I’ll try it out to see how it sounds and test out different, new ideas.

I highly recommend doing this if you want to be able to write more music. You’ll think of lots of ideas and it’s kind of like brainstorming with music.

With brainstorming the idea is to just write down as many different ideas as possible. This is basically the same. Think of as many ideas as possible and just write them. Just go with them and see how they are. You can always cross them off your list later, but thinking of them and testing them out will get you some good ideas.

I had a teacher in college who had me do this. I couldn’t think of anything to write so he gave me a piece of manuscript paper and told me to write 10 melodies. And he gave me time to write, but if he saw I was stalling and not writing anything he’d say, “Just write. Don’t think about them. They don’t need to be any good.”

That phrase “they don’t have to be good” helps me write a lot.

If you sit down and do that, write 10 melodies, and 1 of them is good then congrats you have 1 good melody!

If you write 20 melodies and you have 1 good melody then congrats you have 1 good melody!

Throw the rest away. They don’t matter. But keep that one. That’s what matters.

ISJ