Next time you find yourself staring blankly at an empty DAW arrange page, stuck for ideas on which to base a new track, get things moving with these universally applicable techniques.
Have A Jam!
One of the most effective ways to conjure musical ideas from the ether is to noodle around on an instrument, with or without a particular melodic, harmonic and/or rhythmic agenda in mind. For the singer-songwriter penning a literal song on piano or guitar, this goes without saying, but many electronic producers default to the grid-guided safety of dragging notes around in the MIDI editor right from the off, which is a mistake, as the freeform ‘live’ invention and development of beats, themes, hooks and motifs on a MIDI keyboard and/or drum pads is much more effective, not to mention fun! And this applies no matter what your skill level as a keyboardist – indeed, a great many electronic producers would describe themselves as wholly untrained. We’re not looking for a consummate performance; just hammer away at those ivories as slowly as you need to, recording everything you do for speeding up and editing afterwards.
Start With A Sequence
Sitting somewhere in between live jamming and manual MIDI sequencing, the step sequencer makes a great starting point for any electronic music project. Many soft synths and DAWs have powerful step sequencers built in (recent additions in the latter category include Logic Pro and Studio One), and there are plenty of amazing MIDI controllers to choose from if you crave a tactile pad/button-powered experience, including Ableton’s Push, NI’s Maschine, Arturia’s BeatStep, Korg’s SQ-64, and various Novation offerings.
The step sequencer’s focused, cyclic, pattern-based concept is far more creatively inspiring than the piano roll could ever hope to be, and although it’s especially viable for drums and synth riffs, don’t be afraid to experiment with disparate sampled sources, too.
Trawl Your Sample Library
Speaking of samples, no doubt you’ve got zillions of the things on your hard drive, but when’s the last time you toured them with a view to identifying potential track-starters? Dive into your operating system or DAWs’ file browser and see what you can dig up as an inspirational springboard for a new choon – it could be a drum loop, a bassline, a vocal cut, a full beat… anything. And why stop with your local collection? Get involved with a preview-enabled online service such as Splice, Loopcloud or Noiiz, and you can easily lose hours digging the virtual crates.
Incidentally, there’s absolutely no shame in basing a track on a sample produced by someone else – it’s been common practise for decades now – but if the notion really bothers you, you can always ditch said clip entirely once the rest of the track has developed around it, process it beyond recognition, or replace it with something of your own making.
Return To Abandoned Projects
It’s commonly imparted advice to never throw away a DAW project that might not be clicking at the time, instead saving it for revisiting at a later date – but do you ever actually do that? As your technical and compositional skills develop over time, and your musical perspective shifts, those originally encountered issues might become more addressable; but even if the track as a whole continues to be a dead end, are there any elements within it that could be redeployed as a launch pad for something entirely new? Go through and export anything even remotely viable, keeping your ears open for editing/processing potential beyond the original appearance of each part. You might be surprised at how much better (or worse!) your earlier work sounds with the passage of time.
Break With Tradition
If you’re anything like us, you’ll have a tendency to start every track the same way. Perhaps you always get the ball rolling with the drums, your expertise in theory draws you towards building a harmonic structure before all else, or you just can’t get fired up without the compositional and sonic foundation of a massive bassline. Change things up by opening proceedings with a different part entirely, and preferably one that’s well out of your comfort zone. Normally drums first? Grab a mic and start with a home-made vocal. Guitarist? Call up a synth and make a pad. Keyboard wizard? Borrow or hire a bass guitar and see what happens.
As you get into the weeds with your perverse musical selection, the initial discomfort will hopefully give way to a sense of expanded possibilities and the opportunity to take your audio aesthetic in an entirely new direction.
Start With The Sound
Although a good melodic hook and/or groove of some sort are invariably essential to any (non-experimental) piece, you don’t have to begin the writing process with either of them. For dance and electronic music in particular, the sound of the focal track element will often be as defining and important as the notes it plays, so why not kick off a new project with a free-thinking sound design session instead of prioritising an ear-catching sequence? And even in rock, pop and other ‘live’ genres, an imaginatively conceived guitar sound or wild vocal processing chain can have a huge influence on the shape of the melody that goes with it, so don’t restrict yourself to note-based thinking, even at the compositional stage.
Get Random
Okay, this one could be described as a bit of a cop-out, as it implies the relinquishing of conscious creativity, but if it was good enough for Ives, Boulez and Stockhausen, then it’s certainly good enough for us. Randomisation systems are rife in music technology these days, and whether you use the tools built into a plugin synth or sequencer, or simply bang some notes in on your keyboard with your eyes shut, introducing a little chaos into your compositional and sound design workflow can take you down the most unexpected of paths. We’re not saying you should unquestioningly stick with whatever the fates throw your way, but rather, use that aleatoric MIDI pattern or preset as an initial template to be developed further – unless, of course, it really does sound awesome as it is.
How do you like to spark your creativity at the start of the writing process? Let us know in the comments.