thread inspired by @fenderjess
its happened before where I've literally lept out of bed with an entire song in my head and poured it all into the DAW in one session but thats rare
usually its either:
I'll sit down to write (try to do this every single day) without anything in mind, I'll pick some synth at random and just play around and save whatever i make
or
some sound/drum pattern will pop into my head and ill go to the computer and focus on *just* getting that idea down
with the "Divine Spark" thing its important to just really quickly get the raw structure down and then start filling in the details, for example if its a sustained bass *any* sustained bass will do, change the sounds later and so on
with the single idea inspiration, don't worry about making a song, just work it till is close enough to what you heard in your head and save it, put it in a folder of ideas and when you next get stuck on a chorus or w/e or need a starting point, build it around that
when it's just a case of sitting down to make yourself work, set a random tempo, grab a random instrument, throw a weird chain of effects on after and just play something, bounce the audio, time stretch it , reverse it
whatever it is don't fall back on the same techniques over and over, explore sound
again, once you have something interesting, put it in the ideas folder
sometimes you'll go straight to writing a song, other times you'll just be done with an idea, for now
i watch music production stuff on YouTube with the daw open , first copying (close enough) what the producer is doing and then fucking with whatever I've ended up with, applying the technique to something i already have
sometimes I'll grab a drum pattern from the ideas folder and some bassline, last time i ended up taking a 130~ pattern and dragging it down to ~90bpm to meet the bass and it went from cluttered and messy to very interesting, play with bpm
save racks of effects with distinct names "massive space" and "drumfucker" are two i use often enough and calling them that works for me (rather than a more sombre taxonomy)
save diff versions or presets of those racks when you dial them in for different songs
make sure stuff is organised neatly so when you want to create its all at your fingertips and you wont waste time looking for "that thing that makes pads sound HUGE"
and some days art will not happen, even if you try for an hour nothing good comes out of it. save it anyway and come back to it, maybe there was something you couldn't do right then or maybe it *is* just garbage, don't be defeated, take a break
aside from that, have water on hand and once you get good at consistently working for hours use a pomodoro timer to force yourself to take breaks (co-signed by my wrist sprain in September)
and give yourself permission to do something obvious, even obnoxious
in my case thats putting down an absurdly overdriven bass and a 4 to the floor beat and side chaining it
complicated doesn't necessarily mean good and it can be fun to work within some conventions
@MollyNoise bookmarks this entire thread tysm 🙏
the big creative leap for me (former bassist) was when i stopped writing bass first, then drums, then leads
too formulaic
find ONE interesting thing and build a verse/chorus around it and build outwards from there, you don't have to write the intro first or the end last
the timeline is real but in the DAW time is otherwise fake