HOW TO SUPERCHARGE THE CREATIVE PROCESS

When the muse has taken her leave and your creative spark has dimmed, reignite it with these proven techniques and tricks.

1. ELIMINATE DISCTRACTIONS

These days, the potential for procrastination is a serious issue when engaging in any creative process on a computer, with that constant stream of notifications all too easily drawing your attention away from the music and towards your social media feeds, email and DMs. The result is a profound draining of creativity through lack of focus and time wasting: a stress-inducing alert dings into view, and before you know it, you’ve spent an hour noodling around with ‘the stuff of digital life’, completely losing track of whatever it was you were doing in your DAW.

The solution? Why, it couldn’t be easier: just turn all that nonsense off! Set your computer and phone to ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode, close your email client, quit your browser, and don’t allow yourself to fire any of them up again until you’ve either finished the day’s session or hit a meaningful pause within it – lunchtime, say.

2. OPTIMISE YOUR ENVIRONMENT

For most people, a tidy work space fosters creativity, and when your studio is a mess, your aesthetic clarity, mental agility and operational efficiency will suffer for it. If your music room is looking a bit shambolic, then, clean it up and aim to keep it that way. Remove everything on your desk that isn’t involved in the music production process, clear the floor and sweep up, and ditch all non-essential furniture (as defined by your level of minimalism and how helpful that massive sofa is in soaking up excessive room reflections).

Having decluttered, you may well find yourself inspired to play around with the vibe of the space at a more fundamental level. Possible angles of approach for this would include redecorating, upgrading the lighting, adding some plants, and/or anything else that might make for a more relaxed, enjoyable and, consequently, creatively stimulating place to work.

3. SORT OUT YOUR COMPUTER

It’s all well and good having a perfectly ‘Zen’ studio, but if your software environment is the virtual equivalent of a child’s bedroom, it’s going to significantly disrupt your creative flow. Time spent hunting for a particular sample in a chaotic scatter of unmanaged folders, tracking down the manual for an instrument or effect, or updating plugins that you were alerted to compatibility issues with weeks ago is time that would obviously be far better spent making music. So, if you’ve never got round to organising your sample library into a neat and logical hierarchy, uninstalling all those extraneous plugins that you’re never really going to use and updating those that you are, archiving old projects that don’t need to be kept in ‘active’ storage any more, and so forth, make doing so a priority.

4. EXPAND YOUR AESTHETIC AND MUSICAL HORIZONS

One surefire way to get the creative juices flowing is to take yourself out of your comfort zone and try something new – even if it’s an excursion you’d otherwise actively avoid. If you only ever listen to classical, for example, put your assumptions and prejudices aside, and crank up some rock, pop or dance music to give yourself a fresh perspective on composition and production. And beyond music itself, immersing yourself in other art forms can prove hugely inspirational, so take in an art exhibition, see a play, go to the movies… The idea here isn’t necessarily to consciously apply specific elements of said cultural diversion to your own work (although you certainly can do that if a particular sound, image or concept grabs you, of course), but just to allow the medium in question to influence you in whatever way it might, whether subtly or overtly.

5. PICK UP AN INSTRUMENT YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO PLAY

If ‘passive’ absorption of other forms of music and media can work such wonders for your creative perspective, imagine how mind-expanding getting hands-on with a whole new instrument could be! Don’t worry, we’re not suggesting you take up the sousaphone as a formal study; rather that you simply grab an instrument – any instrument – and see what new sonic and compositional angles it inspires, to be applied to your productions as you see fit. Whether you go for a guitar, a double bass, a set of tabla, a glockenspiel, the Cartpipes, a synth, or the aforementioned sousaphone – with or without assistance from exponents thereof on YouTube or in the real world – exploring the technical workings and physicality of a completely unfamiliar instrument can be a truly joyous and creatively fruitful experience. Indeed, if your weapon of choice really gets it hooks into you, it might just change your life!

6. SET YOURSELF A CHALLENGE

The wilful self-imposing of limitations can be immensely rewarding, so why not set yourself a creativity-flexing musical challenge of some sort? You could try something relatively unambitious, such as writing a score in an odd time signature, or at an extremely slow or fast tempo. Or you could take the brief up a notch and set out to start and finish a complete score in a single day, for example, or compose a piece that only uses three notes… or a single sound… or just four tracks… or is guided entirely by a particular number… You get the gist. Whatever seemingly masochistic mission you sign up for, your imagination and inventiveness will be pushed in all sorts of new and unexpected directions by the restrictions within which they’re forced to work.

7. LAST BUT NOT LEAST: USE THE SCORE!

Supercharging your creativity at every turn, THE SCORE is the perfect conduit via which to quickly and easily turn the musical ideas in your head into complete scores for movies, TV and video games. Featuring a vast and diverse palette of highly detailed instrumentation, 130 lovingly developed Stories and the accompanying Chord Studio with which to intuitively perform and construct your own fully animated compositions, the amazing Melody Studio and much more, it’s our most powerful scoring library yet, and an endless wellspring of inspiration. Just open the main Ensemble NKI, choose a Story and jam around in the Chord Studio or on your MIDI keyboard – it’s like playing a complete arrangement directly, as if it was a musical instrument in itself.

Ronan Macdonald

Writer & Editor • Music Producer • Drummer

ABOUT THE WRITER: RONAN MACDONALD

A music and technology journalist of over 30 years’ professional experience, Ronan Macdonald began his career on UK drummer’s bible Rhythm, before moving to the world’s leading music software magazine, Computer Music, of which he was the editor for more than a decade. He’s also written for many other titles, including Guitarist, The Mix, Hip-Hop Connection and Mac Format, and edited several books, most notably the first edition of Billboard’s Home Recording Handbook. Today, Ronan contributes to Production Expert, Computer Music and MusicRadar.com and works as an editorial consultant and media producer for a broad range of music technology companies. Away from the day job, Ronan is a keen producer and drummer, with a particular passion for 90s hip-hop, jungle, breakbeat and jazz, a hard drive full of unfinished projects and a plugins folder that one day he honestly will get round to tidying up. He’s also the dep percussionist for seminal 80s/90s Italo-house outfit Black Box.

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