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Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
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- Key
- Scale
- Mode
- Vocal
- Chord progression
- Melody
- Bassline
- Beat
- Genre
- Time signiture
- Tempo
- Timbre
- Arbitrary time limit
- Sound loop
- Midi file
- After reading or watching something
- Etc, etc..
The possibilities are only limited by your own imagination. I would also recommend some rudimentary music theory. Nothing hardcore, just so that you understand the language of I ii iii IV V vi vii, tonics + dominants & chord tones + non-chord tones, etc..One of my favourite exercises is the Axis of Awesome 4-chord song challenge. I must have had a hundred goes at this, but there is a little incentive as this is known in the music business as the "money progression" I find it's useful to rework the same chords or melody, as you get to experience how malleable music really is.
hit some drums too
multiple mental health benefits
good luck
Create without prejudice. Ignore the result for a few days. Review in an objective frame of mind - as if somebody else had devised the work(s).
Some efforts will, self-evidently work. Some will, equally self-evidently, be shite. A few will have potential that is only realised when additional parts are added. e.g. Dull guitar chord progressions can be transformed with a clever contrapuntal melody or bass line.
Are these MIDI Note data for synthesizer music or audio beginnings of guitar/bass/drums ideas?
Some background. I went to college to do an advertising course, coming up with ideas for ads. I was then a copywriter in advertising, working first as an employee in ad agencies and then as a freelance, for over 30 years.
Every single day - literally, I frequently had to work weekends - I had to come up with ideas for ads for products, many of which I'd had to come up with ideas for before.
This wasn't easy. I was far from the best in the business, but I was quite good. I won awards. (Honestly. I know literally everyone in adland claims to be an award winner, but I have a certificate to prove one of them, and the agency I used to work at stole the others, but I still have one.)
So what does this have to do with your situation?
For every brief I was given, I would set myself a target of producing between ten and 30 ideas, depending on the amount of time I had to do it in and the importance of the job.
If I was lucky, one of those would be regarded as perfect, two or three as excellent and a couple were good enough fillers to pad out the presentation so the client thought we'd given the job long enough to justify what we were charging them for.
For every single brief.
Every.
Single.
Brief.
For big campaigns that meant a lot to the client, we could produce literally hundreds, because the first batch might get rejected wholesale and we'd have to start again, or the client would like this particular direction but think we hadn't quite nailed it and could we do some more, or suggest such and such a change that ruined it so we'd have to start again, and so on.
After all that, if I was to sit back now and go through all the copies of work that I still possess (and I collected as much as I could as I went along, so that I could show prospective new clients what I was capable of), I could find maybe a dozen really good ads from my entire career.
So, given that I would come up with between 10 and 30 ideas for every single brief, with sometimes two or three briefs a day, in 30 years of work, out of literally tens of thousands of scribbles and thumbnails and layouts and doodles and flashes of inspiration, I've probably got an absolute maximum of 20 ideas that I wouldn't be embarrassed to show on here.
I can't even be sure it's that many, in all honesty.
And I was good. Really good. Not world beating, not even good enough to represent my country, but good. (You don't get to last 30 years as a writer in this game if you're shit, trust me.)
My point is, don't be so hard on yourself. You have to produce bumf - literally, have to produce a ton of bumf - in order for something good to finally worm its way out.
And you'll probably go cool on that after a couple of days, too.
Why do you think it takes the top musicians literally years to come up with a new album that lasts maybe 40 minutes? Because they're going through the same process as you are right now. They just know what to weed out and what to keep, what will lead somewhere and what won't.
So keep at it. If all you produce today is 20 minutes of guff, so what? It means you're at least 20 minutes closer to producing something worth hearing tomorrow.
And tomorrow, who knows just how good it will be?