Been really wanting to make something new, but have zero energy. Any of y'all fellow music people still making stuff right now, or gotten out of a rut lately? If so, how?

  • akylzytheAnwyn [she/her,comrade/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    totally agree with everything riffraff has to say (not that I follow those guidelines very well)

    what's helped me recently is upending my usual music-making - i'm classically trained so i've been working with synths in a daw for the first time and that's really broken up a lot of my calcified inability to create. might be cool to write a cover (someone else has done the work of creating the music, now you can just unleash your creativity on it). and finally musical doodles have helped, instead of panicking about not making a Whole Work i'll just write a melody if it comes to mind or transcribe like a weird set of sounds the neighborhood birds/squirrels make - at least getting something on the page tends to help me keep going.

    hope this helps :heart-sickle:

      • akylzytheAnwyn [she/her,comrade/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        i don't have any One Weird Trick for it, I just try to be methodical: once the melody is sketched out, I figure out a key area that fits and make my own chords that logically fit underneath. it might be totally off but as long as you're finding cadences and modulations you're getting pretty close. once you're down in the trenches of figuring out each chord change there's a lot of trial and error (and as a pianist I can imagine that's easier for you? but I totally get that it's tedious and kind of frustrating)

        and ultimately, if you've gotten close but not quite perfect.. that's okay, it's your cover, it can do whatever you like - just having a full, if imperfect, cover to listen to can really help you hone in using your ear training to find what doesn't quite mesh and then edit those sections

        it's a process though! so just doing any one of these steps on a given day would be awesome, thinking too hard about the End Product really chokes me up especially in this time of uh nothingness tbh