Destroy Writer's Block For Good: A Musician's Perspective

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. Welcome to my Writer's Block class. I'm really excited about this one. It's been on my list to do for a long time. And the reason I decided to do it is I just finished a really big project of my own, big music project, and along the way, I had a couple of bumps. I had a couple times where I just felt stuck. And I've developed over the years a bunch of tools to help me get unstuck, and that's what this class is all about. We will go into a little bit about the psychology of Writer's Block and what some people say about it. But really, what we're going to focus on here is techniques to get stuck. Now, interestingly, I made this class really thinking about musicians and songwriters. But as I was editing it, I just thought, you know, this is really, I think, helpful for any creative. I really do it from a musician's perspective, but most of these tools would be easy to adapt to any creative situation. So if you're a musician, this course is for you. If you're an other creative outside of music, this course will be really helpful to you, as well. So without further ado, let's dive in. 2. About the Instructor: Alright, everyone. Let's talk about Writer's block. And in this video, I want to give you my perspective on it a little bit about who I am. If you're not familiar with me, I am a full time composer. My name is J Anthony Allen. I go by J. I used to have an academic job. I recently last year or so, left that academic job to be a full time composer. Do work in film, television, advertising games, and also a whole bunch of music just on my own. Some of it more classically oriented. I just finished a big book of piano E tubes, and some of them some of the music I write is more popular or dance music oriented. I am finishing up right now a big project of electronic music, producing an album for a Synth Wave artist, and I'm really excited about it. So I do all kinds of different genres. And my goal for this class is really to be as expansive as possible with genre. This is for everybody. Everybody deals with this issue, and I think I've got some good techniques that are going to help you in your pursuit of getting over writer's block, no matter what genre you work in. The first and most important thing to know about Writer's Block is that you're not alone. This is a very common thing for a lot of people. We're going to talk a little bit about kind of what's going on and how to get out of it. It happens to me, too, you know, I am someone who can't afford Writer's Block. Um, in other words, when I sit down to work, I have, you know, I might have a five hour window to work on a given day, and I need to have some music done by the end of that day. I have a project, I have a deadline. I need to get this music out to somebody. There's no choice. I can't have a day where I just stare at my screen and hope that something magic happens or I wish that I had a good idea or something like that. I can't do that. That's not possible. And virtually everyone who works in the music for media industry, that would be film, television, advertising, games, whatever. We'll say the same thing, I think that there's just no time for it. So you've got to develop techniques to get you past it quick. For me, when I have writers Block, I sit down to work on something and I say, I don't know. I don't know what's going on here. I have a process that I walk through to help kind of get me out of it pretty quick, and I'll be back to making music in about 10 minutes. So I'm going to go over my process in just a minute, kind of big picture, and then we're going to dive deep and go through specific techniques that I do to just get myself out of whatever rut I've gotten my brain stuck in and pop back over into doing cool creative stuff. So without further ado, let's go on, and let's talk about first, in my opinion, what is writer's block? It's really three things, and I want to go over those three things and address each one kind of big picture first. So let's do that now. 3. What is Writer's Block, Anyway?: Okay, let me first just say that when I'm talking about things like what is Writer's Block, I don't have, like, a scientific explanation here. I know that, like, there has been some research done on this. There's a lot of people who don't think Writer's Block exists, and we'll talk about that in a minute. But for now, I'm really just kind of coming from a place of what I've learned to do to get past Writer's Block as fast as possible. And in the process of doing that, I've kind of boiled it down to three things. Okay? There's three things that can trigger an episode where I just don't know what I'm doing. I just don't feel like doing anything or I'm really into it, but I just don't feel like I have a good idea. Those three things are. First, your environment. I know it sounds a little hippy to be like, have a creative environment, be inspired and all this stuff. But it's totally true for me, anyway, maybe it's not true for you. But for me, being in a place where creative things are happening helps a lot. We'll talk more about this later, but I have built myself an office here that has everything I need at my disposal, and I feel very creative here. I feel even more creative with just a little laptop on a ship somewhere. But we'll talk about that more later. But make sure your environment is comfortable, inspiring, and that works for you. The second thing is your body and your mind. If I'm not feeling good, I'm not getting anything done. I know that. Um, if I'm treating my body poorly, it's not gonna take me. It's like if I had a car and I was putting, you know, dirty gasoline in it rather than normal gasoline, I have an electric car. But still, you get the point. It's not gonna run very well if I do that. So treating your body well, making sure that you're feeling healthy, awake, alert and ready to work. If your body feels like crap, your brain's not going to generate good ideas. More on that later. Then the third one. The third one is the big one. The third one is probably the one you came to this class looking for. And that is what I call rethinking, okay? So it can be true that we're looking at a piece of music and we're saying, Okay, what comes next? I am stuck. I am stuck. What comes next? We know our environment's working fine, our body is working fine. We just need an idea, right? Like, that's all. We need a good idea to go forward and just everything sounds bad. Um, for me, the answer to that is rethinking. Take a step back and try some techniques to get you out of that rut. We're going to rethink what you've got on the page and see if we can push forward by a couple of just little exercises that I do that pull me out of that rut, okay? Okay, so we're going to spend the majority of this class going through those techniques. And, you know, not for nothing. They're really kind of fun. I love these little techniques. I do them with students all the time. So those are three areas that I want to focus on environment, body and mind, and then rethinking. Alright? Okay, so before we get into the kind of What is Writer's Block kind of stuff, let's talk about genre a little bit here. 4. Music Genre and Writer's Block: Okay, I know I just talked about this a little bit, but I just want to emphasize that Rogers Block doesn't care what genre you're working in, right? When I am working on, like, instrumental chamber music or I'm working on dance music, no matter what, when I feel myself struggling for an idea, the feeling is the same. You know, it's exactly the same whether no matter what kind of project I'm working on. So if you're someone who focuses exclusively on electronic music, you've encountered these things. There's a reason you took this class, right? Like, you've encountered these things. If you're someone who focuses entirely on writing, like, film music, you've encountered these things. You've had days where everything sounds bad, right? I know you. I know you. I've been so it doesn't matter what genre you're working on. Everything. This happens to everybody. Everybody gets stuck, okay? We need to find a way to get unstuck. And what genre you're working on does not matter when it comes to getting unstuck. Getting unstuck is the thing that all genres have in common. Okay, one last thing in this first section, and that is, I want to talk about how we're going to cover this, okay? So let's go into that. 5. My Approach to Writer's Block: Okay, so here's our plan. We're gonna talk about first, we're going to talk about what is Writer's Block? What causes it. What do we know about then we're going to go through those three things. We're going to talk a little bit about improving your environment, making where you're working more conducive to writing. Then we're going to talk briefly about improving your mind and body, getting prepared for composition. I'm not a mind and body expert, and I'm not attempting to move my way into that niche, but I do want to talk a little bit about how exercising and things like that has affected my creative output. It's done a lot. Then we're going to go into this rethinking strategies. For that, we're going to talk about all these goofy techniques that I've developed over the years. Some of them are simple and just designed to help you get out of the rut. Some of them are complicated and weird and silly, but they sure do work. So we'll get into those. Then we're going to talk, we're going to kind of close down by talking about your creative practice. This is a term that isn't used as much in music as it is in other art forms, but I'm all for it, and I think it should be. Your creative practice is what we call how you go about doing your creative stuff if you are writing music primarily, then your creative practice is how you go about practicing writing, right? How you go about creating things. What is your routine? We want to get you into a very healthy creative practice because that's going to just bulldoze through these writer's block moments, okay? So if we can get you to develop systems, routines for writing, then you're going to stop encountering problems with Writer's block at all. So we'll close up focusing on developing a good creative practice. All right. Now, let's go on and talk about what's going on a little bit when we encounter Writer's Block. 6. Does Writer's Block Exist?: Alright, a lot of people don't believe in writer's block. I've heard people say this before. They say, I don't believe in it. Writer's block is a myth, all these things like that. I both agree and disagree. I agree in that I think what the message here is that Writers block can be easily overcome with a couple of tools and techniques. Writer's block is not a physical thing happening in your brain. I often has to do with just being comfortable when you're creating. So I agree in a way that writer's block is not is a myth. It's a myth. However, I also acknowledge the very real struggle that it creates, right? The problem it creates is that we we need an idea. That's good. So to call it a myth is I guess that's maybe true. I think that's kind of dodging the actual issue, though. The issue is, no matter what we call it, we get stuck sometimes. All artists do this. So we need to learn some techniques for getting unstuck. So no matter whether you say it's real or it's a myth or whatever, no one's really denying that everyone gets stuck sometimes, and we need to get unstuck. So, we're just going to kind of put the Writer's Black isn't real thing aside, and we're going to focus on some techniques to help us get unstuck. Here's an article I found. I was looking for people who really get on this bandwagon of Writer's Block is a myth, and I wanted to hear what they say. So here's an article. I'm just going to read part of this really quick. Believe me, I know what you're going through. I'm not saying I don't have those days when I roll out of bed feeling I'd rather do anything but put words on the page, but I know how to get stuck. This is important. During my career, I've learned to turn on a faucet of creativity, even when, in fact, especially when I find myself staring at a blank page. This is important. What this person is saying, in my words, is that they have a very good creative practice. They have good habits that they use while they're writing that keeps them from getting stuck. And when they do get stuck, they know what they can do to get unstuck very quickly. My approach stops Writer's Block and its tracks, and it can for the same for you, how can I call Writer's Block a myth when you and countless others seem plagued by it? Let's think this through. If Writer's Block were real, why would it affect only writers? Imagine calling your boss and saying, I can't come in today, I have Workers Block. I've heard this argument before, and I really don't agree with this logic here. Well, it's the idea that Writer's Block only affects writers, I think, is categorically untrue. I think Writer's Block affects all creatives. No matter what you're doing, all creatives get stuck sometimes. No other profession or profession accommodates Block as an excuse to quit working. So we writers shouldn't either. I don't think Writer's Block is ever considered an excuse to quit working. If you are working and you say, Oh, I have writers block. I can't do anything else, I'm going to go, you know, down to, you know, the bar and hang out instead, that's not good. That's not a good healthy practice. What we're talking about is fighting through it and how that can be a waste of time. Fighting through writer's block, I don't think is useful. You're just swinging, trying to find ways to get out of it. Using some good techniques will be better for you. So we'll go over those. If writing is just a hobby to you, diversion, something you can take or leave, it shouldn't surprise you that you find ways to avoid it when it's hard. Mm. Yeah, I don't really think that's talking about the same thing that we're talking about. So, is Writer's Block a myth, I don't know. Probably I'm not gonna get bogged down in the woods on that. What I believe is that everybody gets stuck, and we need to find ways to get unstuck. 7. Imposter Syndrome: One last thing about this, and that is the correlation between Writer's Block and imposture syndrome. They are not the same, but they're pretty closely related sometimes. And they can often come together. So what is impostor syndrome, if you're not familiar, that means that you are kind of feeling like you don't deserve to be here or you don't deserve to have gotten this gig, or other people do this so much better than you. Let me tell you a little bit about impostor syndrome. Most creatives feel that from time to time. I feel it all the time, constantly. Every time I sit down to write a piece of music, I feel like I've never done it before, and I feel like I don't know what I'm doing here. This is crazy. What gives me the right to try to do this? And this is something that other composers have said to me before. A very famous composer, Can I say her name? I'll say her name. Named Libby Larson once said something to the effect of writing and sitting down to write a new piece of music is the scariest thing in the world because you've never written anything. It feels like you've never written anything before. And now you have to go up against these grates of history and things, you know, and you have to walk out and say, My track is as good as everything else that's being created at this level. That's impostor syndrome. And often when impostor syndrome comes on, the easiest solution is to say, Well, I got no good ideas. They don't sound as good as what I want them to sound like, so I'm done. And you take a break, maybe for many days or weeks or years. So imposture syndrome is different than I think Writer's Block, but they really often come together, at least for me. That's one of the things that drives me into Writer's Block that's harder to get out of. I have to kind of just put on blinders and just say, Okay, I don't care about the impostor syndrome. I'm just going to keep going. If this is resonating with you, search imposture syndrome and some techniques to get out of that. Maybe someday I'll do an impostor syndrome class. But, okay, let's move on, and let's talk about your environment and creating a space for productive work. O 8. Where Do You Work?: Okay, let's talk about your writing environment. Where do you work? And are you in an inspiring place? If you've taken some of my other classes, you might know this because I've said this before, but let me tell you about my favorite places to write music. They are independent, kind of dirty coffee shops. This is where I love to be. This is my home base. Not this room. This room has a lot of great stuff in terms of equipment. I have a nice big window right here. I have all this gear. I have a huge amount of displays, but I'd really rather work just on a laptop or pencil and paper at a coffee shop. And when I say independent kind of dirty, I'm not saying what I mean is, like, not Starbucks, not that vibe. Coffee shop that's in some weird corner of the city has a couple of people that hang out at it, and nearly everyone in there is creating something. They're drawing, they're painting, they're writing poetry or something. I love working at those spots. Back when I lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, around the year 2000 Ish, there was this 24 hour coffee shop that played David Lynch movies on repeat. It was called Lillian's Vd Cafe, I think. I loved working there so much. I would go there and just write music from, like, 9:00 P.M. To I don't know, probably three or 4:00 A.M. They play David Lynch movies. It was weird. And I got so much done. Also, writing music in the middle of a coffee shop tends to generate weird things happening. You tend to meet some interesting people that way. But regardless, no matter where you work, make it comfortable, okay? Make it inspiring. If you look at a lot of old composers' desks, one thing you'll often find on their desks, and this is weird. This is gonna make you say, What are you talking about is a pineapple. Like, I'm not joking. I know, like, VerezF Verez it was a thing. And for a couple other composers, they would put a pineapple on their desk. And apparently, theory is that having a pineapple on your desk because of, like, the fractal patterns of it, I'm talking an uncut, like, pineapple. I guess because of the fractal patterns in it, they found just staring at a pineapple for a while, kind of perked their brain up and they got inspired to do interesting stuff. Weird. But whatever it takes, you know, I have my weirdest little comfort thing when I'm writing is something that you've probably seen in the background for a long time if you've been watching all these videos that I've been making, all these classes I make. But there's a thing it's right over there. In my current setup, it's just off camera. But let me Yeah. You see that little red thing? That is like a porcelain head that's been following me around ever since I was in high school. I carry that thing around, and it's some sort of I don't know, it's literally just like a porcelain head that's painted that I found in some dumpster somewhere, literally. Um, but I don't know. It's like a muse. I don't know. I don't really believe in muses and stuff, but if it's here in my office, I feel like it's a creative space. So find little things like that for yourself to make your creative space work the best it can for you. If I don't have windows, I'm not getting anything done. I need to see the outside. I need to breathe air. I need to be able to open those windows. Those are all things that are important for me. So, find things that are important for you. 9. Your Precomposition Plan: I Alright, do you have a compositional plan? This is another big important thing that I kind of lump into your environment. What this means is that you've done a good amount of pre composition work, okay? So I've recently published a separate class on pre composition. So if you're interested in that, go look that up. But what it is, is it's basically answering all the questions that are going to come up in the process of writing whatever music you're about to write before you start writing music. The instrumentation, the duration, uh the form, the texture, the sounds you're going to use, maybe something about harmony, answering as many things as you can before you start writing. This is probably the biggest way that I avoid getting stuck is that I spend all this time figuring out as many of the details as possible before I start writing. I basically figure out almost everything except the notes. And then once I sit down to start writing, I have everything I need. All I got to do is start putting notes on stuff, right? And thinking that way. So watch that other class. Be sure you have a plan. Be sure you know what you're going to do before you start writing, because if you don't, and you just dive in and say, Okay, well, let's put something here and something there. That is destined to fail. You will end up with an incomplete piece if you do that. So watch my pre composition class, come up with a pre composition plan and make sure that it's something you really believe in and that you want to write. And that will probably take care of 80% of any writer's block issues that you may have. 10. Distractions!: Distractions. Okay, I know I've told you a few stories already, but I'm going to tell you one more, and I probably will bring up this story a few times because it's where I learned a lot about Writer's block. So, twice, I have gone on a writing retreat where I am on a ship in the, you know, hovering around the North Pole. It's very cold and I'm on a ship. And I'm writing music. Twice, I've done that. I've gone out for a couple weeks at a time on these ships and it is the most productive time I have ever had. By a lot. I get so much done there. And you know why I get so much done there? It's because I don't have these things, right? When you're up on a ship in the Arctic sailing around the ocean, you have no cell, you have no Wi Fi, you have nothing. And it is incredible. Seriously. Every time I sit down to write, if I could throw this thing away, get it way out of sight in mind, turn it off. No alerts, nothing. I would write so much more. Last time I was on that ship, I made the deal of writing 2.5 minutes of music a day. And I beat it every day. I was writing so much. It was unbelievable. And it's because I had no technology. I had no Internet. I had no phone. I had no Wi Fi. If you can create that environment for yourself, by all means, do it. It is the best thing you can do for yourself. Now, it's not as easy as that. Not all of us can just go up on a ship and I've been trying to recreate that back here at home, and I can't do it. I can't just turn the Internet off. I can't just hide my phone away. Okay? I realize how difficult that is. It's tough. But any effort to do that is going to help you so much for focus. Trust me. But I realize how hard it is to do. And that brings us to kind of our last question in this section, which is to use a computer or not a computer. Let's talk about that. 11. Are Computers Bad for Creativity?: Okay, here's the deal with computers or not computers when it comes to writing for me. When I'm writing and I'm using a computer to write, I get stuck ten times more often than I do if I'm just writing with pencil and paper. Now, here's what that means. If I'm writing chamber music, let me get some. I love just writing with staff paper like that and pencil or a pen, actually. You can see, like, my little scribblings here. I love writing that way. I love going to a coffee shop with just staff paper and a pen and just writing for a while. When I use a computer, I feel like I get sucked into the computer a little bit more and distractions are so much easier. And also the way the computer is dealing with me makes writing harder. Let me explain that. I can interact with the computer through keyboards and mice and things like that, but the computer has to interact with me in a way in order to get my ideas into it. So I can click in and create notes or create a sequence or whatever, create a beat. But in a way, I'm always fighting around what the computer wants me to do and trying to do things a little differently. That gets tedious and that wears away at you, and it makes me walk away from the computer faster than I do with pencil and paper, which has no expectations of where things go. I can just scribble all day long, and it doesn't care. So when I'm given the opportunity to just work on pencil and paper, I will always take it. However, there is a speed issue involved. If I can write straight into the computer, I save myself probably a couple of days because if I write by hand, I need to then put it into the computer so that it's legible and I can make a mock up. Also, if I'm writing electronic music, I always need to be in the computer. There's very little I can do with pencil and paper when I'm writing electronic music, but not nothing. So think about that. Think about if there's an opportunity to go without a computer for a while, just to feel what it's like. 12. How Your Health Effects Creativity: Okay, let's get into a little kind of sort of hippie stuff. Not really. I don't normally get into this, like, mind and body stuff all that much. Nothing against it. It's just not my thing, usually. But I want to talk about some very practical things in this matter. I'm not really gonna talk about, like, aligning your hakras and all that stuff. That's not my jam. But I am going to talk about making yourself feel good and having that be the only way that creative work is going to get through, right? If you're like me, when you feel crappy, nothing good. Nothing good comes out in this, like, creative thing that we do. If I don't feel good, I'm not really getting anything done. So that means, like, do I write when I'm sick? P not really, no. Sometimes if I don't have a choice, but I really don't, because I know that it's just not gonna work. It's not gonna be all that awesome. I had a teacher once who told me that he doesn't write on days that he teaches. And to the young graduate student that I was at the time, I thought, That's insane. Like, you are just wasting so much time. You could be writing so much, but, like, you teach, and then you need, like, the rest of the day off. But now that I also teach, um, I totally get it. Like, you're exhausted. Like, after teaching, you're tired. If you teach well, then you put a lot into it, and you're tired. And when you're tired when I'm tired, it's just hard to be excited about anything I'm writing. So it comes to writer's block, one thing we need to do is make sure that we're taking care of this ship. Our ship is feeling good, and that is going to help us write. So I've got a couple things here that I've found about me and my own body that really help me be conducive to creating and not getting stuck. So I want to go over a couple of these things now. When you write, how you write, exercise and just some habits that I've developed that have really helped me maintain, like a really focused creative energy, um So let's get into those things. 13. Finding the Right and Wrong Times to Make Music: Okay, the first thing for me, time of day matters, okay? I am a big advocate of this, and I've given some talks about this before, actually. I think that our bodies go through some kind of cycle throughout the day of creative energy, like work energy, like busy work energy, and probably a few different kinds of energies. Now, I don't have any scientific background for this, okay? There's no science here. This is just me talking about me. But try it. Just, trust me, try this. Find during the day, the point when you are at your creative maximum, right? There's a point in your day where you are the most creative. And there's a point in your day when you're the least creative. Okay? So, easy. We need to figure out what those two times of day are, and then we need to make sure we're making the most of both of those things. So for me, it's the morning. I am the most creative in the morning. I usually film these classes in the morning because I feel the most sharp. It's 10:30 A.M. Right now. I love going for walks in the morning. And I'm not like an early early morning people. I'm not one of those crazy people that gets up at, like, four in the morning just to have quiet and write. I did do that for a while, and I really loved it. But now I usually get up around, like, 730, and then I, you know, take my kid to school, and then I come back and I'm writing. Um that is my most creative time. By a lot is the morning. But it shifted. You know, I shifted as I've gotten older. When I was in college, it was night, for sure. I was staying up all night long. I think I've already talked about that. And I loved pulling all nighters and writing. But as you get a little older, shifts. Now it's the morning. The afternoon for me is my least productive time between like 1:00 P.M. No, between 2:00 P.M. And 5:00 P.M. About really 2:00 P.M. And 4:00 P.M. That's the least productive for me. So, I save busy work for that time. I generally stop my creative process around one or so, um and then transition to, you know, editing videos is a really good thing to do, while I'm not feeling well, I'm in that mode, right? So I'm not, like, super creative, but I'm getting busy work done. Editing videos, sometimes doing notation stuff, business stuff, anything like that. That's what I like to do in the afternoon. So for me, my maximum creative time is in the morning. Find out when it is for you. When you When do you get the most done? When are you most excited to sit down and write? That's probably your best time. Take some experimenting and do be aware that it moves around. But make sure you're not trying to squeeze some creativity out of a time when you're otherwise at your least creative point. But think about that. Try to find those times. If you're writing in your most creative time, your odds of getting stuck are way lower. If you're writing at your least creative time, your odds are way higher. And again, the way you find these times, you just got to experiment and find what works best for you. You probably you might already know. You might say, I love writing late at night. Then that's right. That's great. That's your time, probably. Experiment with it and see if you can figure it out. It's not that hard once you try to do it. 14. Perfectionism and Procrastination: Alright. This is gonna be a hard pill to swallow, but I'm just gonna give it to you right now. Straight up, okay? Perfectionism, procrastination. If you are professional or aspiring to be a professional, we don't have time for those. We just don't have time. You got to get stuff done, and you got to write stuff. You can't write and then stare at the screen or your paper or your instrument and say, Do I like that? Do I not like that? What can I do better? Sometimes we can do that, but sometimes we just got to get to business. You can do that. You can always try to make something better. But to get stuck in your tracks because you just don't know if you like it, we just don't have time for that. We're not going to do it. We just have to cut those things off now. The same thing with procrastination. We can't just say, Oh, I want to write, but I don't feel like it. Maybe I'll work on this music later or something like that. As a professional, that's just not an option. Like, if it's my time to write in a day, I'm sitting down to do. A long time ago, I read this book by Philip Glass. I think it was an autobiography of Philip Glass from, like, the 90s. So there's probably a lot more to do with it now. But he talks in there about training the muse, which I find to be really interesting. The idea is when he sits down to work, he works from, like, if I remember right, it was basically like nine to five. Like, he treats it like a job. When he gets there, he sits down and he writes, just like a job, like a banker. When a banker goes to work, he banks or she banks. Composers, music producers, music writers, that's what we do. We sit down and we write. So if you're not feeling inspired, there is some argument to be made to grind through it and keep working. And sooner or later, you will train your body to be ready for creative work when you sit down and get ready. That's this training the use thing. I used to think, Oh, there's no way. There's no, I'm gonna be inspired when I'm inspired. I can't train it. That was younger me saying no way. Older me, grown up me says, Hell, yeah, there's a way to do that. Um, it takes practice and commitment. But this idea that I don't feel like it, I don't have any good ideas, all that, no, just we can't do that. That's just not an option. So throw that away and get to work. That's the answer to those particular problems. Let's move on. 15. Exercise and Creativity: Exercise. Let's talk about exercise. I'm not going to preach exercise to you, but let me just tell you this one thing, okay? A couple of years ago, you know, I'm working in my little office here, and I have every tack toy you can imagine, but I get tired. So one thing I found after doing this for a while, is that I'm not getting outside enough. Fresh air smells really inspire me, so I needed to find a way to get outside more. I also, um wanted to try doing some exercise. So a couple years ago, I started running. Typically, what I do on a day is I will sit at my desk and write music or work on whatever project I'm working on from about 8:30 to one or two. And then often, not every day, but often, I will go for a run, and I'll come back from that run at about 3:30. I get back at 3:30, I take a quick shower. I'm back at my desk at four. I can squeeze one more hour out, and my creative energy has kind of come back by that point. So for that four to five hour, and I stop at five just because that's when I leave at, I don't have childcare at five, so I take over being dad at five. And then I often come back to my computer after bedtime and work a little bit more. But if I go for a run and come back, I've rejuvenated some of that creative energy. It really helps. I can also mull over ideas while I'm running. Running has been really good for my creativity. So you don't have to run. You could just set a little alarm for, like, once an hour. And when your alarm goes off, do ten push ups or go for a walk. Walks are incredible. Sometimes, if I don't feel like running, I just go for a walk, and it works just as well, really. So take a break, go for walks, get fresh air, clear your head, you'll come back and you'll have a new burst of creative energy. Now, if you can't exercise, I get it. Not everybody can. But take a break, do something to at least exercise your brain a little bit. You know, just, you know, do puzzle, do something that will work your brain outside of this creative project, and just give a little break. You'll have a fresh whenever I do that, I have a fresh amount of energy when I come back. 16. Learning Your Weird Body's Weird Habits: I Alright. Last thing on this topic, learn your body's oddities, whatever's going to make you comfortable, whatever sets you up for creative success. For me, I have this weird thing where when I get to my desk, when I get to my office, I really like to have shoes on. I get much less done when I don't have shoes on. I think the reason is that when I come in here to work and I'm like, focused on, you know, being creative, I kind of feel like if I just come in here without shoes on, I'm like, just sitting at a computer to do a thing, right? Like, I might as well be checking my email or something. I'm just there. But if I have shoes on, then I'm at work, I am working. So I'm not advocating that you wear shoes. I am advocating that you find the weird things that make you comfortable. So whatever it is, if it's wearing a hat, then do that. I find that it's whatever like, if I was being filmed, like, if someone was watching me work, then I would, you know, be wearing clothes I'm comfortable in. You know, if I wear a hat, I might be wearing a hat. I'm wearing shoes. I've got, like, all my stuff on, like, bracelets and watches and stuff. And that makes me comfortable. That's how I'm comfortable. And that's how that's what I need to do creative work. I need to feel comfortable. So look for those things. That make you comfortable, whether someone's watching you or not. It doesn't matter. The most important thing is that you feel good, you feel as much as you can, hopefully you feel proud of who you are and comfortable in your body, and that's going to lead to more creative work. If you don't feel comfortable in your body, I get it. Not everybody does, and I all the time, either. So just learn your body's habits, and it will help you out with Writer's Block, I promise. Okay, let's move on to the meat and potatoes of this class. And that is when you're stuck, how to get unstuck. So techniques. 17. How to Use These Techniques: Okay. So in this next chunk, I'm just going to give you a whole bunch of techniques that I use that I use with my students to get them out of a rut. So with all of these, I'm kind of assuming that you've already checked off, you know, the first things that we've already talked about. So you've done what you can for those. But despite all of that, you are writing and you've gotten yourself stuck, and you're just like, I don't know what comes next. Nothing sounds good. Over the years, I've developed, you know, these techniques that just kind of snap myself out of it as quick as possible. Still, it is true with the things we've talked about prior to this that we are trying very hard not to get you stuck. We're going to try to make it so that you have the perfect situation so that when you're creating music, you don't get stuck, but it happens, right? Like, it still happens. So if you do get stuck, these are some techniques that can get you unstuck really fast, okay? I use these all the time. And the general philosophy here is that when we're stuck, our brain is just stuck in a rut. Like, we are heading this way and our brain sees only this way, and we're like, maybe you can imagine that we are in a cornfield, right? It's a very Midwest analogy of me, but you're in a cornfield, right? You can't see around you. You can only see the paths that you can take that have been like, kind of borrowed through the cornfield. So here in this cornfield, you can only see the path in front of you, but that path is blocked. How do we just power through to make a new path? That's what we need to do. So a lot of these are just little tricks to get your brain to go, Oh, there's another path over there. Boom, and then you're up and running. That's all we need to do usually. We just need to say, Where did this path go? Let's find a new path and then keep going. That's the whole thing. Last thing about this. I'm going to list, I don't know, maybe ten techniques I have in this area. Which one should you use? I don't know, pick one that feels good to you. Not all of these work all the time. Some of these are specific situations. But you'll have a few that you'll probably identify with and say, Okay, those two or three things are going to be my go to things, right? But if you want to keep it interesting, write all of these down on a list and then just randomly pick one whenever you're stuck, and it'll get you unstuck. Here we go. 18. Go Back: The Previous Section is the Problem: Okay, first things first, go back to the previous section. Here's what I mean. So let's say I'm working on this piece here, okay? So this is kind of an electronic jazz kind of thing. Sounds a little bit like this. Okay, you get the point. So let's say I'm here, and I need to figure out what comes next, okay? So let's just say for a minute, this doesn't exist. Okay, so I've gotten to this point, and I'm thinking, What do I do next? Where should this go? Where does this go? If I'm truly stuck here, the odds are that I've done this thing that I like to call written myself up against a wall. And here's what that means. That means that I've written this thing, and it's cool and I love it. And we're going and going and going, and now we've run into a wall, and we're like, This can't go any farther. This often happens to me when I'm working on groove based stuff. Like, if I'm, like, writing, like, a beat and it's a groove and it's cruising and I'm feeling great about at one point, I need to do something else. I need to stop that beat or something. And if it's been going on for a long time, I might just be stuck. There's just no way to do it. So the easiest thing to do is to step backwards. Cause what's happened here is we're running through that corn path, right? And we're like, Okay, here's our path. We're zigzagging, we're feeling good. And we get to the end. We get to a dead end, and we're like, Oh, we missed the we missed the turn. It's behind us. So we're going to jump back a section. And we're going to basically say, and this is going to be really hard to do. Trust me. We're going to take the previous section, all of it. And again, I'm using Ableton here. You know, it's writing music, whatever. Use pencil and paper, use anything. So I'm going to go to the previous section. I'm going to highlight it. I'm going to shed a little tear. Then I'm going to delete it. Because that previous section is your problem, not the section you're on now. The section you're trying to come up with now. The reason that you can't come up with a next section might be that your previous section leaves you no options, right? You need that section to give you options, places to go. So we're going to step back and say, that last section left me nowhere to go. So let's try that again. Write a whole bunch of write what you can here, and hopefully what you come up with next for that section will leave you places you can go. They will lead you to the next path in the cornfield, sort. Cool. Okay. That's technique number one. 19. Walk it Out: Get some Fresh Air: Alright. Next one, take a walk. I'm dead serious about this. We're stuck here. Let's go back to where we were. Okay, we're stuck here. What comes next? What am I gonna do? I'm gonna take a walk. I'm just gonna walk away from this whole project. I'm gonna take a walk, and on that walk, honestly, I'm really not gonna think very much about this piece. I'm not gonna go for a walk and think, Oh, what can I do next? I'm not gonna do that. What I'm going to do is I'm gonna take a nice walk. I'm gonna think about how the leaves are changing in the fall. I'm gonna think about how nice the neighborhood I live in is that I can take these nice walks. It's gonna be great. I'm going to stretch my legs, get some fresh air in my head, get some oxygen going. And then I'm going to come back and sit and say, Okay, where did we leave off? Now, when I do that, what's happening now is I'm saying, Okay, we might have been at a dead end a minute ago. But now my head is clear, I'm going to look at it again. Ah. Now I see the path, right? So sometimes just taking a walk or even a break. You could just say Take a break. You know, that probably works too. I prefer to take a walk. I think it's actually really good for creativity to take walks. And you can read all about that in, like, Steve Jobs. You know, he took walks all the time. A lot of people have talked about walks and creativity. So stop, take a walk, come back, look again, see if you can find the route that you need to take to finish the piece. 20. Look Back: Explore Previous Material: Okay, another thing you can do, and this is a really good one that I work with students on all the time. This is one that I often find younger composers or less experienced composers kind of miss sometimes. But if I'm here and I'm thinking, What comes next? What can I do here? A lot of the time, the answer is, you've already done it. What goes there is music you've already written. So I can say, Okay, uh, this section. This section was pretty cool and fun. So let's put it there. Can I just do that? That might work. Try it. We as humans, like repetition of ideas. We like familiarity, right? We like it when something is familiar to us. Reusing material is great. That's why we have form in music, right? It's because we like to reuse things. So a lot of the time, the answer you're looking for, what comes next, is already answered in music that you've already written. Now, do you just paste the whole thing right in? Maybe that might work. Or do you modify it? Do you say, Okay, that's cool, but we're going to do we're going to take this chord progression. We're going to conform it to this new key. We're going to thin it out, thicken it up, do something. Maybe we'll get rid of the guitar for this part. You know, just something to change it up, maybe. Maybe we need that. Maybe we don't. It all depends. But keep in mind the material all the music you've already written is probably really great material for you to use next. 21. Skip It: Jump to the Next Section: Another really good technique is to start at the end and go backwards. This sounds harder than it is. Watch. If I let's take this and if I say, let's just go back to where we were. Okay. So here's this section. I need to come up with something that goes here. One thing I might do is say, I don't know what goes here. So I'm going to skip it. So let's say what does go here is probably similarly length to things that go here. So this is actually, I think it's 24. But, okay, let's put 24 bars in there. One, two, three, four, 24, right here. Let's put a marker there. I'll say I don't know. This is probably going to be the last section. Okay, so now I'm going to work on what comes last, or after this. Okay? So let's say maybe it's this. I don't know. Okay? So now we've written the last section. But we have this big hole in the middle, right? But it's an easier hole to fill than it was before, right? Because now we know where we're going. We know our target is here, okay? So we need to write something that turns this into this, right? So transition, we could kind of think about how it's going to morph into that. There's a whole bunch of things we could do, but having a destination, having a target can really help us rethink things and help us out of the rut. And if this is the wrong number of measures, that's fine. You just say, Okay, cool. My previous section ended earlier. It's here. That's great. So let's just grab all this and then just slide it back. So, you know, you can be flexible about finding that exact point. Sometimes when I do this, I don't even count measures. I just zip, way out to the end and just say, like, Okay, over here somewhere, I'm just going to put this and say, that's how I want this piece to end. So what comes next? And it might be as simple as, Oh, I just need to use this part of it. And then it's easy. So sometimes jumping the section you're on, skip it, do the end, and then you'll say, Oh, now I've got some cool ideas about what I could do for that previous part. 22. The Avoidance Game: A you know, there's a new dog in my neighborhood and it's driving me nuts. Listen. Oh. There it goes. Okay, getting into these next few, these are a little weirder. These are really designed to get you out of a comfort zone and get you writing something that you wouldn't have otherwise come up with. These are little bit of games, kind of, little musical games that you can play with yourself that's gonna make your brain go, Oh, We're in this corn maze, and we need to jump over there and keep going. So bear with my little games. They sound silly, but they will get you out of a rut if you stick to doing them if you just do them. So this first one, I call avoidance. So what we're going to do here is, this is really designed for pitch stuff. So let's say we're working on this melody. Here's this nice little melody I liked. Let's hear it. Oh. Okay. It's kind of weird melody without any context, but it's fine. So this is in the key of F. That's fine. Let's say, let's pick a note. How about F? Sure. It doesn't have to be what key you're in, but sure, it can be F. Pick a note that's in the key that you're working, okay? So F, G A. Let's do F and G, actually, just to make this a little harder. Okay? So now, we're going to avoid those two notes. We're just not going to use any Fs or Gs. Now, what this is going to do is it's going to force us to come up with something a little different. Here's our melody. I'm going to copy it. I'm going to make a new version of it. Now let's do it without any Fs or Gs. There's an F, so I need to change that. Let's actually put that to a C, maybe. Now this D is weird. That could go there. Here's a whole bunch of Gs. Let's move those two want to go up a That's not a key. That's in key or that's in key. You know, they don't have to all be the same note. What if I did? Oh, can't use Fs. You see how this just forces you to rethink things in a really interesting way? Can't use Gs or Fs. Let's go. D C. Okay. Let's hear it now. Cool. Totally different melody. I came up with it by just picking a few notes and saying, I'm going to avoid those notes. You cannot use those notes. That's fine in a melody, but it gets pretty hairy when you get into a harmony like this. You know, I could go through here and say, All the Fs. There's some Fs. Let's move those to B flats. All the Gs. Let's move those to I don't know, Ds. Let's replace that other D, right? So this is really going to change things up and force you to find new, like, pathways in your head that will, um, create something that you may not have otherwise thought of and bust you out of your rut. Now, you don't have to stick to this. Start doing it. Start avoiding those notes, pick a few notes, and avoid them to force yourself to write something different. And then if you're like, Oh, now I see what I'm doing. Now something makes sense. Now I have a plan. I have an idea. If you're like, Oh, but I need those notes now, use those notes. Throw this little game away and get going. The whole point of this is just to get us back on track. So as soon as the game has played out, you can ditch it. It's just a tool, right? Alright, let's go to the next one, which is probably my all time favorite one. 23. F#?!: Okay, I'm presented often with the following situation. I'm in my office, student comes in and they say, I'm writing this music. I'm feeling pretty good about it, but I'm stuck. I don't know where to go next. Every note sounds bad. How do I choose what note to do next? And I always have an answer. I do. There's always an answer to that. And the answer is F. That's the answer. Okay, now, you're thinking, What kind of garbage answer is that? You're just gonna randomly say a note? Yes, I am because here's why. You're asking me for a note. You're saying, Just give me a note to start on. And I'm saying, Okay, F sharp. It's as good as any other note. Pick a note. And if you're gonna ask me to pick a note, I'm just gonna pick an F sharp. Why F Sharp? Because when I was in that exact situation, I remember going to my teacher, and I said to him, I'm writing a string quartet. But it's like daunting. I don't know what to do. And in this particular case, I was starting the piece. I was like, I don't know where to start. And that teacher, who is one of my all time most influential teachers, that teacher said to me, Look, the F Sharp above the base class staff is the most beautiful note on the Cello. This teacher was a cellist. So start with that note. And I said, Okay, so I wrote the piece. But that idea has stuck with me. That just like you want me to pick a note for you, F Sharp. Um now, will it work for your piece? Just mit, because here's the deal. If I say the next note in your piece right now, no matter where you are, the next note is FHAp. That's either going to work or not work. So if it works, you're going to be like, Okay, well, FHAp is in the key. It kind of works. That's fine. Your job is to make it work, make it work better. If it's out of the key and doesn't work at all and makes a dissonance, even better because now you need to make that F sharp work. You need to come up with a new chord progression, a new melody, a new texture, maybe, a new something to find a way to make that note work. That's going to be tricky, and it's going to lead you down a whole new row of corn in the corn maze, okay? So forcing yourself to make that work is going to generate some new and always interesting music, I promise you. So if you are just stuck and you're like, I don't know what to do next, put enough sharp there. Put enough sharp on the page, and then try to make it sound good. That's going to be a unique turn in your piece. It's going to make something different happen. It's going to be not something you otherwise would have come up with. It's just a little game to kickstart you going. So try F Sharp. Incidentally, if you look at all of the music I've written in the last ten or 15 years, you'll find that all of it in one way or another, is, like, centered around F Sharp or is avoiding F Sharp. It's like a weird thing that I do. And then it's because of this. Anyway, moving on. 24. Genetic Variations: Okay Okay, three more. This one is one I like to call genetic variations. Here's how it works. Basically, what we're going to do is if we're saying, let's tidy this up a little bit. Let's get rid of that. If we're saying we need something to go here. Okay? We don't know what comes after this part, but we need something to go here. One thing you can do is this genetic variations thing that I like to think about. Here's how it works. What you're going to do is you're going to take the previous section. And you're going to make a variation on it, okay? So you're going to put it here and you're going to change it up, okay? Change it up in some way based on the previous section. It doesn't need to be wildly different, but different is good. Make it as different as you can. So, you know, slightly different melodies, slightly different harmony. That's cool. Okay, so now we're so that's the variation part of it. Now, here's the genetic part of it. We're going to take this music that you just wrote, and we're going to call that like a generation. Like we're kind of doing this evolving music thing. Okay? So we're going to take that and then we're going to paste it in again. But correctly, there. We're going to paste it again, and we're going to do another variation on it, but only a variation on the previous section, not two ago, this one, okay? Cool. Make a variation of it. When you're done, do it again. Do it again. Another variation, but just on this one, okay? We're going to keep doing that for another, I don't know, four or five times. And each one of these is getting farther and farther away from the original, but there's still variations, right? So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to keep making these variations in, like, these different generations, right? And then what I'm going to do is once I've gotten out maybe five, six, seven, ten, however many I need to go in order to feel like I've got something interesting happen now happening now. Then I'm going to take all these in between generations of it and delete them. I don't want you guys. But I'm going to take this one and nudge it back over. And that's my new section. So I'm going to basically evolve this thing, this music to something else, and then I'm going to take that something else, plop it right in. The odds are, it's going to fit. It's going to musically fit because it is a variation or started off as a variation of that music. So this one takes a little extra time because you're going to write a whole bunch of music that you're not going to use, but tends to have really good results for me. 25. Using Numbers: Okay, next one, use some numbers. Random numbers, anything that just kicks you out of whatever rut your brain is in. So, phone numbers used to be great. You flip open a phone book and then but we don't have phone books anymore, really. But you could do it. I mean, it. Use somebody's phone number. Someone that you know, grab their phone number. Serial numbers or bar codes are also great. So I just reached for something. I happen to have just gotten in the mail the other day this cool new uh tape deck, circuit bent tape deck. It's got, like, vary speed, some glitchy stuff that I can do with some old cassettes. This is not an endorsement, but this is made by a company called Fattronics super cool stuff from them. Anyway, so this on the back has a serial number. So let's use it. That serial number is 101424. So let's use it. Let's go back to my melody. Let's say I need a counter melody. Okay. And let's use these numbers. So I can map these numbers in all kinds of different ways. The easiest way is just the scale. Alright, so this part of the song is looking like kind of looking like C major. Maybe A minor, actually. I think it's A minor. Let's call this A minor. Okay, so in the key of A minor, let's just write this out. So in the key of A minor, we have these notes. G. Okay. Let's take that down an octave just so I can see a little bit better. So here are our notes in A minor. Maybe there's one more. Okay? So I'm just going to assign a number to each one. What were our numbers again? 101. So 10 is kind of nothing. So let's say, one, zero, one. We'll make one tonic. So let's treat zero as a rest. One, zero, one, four, one, two, three, four. That's D. Two. That's gonna be a B four. And then there's a hyphen one, but whatever. We'll leave it. Okay, so this is our new counter melody. So now, is this gonna work? Probably not. So I need an A. Let's go right there. Okay, so let's hear it without these extra notes. Okay, I'm gonna play it with the piano stuff, too. So I'm gonna play this along with it. Okay, now let's add in our little countermlody, and see how we did. Okay, I don't love that note right there. So maybe I'll cheat and move it. If you're using something like this, like numbers just to help get out of a rut, cheat all the time. If you hear something that's, like, close to good, the whole point here is to get good, to get the sounding good. It's not to use some random number. That's just an impetus. So adjust it, do whatever you need. And if figuring out the scale and the numbers and all that stuff, if that's too much, then check out some of my music theory courses. I'll walk you through how to do that. 26. Use Artificial Intelligence: Alright. Last thing on this, something that I actually haven't really done yet, but I'm open to it. And that is use an AI tool to help kick start your creative process. We can argue about AI and how that works and whether or not it's ethical and all that stuff. But let's not get into the weeds on that right now. I'm not asking you to go to an AI and say, Hey, finish writing this piece for me. No, I'm not asking for that. What I'm saying is go to an AI and say, what should I do next, or have it generate a few beats for you or a chord progression for you or something. Have it. Just kickstart something because remember, we're not using this as a tool to write our music for us. We're using it as a tool to get past any kind of writer's block you have, right? We're stuck in a rut, so we're going to use one of these AI tools to just poke us and get our brains finding the right path forward. I don't see anything wrong with that. I think AI can be a really helpful tool for musicians to help with creativity. Whether or not I'm going to jump on board with AI writing Hole music, I don't really think so, but maybe, I don't know. I have a paper that I've written about my thoughts about AI and music. I think it's on my Linked En page or something. You find it if you want. Anyway, okay. So from this, let's move on to talking about building a creative practice and creative habits. 27. What is a "Creative Practice?": Okay, in this section, I want to talk about a creative practice, okay? This is an interesting term and one that for no good reason, I don't often hear musicians talking about. I hear visual artists talking about a creative practice all the time. But your creative practice is really just how you do what you do. But you can work on your creative practice and make it better so that it's easier to do what you do, right? So everything we've been talking about in this class goes into creative practice. Yes, those little tricks that we were just talking about about how to get you out of a rut, that is definitely things that go into your creative practice tool kit. But also, you know, tuning up your work environment, making sure that it's comfortable for creating work. Everything we talked about about, you know, making sure you feel comfortable in your body, in your mind, all of these things go into your creative practice. But there's more, too. So I want to go over a couple different things in this section regarding creating a good, healthy creative practice because that will keep you out of that writer's block mode. So just like everything else, writing music is a skill that we can do difficultly or easily. That was a weird way to say that. Let me try that again. You ever noticed how a lawyer, when a lawyer talks about what they do, they talk about their practice. They refer to the place that they do their lawyering as their practice, right? A doctor refers to their office as their practice, right? There's no reason we shouldn't do the same. Everything that we write is practice for the next thing that we do, right? Every note we write makes the next note easier to write. Now, you might take two steps forward and three steps back some day. But if you develop a healthy creative practice, those days of walking backwards, taking steps backwards, are going to get smaller and smaller, okay? So again, everything we've already talked about falls into this category of building healthy habits that'll keep you out of this writers block area. But let's talk about a few more. Here we go. 28. Developing a Daily Practice: I just spilled coffee on myself. It's cool. Coffee is a big part of my creative practice. Anyway, so story time. I think I mentioned earlier in this class, and certainly, if you've been following some of my work, you know that I was recently up on a ship circling around the North Pole as a resident on this crazy ship experience. It's a whole thing. Follow me on social media for more info about it. But here's what I want to tell you about right now. So in that experience. I had I was on the ship, and if you've ever been on a ship, not a cruise ship, mind you, this was, like, a working vessel ship. It's pretty tight quarters, and you have to really the room you get to sleep in is very small. Um and not very comfortable. So, the room I had was really small, and I had a roommate. And these were not people I knew. This was the organization that puts together this trip, they just paired us with roommates, basically randomly. So I was roommates with a artist. Should I say his name? I'm going to say his name, because I'm going to say nothing but nice things about him. His name is Gabriel Dah. He lives in Texas. Although he's originally from Mexico City, and his work was so cool. I encourage you to Google him. I'm not going to waste all of our time telling you about how cool his work is. He's a visual artist, not a musician, but really cool work and such a nice guy, amazingly nice guy. So the reason I'm telling you about Gabriel is because Gabriel had is very disciplined about his creative practice. Every single night before Gabriel goes to bed, he pulls out a pad of paper and a couple watercolor paints and pours a little water in them and does a quick little painting. This is so healthy. This is so good. If you can find a little thing you can do like that every day, just to just keep the pump primed, right, for creative acts. I asked Gabriel about it, and he said that a couple years ago, I think during the pandemic, he got really tired of his art. Maybe tired is the wrong term. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he told me about needing to kind of reboot his creative practice. And so he started doing this daily watercolor, and it was amazing. Now, one of the really cool things, one of my favorite things is that on the last day of the trip, as we were saying our goodbyes, he gave me one, check this out. You see my degrees right here. Those are my master's degrees. Oh, it's hard to do backwards. There's my doctorate right above my doctorate. That's one of Gabriel's daily watercolors right there that he gave me. It's not brilliant. It's just a little watercolor. It's, you know, it kind of looks at the It's abstract. It's, you know, he spent I don't know, maybe a minute, maybe 2 minutes on each one of these. So yeah, they're not brilliant. They're not supposed to be brilliant. They're just keeping things flowing, right? So, the reason this is important for us every day. If you can do creative things every day, it doesn't have to be music, although that would be ideal. Um, this is the best way to really tune your creative practice. Ever since I got back from that trip, I've been trying to find a way to do that same thing, daily watercolor. I'm thinking, like, a daily melody, daily chord progression, something. I haven't found the perfect thing yet. Um, but I do write every day. I do make music every day. This is my full time job. So I don't really need a daily little thing like that. But if I didn't write every day, I would find that to be really important. So, find a way to exercise your creative practice every single day. Weekends included. Doesn't need to be much. Can be one little melody, one little chore progression. Can be just sitting down at an instrument and playing some notes, even an instrument you don't even play. All of that is good, but you've got to keep that creative practice going, okay? So, whether it's just a minute or a few hours every single day, the more you do it, the less likely you're going to get into any kind of Writer's Block type situations. 29. Making It Happen: Okay, I want to circle back around to this idea of not waiting for inspiration, okay? Because you shouldn't build that into your creative practice. It might sound like a great idea. You're like, Okay, I need to be inspired, and then my creative practice, which is all the tools I have in my tool kit to make music. Once inspiration happens, then that happens, right? Then that triggers my my tools and my methods for being creative. No, we're not going to do that. We don't have time to sit around and wait for inspiration. We're going to get inspired because we're going to train the muse, as we talked about. We're gonna have a really good creative practice. We're gonna feel creative when we sit down to work because of all these things. I want to share with you two quotes that I rather like. Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration. The rest of us get up and go to work. Um, I think that's just great. You know, this is Stephen King, obviously, American writer. Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration. That might sound kind of offensive, but that's true in the real world. Do you think Stephen King just, like, goes on walks and says, Hmm, what kind of monster should I think up today? And then he goes home and starts writing? He doesn't. He sits down and he says, Okay, time to write. Here we go. And he's trained himself to be ready for that. I think I heard the other day in an interview him say that he does he just sets a goal, and he says, 20 pages a day, which to any writer, like, that's a lot. A lot of pages in a day. But anyway, he writes 20 pages a day. So he sits down and he says, I'm going to write 20 pages. And when he writes 20 pages, says, I'm good. And he walks away. Um, he probably, like, finishes the thought he's on, but in the end, that's his goal, you know? Let's look at another quote My cure for writers block, the necessity of earning a living. Obviously, that's pretty tongue in cheek, but also kind of true. Like, I got a kid. I got to put food on the table. I got to get stuff done. But this is a quote from James Elroy. I think he's like a crime writer. I'm not real familiar with his work. But something to think about. When I was younger, I was very into the whole, like, Let's drive to the lake, stare at the sunset, be inspired, and then write music about it. And I still love all of that. But I also have had enough of that to fill me with things to be inspired about. There's always something. There's always something ready to go. Okay. Let's move on and let's talk about a few questions that come up when I talk about this kind of work. And that is just what happens if I don't know where to start? What happens? What are my options, if I just don't know what to do next? And what if I just don't know what sound I want? What should you do? Let's just power through some of those really direct questions in the ways that I handle them right now. 30. "I Don't Know Where to Start": Okay, question one. I don't know where to start this piece. What should I do? Okay, so you're starting to work on a new piece and you just don't know where to start. Here's what I'm going to do. If it was me, it depends a little bit on what style of music I'm writing. If I'm writing an electronic piece, I might look for a cool sample or that I like and just kind of load that up and then see how see what comes to mind from that. But the odds are, I'm probably going to start with some kind of chord progression, some kind of harmony to kick things off. So tools at my disposal. I could use the F Sharp trick. I could just say, Okay, I'm going to write an F Sharp and then start adding notes from there. Let's do it. Let's go to a new session. Let's take a mini clip, and I'm just going to throw like I don't know, this analogue on here, something quick. So let's say, Okay, well, there's enough sharp. Let's maybe go down in octave. I'll say, What do I want to go with that? Maybe like a seconds kind of thing. I'm not even gonna really think about harmony. I'm just gonna What about that D? That's gonna be, like, dark and cryptic. That D that's gonna be really dissonant. Let's go like that, like that and like that. And I'm like, Let's just, like, this let this resonate so we can just hear it. Now, how did I pick these four notes? First one is F Sharp. I just did it. I don't know. Somewhere to start. I thought, maybe, like, a second. Mm mm. That might sound kind of cool. Then a fourth above that. That might sound kind of cool, give me a perfect something, and then a semitone for a dark and creepy dissonance because it's the day before Halloween. Okay. I've officially started. Things are happening now with this piece of music. It's a little bit of a mess. Let's go. Le stretch that out. I like the D natural for the Halloween. Maybe we add one more we add a G natural. Oh, that's gonna be really dissonant. Maybe an A. Now I want it more straight. See, so the point here is that I'm up and running. I'm making music now. So what's the start of something? Other tools I could use is I could do, like an avoidance thing and just say, Okay, well, I'm an F sharp here, so I'm not going to use any G sharps or A sharps, right? That would be the second and third note of the scale. That would be fun. That would help me start working and start playing with something. Or here I might say, you know, I heard this thing the other day. It was like, Like that. And I liked it. It was that shape of a thing. So my notes, but the shape I heard somewhere else. That's totally cool. So a couple ideas for just getting started. 31. "I Don't Know What to Do Next": Okay, question two. I don't know what to do next in this piece. Okay, so you've got a piece of music. You're working on it, and you go, I don't know what to do next. Okay, I've given you a few tools for that. Let's review what we've talked about. Okay, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to look at the previous section, and I'm going to say, how did we get into this mess? Like, how did we get into the rut, right? Like, we're clearly stuck. We've written ourself into a corner. Let's look at the previous section and see if we made some choices there that have kind of closed off where we're heading, right? So let's go back and see if we can rewrite that section to kind of leave us a path out of it. If that doesn't work, I'm going to stop, and I'm going to take a walk. Just go to relax, clear my head, I'm gonna come back to it. Then when I come back to it again, if I still don't have any ideas, I'm going to look at some previous material in the piece, something I've already added to it that I can take and either reuse in this next spot or modify and adapt to something new. So if it doesn't work straight up as it is in the older part of the piece, if it doesn't work to use it again, then I'm going to look at what kind of variations can I do to it, and then maybe if I feel like getting weird, I'll do that, genetic variations thing that I like to do to come up with something new. I still that doesn't work, I'm just going to skip this section. I'm just going to say, Nah, I don't know what I'm doing here. Skip it. Go to the next section and start writing. If I can do that. If it doesn't work, if I don't know what the next section is, then let's chip all the way to the end. Let's write a really good ending. And then we'll write the part before the ending that leads to the ending. And then we'll write the part before that, that leads to that. I did my big, like, Minnesota orchestra piece. I did that way. I started at the beginning. I wrote an intro, and then I didn't like what I had next, so I skipped to the halfway point because I knew there was this big thing that happens right in the middle. So I wrote that. And then I kept writing from there, and I wrote all the way to the end, and then I jumped back and I wrote this section before the middle and then the section before that and the section before that and the section before that until it tied all up into a completed piece. And then, of course, I edited it a few times. But Um, doing that has worked really well for me. So there you go. A whole bunch of ideas for ways to get unstuck. 32. "I Don't Know What Sounds I Want": Okay, question three. I don't know what sound I want. This is particularly for the electronic music makers here, and this is kind of a sound design question, but this happens, like, a lot. You could think of it as an acoustic problem, as well, but it would be an orchestration problem. Orchestration and sound design are basically synonymous, but in entirely different mediums, right? They're both about crafting the sounds that we want. Anyway, if I'm working on electronic piece and I'm stuck on the sound design, 100% of the time, here's how I'm going to deal with it. Skip it. I'm not going to deal with sound design. When I write electronic music, I'm pretty strict about how I do it, and it is in three layers. First, I'm going to write the notes and the beats. I'm going to put all the notes where they go, and I'm probably just going to put pianos on all the cents I, you know, I'm comfortable with pianos, and I'm just going to do that to make sure the notes and rhythms are all how I want them. Then once I finish the piece in that way with just a whole bunch of pianos, I'm going to jump back, and then I'm going to focus only on sound design. At this point, I have no note or rhythm decisions to make. I'm just focusing on what sounds I want. Maybe I'll cue up some guide tracks, some similar music, and I can hear what they did. Maybe that'll give me some ideas for what I want. Probably start describing things in terms of color. Like, do I want a bright sound, dark sound, buzzy sound, stuff like that. But the biggest and most important thing I'm going to do is separate the writing from the sound design process. So I'm going to write everything, all the notes and rhythms, then back to sound design. So I don't have to worry about any notes or rhythms or harmonies or anything while I'm focusing on sound design. Alright. Those are the big three questions I get ask more than anything else on this topic. I got a couple more things for you. So let's go on to the next and last section. 33. What Should You Do Next?: Mm. Alright, we've reached the end of our little class on Writer's Block. What comes next? If you enjoy this class, I have a couple other things that you might also enjoy. Consider a composition class. I have a few here. Maybe consider a sound design class. I have a really big sound design class here. It's very thorough. Or maybe you want to get more into the music theory stuff. That's kind of a big, big part of what I do here online. So check out some of my other courses. You'll find a lot of options on what to do next. Okay, a few more goodies for you that I want to leave you with. So sit tight. 34. Bonus Lecture: Hey, everyone. I want to learn more about what I'm up to. You can sign up for my email list here. And if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also, check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there, and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.