Overcoming writer's block

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Hey everybody,

Over the last couple of months I hadn’t been able to write a lot of music. It isn’t something that worries me horribly, as I have gone through this in the past and overcome it, but it is all the while frustrating. I sat down several times today with the intention of putting a new song together, and repeatedly I walked away with nothing. This evening I watched about three hours worth of the documentary footage in the Fellowship of the Ring extended DVD. The Lord of the Rings has always captivated me and just raised my spirits in times of doubt, and this time it did as surely as any other. I sat down at the Moog and things just started to happen. I’ve got a good way into a new song, and even written a new patch on my Old School of which I am particularly fond: it is a snappy, somewhat harsh, crackling lead sound that involves feeding the mixer out into the external input and cranking the external input level to around 80%. I have given this patch the fitting name “Captain Crunch”. I’m very relieved to have left another dry area of creative desert behind me and traveled once again into exciting and unknown musical frontier. I thought this would be a good time to ask others on the forum: How do you overcome writer’s block? Anything in particular? A book, movie, or album? I’d like to hear what stimulates others’ creativity around here.

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That is an interesting post.

Personally, I have never experienced such a block, for the simple reason is that I am not, or do not consider myself as, a writer or a musician. I have never sat down in front of an instrument with the intention of writing music. I am in fact certain that I would be incapable of this. That being said, I have music in my mind most of the time. I guess part of the reason is that it is all around us. The drone of your refrigerator, the beat of windscreen wiper (although you may not get to hear that too much depending on where you live :laughing: ), engines, the rain. Every morning I sing along with my coffee machine, sometimes there are subharmonic beats if the refrigerator motor is running.

All this to say that my way of thinking, and I can understand if some people may think of me as some weirdo, is that music (as everything) is not created as such. It’s already there. It’s my opinion that artists are mediums, they bring into our relative reality what already exists in the absolute reality.
For example take a sculpture, whatever comes out of the piece of wood or stone was already there. What is a photograph but transferring one reality to another ?

I realise that this is either going to sound utterly ridiculous or very pretentious but to (finally) answer your question, I don’t consciously turn to anything for inspiration. I believe that through listening to the “music” that is around me (and this is most likely subconscious), I just transcribe what is already there… that’s not to say I wouldn’t mind making a bit of money with it :smiley: :smiley:

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Oh, this one is a very interesting topic. I dealt with it many times on Elektron-users.com.

My experience may be not exactly on the spot but still. It can be made short as follows. Once, I finished university (for the first time ahem) and had a lot of time. I was looking for a job, teaching maths/physics/language to high-schoolers and was living at my parent’s. By that time, I was able to find many times a week some 4-6 hours periods for good music sessions. Then, I found a training course which led me to have daily office hours. Things got complicated: I was still going to bands rehearsal but could not do my own music as I could not find time for long sessions anymore.

When things became really hard frustration-wise, I though about selling everything and get some home cinema or whatever. Anything that would not have the ability to frustrate me. I could not. I have a kind of… flame, something that happily dictates me that I HAVE to do this. So I worked on another strategy: accpet that my life rules had changed and deal with it. I started to make this less formal, more casual: instruments were not anymore in my “spaceship” but scattered in tha appartment (I had a cool room mate :slight_smile: ) and I played WHENEVER I FELT TO, without the goal to come up with any hit/monster patch etc. My #1 Mantra became: PLEASURE FIRST. Poor productivity was considered not to be a problem.

I started experimental improvisation: no rules, no preparation. Just plug, sit, watch each other, press record, and go. That changed eveything even more since I became kind of bored of having objectives or milestones. Then it came back: I joined a band, created another.

As a conclusion to this, I would say that most of the problem was how I considered music making and how high I put my expectations. I had WAY MORE PLEASURE when I started to deal with this more lightly.
You sit and nothing comes? Well, why not being grateful just for having had fun? Fun is what all of this is about, right? Now if you have something (film, album etc) that makes it burn in you, then you have some sort of luck :slight_smile:

On a side topic, some top of the cream members of elektron-users have offered methods to associates family life or professional life with music making. I’ll find these topics and I come back to link them.

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Stiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive: I see what you mean about the whole improvisation dynamic. It is a lot of fun, and it gives you a whole different outlook on what it is to play music. It actually gets my juices flowing really well and helps me unwind and remember to have fun. I listened to some of the improv stuff you have up on Bandcamp, and I must say it is very enjoyable. I like what you’re doing, and I respect your vision. Keep it up!

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You can’t force inspiration, of course. You can only seek new sources of it. Be it in movies, events in one’s personal life, or in everyday news, or even (dare I say it?) drug induced trips (mostly in the seventies).

It’s a sorry fact that most (not all, fortunately) of the best music was composed and created under the influence of some artificial stimulants. I’ve never taken any myself, but I must acknowledge that fact nonetheless.
There are other events that can lead to inspiration, like new found love, or the birth of one’s child. Both of these are known to produce similar effects to drug induced euphoria.

Personally, I usually am greatly influenced by the tones and timbres of new patches on a synth. Followed by the mood I’m in at a particular moment. Sometimes, I will even stay up late (too late) just to add something to a composition in progress, before I loose the inspiration of that moment.

Almost all the music I’ve “composed” or recorded was done in the late hours of the night. Probably helped by endogenous morphine, a naturally sleep induced drug…

P.S. Just to make it clear that, although this post seems to suggest that drugs are helpful in bringing inspiration to create music, I do not endorse their use, nor do I use any myself. Other than the ones my body secretes naturally.

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One resource I turn to as a source of random inspiration, is Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies.” For folks who don’t know what they are, long story short, it’s sort of like a deck of cards containing thought-provoking suggestions, aphorisms and phrases designed to ‘jog the mind’, to quote the website:
http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/
You draw a card at random and do what the card suggests :smiley: I have an app on the iPhone that takes the place of the physical deck of cards, but regardless of the format it’s a fun tool to have in your bag of tricks, not just for music but for anything creative…check it out!

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Great topic, Kenneth.

Vince, I’ve been meaning to check out that deck for some time. . . Thanks for reminding me of it! Good to know that there is an app for that. . .

It’s always fun reading people’s takes on this sort of thing. . . I think Stiiiiiive has a great point about making the process fun. When I find that I have not been being very productive, I often feel like I have lost touch with what I really enjoy about music making. I remind myself that I can make anything that I want, and that, life being short, it better be something that I enjoy making. It’s like the Joseph Cambell quote: “Follow your bliss, and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”

Now, I think “following your bliss” can can be much trickier than it seems. . . otherwise everyone would be generating tons and tons of incredible content all the time: ) If i’m feeling stuck, I try to get myself to do something that on the surface might not be productive. Top of the list is listening to more music, which normally gets me going. These days, killing a few hours just making a really cool patch will often end up lighting a spark as well. . . I’ve got some favorite music theory writings that I like to delve into for fun ideas. . . and I like to look at scores of composers whose work I admire and see if I can get sneaky and steal something in a not-too-obvious way. I’m also really into structure-generating chance operations and pre-compositional assumptions of various sorts. . .

I also like reading books and watching movies. Reading both classic literature and great comic books get me going. Today, I got pretty charged from reading a bit of Frank Miller’s “Dark Knight Returns”, the other day, I was getting some great inspiration from some Nobokov. . .

Oh, and I love stealing patches from songs that I like and then morphing them until it sounds completely different. I often accidentally start coming up with a fun start to something this way. . .

Hope this doesn’t sound Pretentious (god, I hate that word. . . I’m like, “If having a bit of Pretension is the worst I do, is that such a big deal?” I feel like Aspiration often and unfortunately gets confused with Affectation. . .) :smiley:

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Nothing pretentious in what’s been said here, to me.

The Oblique Strategies are cool, indeed. Here is another alternative, which I have in my favs untill I get the cards.

I had not seen the Fywewyt
ches’ post but he states something really interesting: what artists express is not what they invent but something they receive and translate.
I’ve been into some great books lately, and some of them got me thinking about me, life etc. Eventually I kind of reconcialted several of my beliefs which I though they were not compatible. At a point, everything matched, strangely comfortable. I’m coming to the point: when I watched the Bob Moog documentary, the man said something in this vein (like 5 minutes to the end…):
I believe there is something out there, which we are only a part of. When I’m designing a circuit, I feel like I’m directly connected to it.

A few weeks later, I watched a french actor’s interview. He said this:
We have to find who we are, and artists are the ones who do the most for that. I don’t think we invent anything, I think It exists somewhere and sometimes it just pass through us and becomes understandable for human.



Anyway, I don’t want to hijack the topic :slight_smile:

Lately, my best experience was to fool around some simple riffs, a bit of patching, and I ended with a song. Surprise.
Kenneth, maybe you should just to trust what comes up: if it ends a song, cool. If not, why consider it like something that had to make its way out for the song to come?
Maybe you should not consider you’re blocked, but rather consider you are preparing something despite you.
Maybe things have to get out, whatever they are, songs or not.
Trust chance.

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Carry a voice recorder everywhere because it seems you get your best ideas at the most inopportune times. Record the tune in your head and forget about it. Then go back later and have a listen. You’ll be suprised at what you come up with on the morning commute when the caffeine hits.

I don’t actively “write” anymore because my studio is not consolidated. But when I went through bouts of writers block over the years I would just walk away from the project. Go play pool, watch a movie, spend some time with friends. Go take a drive, watch a sunrise or sunset. Go down to the parks and jog or feed the ducks. Go see a symphony, just take your mind off of it.

You might want to just take your synth down and pack it up and put it in the closet.

I used to keep my basses and things on the stands. Id take the bedsheet off my drums, have everything on display so to speak. I would have this all out and It wouldn’t be until I decided “Well, it’s been enough time since I haven’t played them, I might as well put them back in the cases” that I would get the urge to play.

When I was solely devoted to the bass and I got in a rut I’d just practice scales.



Nowadays, since I don’t exactly have a complete rhythm sections worth of instruments at my disposal, I have been relying on the sequencer. I notice people on the forums have all kinds of opinions and expectations when it comes to how they produce their music. Some take pride in live performances, some rely on overdubbing, some are anti-sequencers, etc. One thing that I can say without being bashful: I overdub and I love sequencers! I have also found when I wrote songs on the guitar or bass that a lot of times they just happen on accident. You will sing a vocal line out of nowhere and turn it into a melody on another instrument. Music is accidental (no pun intended) in this respect. Sometimes the best Ideas happen through random experimentation. I think the sequencer is a great facet for new ideas. Turn the knobs to random values, listen to the pattern, adjust here and there. With a 24 stage sequence you are generating more complex patterns. Some even numbered stages will generate some call-and-response types of things and some of the odd numbered stages further down can generate a melody. Depending on how creative you get, you can create bassline rhythms with melodic punctuations.

I know I have posted this before, but this is a perfect example of what I am talking about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q25O-xox2w
This entire patch happened because I was trying A and got B. You can hear (on good speakers) how the bassline made itself known. When I removed the noise, you hear the melody. This entire thing was an accident and I swear when I turned up the resonance before the cameras rolled I was thumb-dancing like Thelonius Monk…very proud of myself. So you can always view a decent modular program as a template for what can be translated to a traditional rhythm section. You have complete creative control. I have massive respect for those who know what they want out of their synth and can make it happen, but I think even the best of them came up with stuff when they were intending to do something totally different.


I used to think that music came from the ether. Tori Amos said that faries gave her the music. I’m now a rationalist and no longer spiritual. I do think the music comes from your environment though. One of the previous posters wrote that they didn’t consider themselves a musician…well you sure listen to the world around you like one. :smiley: Everything that you take in, every breath you take, every event in your life, every chemical reaction in your body goes right back into your art. I recorded a sax solo during a session one time and when my partner left and I reviewed it for the hundredth time, I burst into tears because I realized that it was because of my grandfathers cancer diagnosis that I played the way that I did. WHen I recorded it, I wasn’t feeling anything…it was purely technical. So if you hear about something that affects you, and then later on down the line you play a sad melody without trying, there you go. Everything is connected, and I believe it comes from within us. I’ll bet that Mozart, Wagner, or Beethoven farted an interval once and said “Hmmm” and jotted that down on a staff somewhere.

It’s like in photography…nature is beautiful, but you have to have a set of eyes to recognize the photo needs to be taken.


I think the best way to get inspired…buy a new instrument! I bought my sister an Oahu lap steel from the 1950’s and I have never played one before. I sat down and the tone was so beautiful and ghostly. I began playing “Sleepwalker” (Santo and Johnny) from the La Bamba movie and I thought Ritchie V and the Big Bopper were going to come over and have a Luau. The sad part is I have to give it to her for xmas lolol and I now have respect for the Moog Lap Steel

So I’ll let others chime in now. Sorry for being so long winded.



I hope that maybe this helps a little.

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Definitely.

Or at least: let the music the chance to be so :slight_smile:

I used to be like that. I finally got bored of though stuffs and it naturrally led me the wild side, imrov.
I second that: you take a direction and land just next to it by turning the “wrong” knob. Actually it’s the right one, but unintended.

I’ll have a look to the video you linked, EricK.

Again, very interesting thread :slight_smile:

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Writers block occurs with improv just as much, as improv is just writing in the moment. This is what I do, I try to leave all preconceived notions behind when I sit with an instrument. Especially keyboard, since there are so many different muscle memories, and getting stuck in a rut of a few will limit you greatly. I do tend to stick in one key, since I know it best, and it is easier to come up with ideas, though switching keys can help you see intervals in a new light.

Switching instruments is invaluable for me. Playing something on bass that doesn’t really make sense on keyboard, but trying it anyway can help, since the two are always different, even the same exact riffs feel and sound different and more importantly have different context.

Playing a percussion instrument is CRUCIAL! Even just a hand drum, or banging on a pot is very inspiring, because you are not thinking about melody or chords or anything, just a beat. I play tabla myself, which warms up my rhythmic juices, then switch to bass or keys and just start playing them like a drum, with just a few notes, concentrating on rhythm. And the difference is huge vs. Just picking up the bass first. When I sit at the keys or.play bass first, I am not in rhythm mode, so I approach it cerebrally, thinking of notes and scales, which does not help me nearly as much.

But the most dramatic way to get inspiration is really good cannabis, of the sativa variety, not indica. I write notes to myself and write on my to do list to acquire and smoke it, because I easily forget. It’s good to quit for a while why now and then, but no music gets to tape. I don’t even get high anymore, but it still helps me to maintain healthy diet, sleep and work patterns. I have done every drug known to man, but nothing inspires me more, although some psychedelics every so often can’t hurt.



Still with everything I do to not get blocked, I still get in ruts that last a long time, weeks even. It’s rough, even when I start back up, I feel terrible for wasting time. But on the bright side, I get a fresh look at my gear, and almost always come up with something new immediately. It’s a cycle, you have to respect nature. Speaking of, going outside and hiking or camping or fishing or whatever helps a lot as well.

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Crown Royal and Youtube… Works every time!