Published
Tue, Mar 29, 2011, 13:00
- We look at how to keep creativity bubbling over—for longer.
Few things rival a sudden spark of creative energy to get musicians excited. We've all been there—sitting on the bus, head hitting the pillow, gazing idly out of the window only to find that—bang!—there's an idea which just can't wait. Over to our computers we go and hours happily pass. This week's column is devoted to the exciting subject of creativity and, importantly, what we can do to nurture and sustain those magic moments.
Ask most musicians what inspires them and they'll often answer "other music." We might be music makers but we're also huge music fans and there is no doubt that other music is hugely influential in our creative flow. The reason we decided either to become musicians, or at least to dedicate time to making tracks as well as possible, was because we heard music which inspired us to get started. It's also true that in terms of comparing mixes, mastering processes and even sound programming, other records can act as encouragement and fuel our own musical aspirations.
That said, it's hugely important for the music we make to borrow from the widest gene pool possible. If you make house music and you only listen to one narrow branch of the same genre, how can your music really hope to stand out from tracks which already exist? Musicians ambitious enough to open themselves up to musical styles beyond their favoured genres are often those who go on to create new sub-genres of their own.
With this in mind, I wonder how much we might all benefit from provoking creativity through periods of "cold turkey." In other words, why not spend a month deliberately not making or listening to music in your chosen musical field? If you make house, listen to Bach. If you're a TV composer, swamp yourself in dubstep and if you're into tech house, listen only to punk rock. After a month, go back to your music of choice and see what influence alternative arrangements, different structures and opposing instrumentation have had on you; you might well be pleasantly surprised.
I also firmly believe that our creative work-flow is shoved along by the technology we choose to ally ourselves to. We all have a DAW of choice and along with that choice comes familiarity with the tools available to us. If I know that I can produce a great vocal sound with a particular choice of EQ, compression and reverb, for instance, I can save that channel strip and use it time and again. If I do, however, a key part of "my sound" is common to every record I make, whereas the vocalist performing might change and certainly the style of the music I make will. The net result is that I'm holding my productions back—a possible "better" vocal sound will never be sought out, as it's quicker and easier simply to load a setting I know has worked before. As a result, my production sound won't progress or evolve.
Also, as our DAWs now provide sounds, instruments, preset effects channel strips and so much more, it's easier than ever to load sounds from a library and make music more quickly. Again, I'd question whether this provokes creativity—does it instead simply create distraction? If I'm searching for a killer sound and I'm flicking through presets, I'm much more likely to settle on something "close" to my original thought than I am to pursue the sound I'd originally imagined. You might well be thinking—who cares? Again it comes back to the gene pool issue; as everyone who owns your DAW of choice also has those presets, unless we have producers ambitious enough to go further and dream a little bigger, we'll end up with the same sounds in many of the records we hear.
At the music college where I teach in London, I run a project for the students who have already studied music technology for a couple of years. I present them with a single snare drum file which is just over a second long and ask them to make the most interesting piece they can with just that sound-source. Working creatively, it isn't long before they've sampled it, chosen individual waveform cycles to create pitched content, re-sampled it again with effects to create warped textures and so on. Almost without fail, this piece ends up being the most interesting of the work they submit at the end of the year. Does the array of functions in modern DAWs make us creative, or is a deliberate limitation of the tools we have available likely to make us look for creativity and inspiration in more interesting places?
So, like many people, I feel privileged at those moments when creativity strikes but I've long since given up on the thought that there's nothing I can do to provoke it. Instead, I'm aware that I'm as likely to feel musical inspiration when I edit videos, go out and take photos or engage in any kind of non-musical activity which interests my brain in some intangible way. I much more rarely find myself writing interesting and original music when I boot up my DAW straight after listening to other people's works of creativity. Is this a trick of the mind, or simply a widening of my own creative gene pool? So long as the creativity flows, I don't care.