CURING CREATIVE BLOCK
Creative Block, or “Creative Constipation” as it is commonly known, is the frustrating feeling we get when we sit down to work on a track and... nothin’. We might try putting together a melody, or a bassline, or a drum loop, but no matter how many things we throw at the wall, nothing seems to stick. This defeating process can spark a destructive thought pattern, causing us to think things like, “I’m just wasting my time,” or “today’s just not a production day,” which can lead to frustration, procrastination, and in many cases, the total abandonment of a project.
Sound familiar?
It certainly does to me, which is why I actively keep track of the tactics that come to the rescue when I find myself treading water in the DAW. What if the fix was as simple as watching a quick video, or taking a walk around the block? Believe it or not, the best fixes generally are that simple. Below are my top 5 methods for breezing past the self-induced obstacle known as ‘creative block’.
HACK #1: LEARN MORE
What if the stagnant state of your creativity was nothing more than a sign that it’s time to grow? Throughout my time making music, I’ve found that the number one setback to advancing my productions has been a simple lack of knowledge. If you’ve spent any time in a DAW, you understand that there’s more than one way to skin an 808. However, we often become complacent with the way we are used to doing things, and fail to look outward for new and innovative ways of achieving them. That “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality is often what causes us to become stuck in our ways - and stuck in our DAWs.
Lucky for us, online resources for learning various aspects of music production are at an all-time high! In addition to the wealth of free content available from blogs and YouTube channels, there are countless other online resources that consistently put out quality tutorials covering all aspects of music creation. Furthermore, there are also 1-on-1 mentors you can meet with virtually who will accelerate your skills faster than any of the aforementioned avenues. Indeed, the best way to beat your creative block is to outgrow it.
HACK #2: GET ORGANIZED
Have you ever had a messy room and realized that things get lost 10x more than when it was clean? Well the same goes for your DAW. If your sample library looks like a tornado just went through it, it’s probably a big factor in your creative block. Making music requires an efficient workflow, and you can’t work efficiently if you can’t even find your own samples to begin with.
This is where organization is a necessity! Your sounds and samples should be stored in a place that is quickly accessible and easily navigable from within your DAW. For example, I have a folder in my Ableton browser that contains all of the go-to samples I use when producing. Within that folder, everything is organized by section: Drums, Synths, Vocals, FX, etc. Within those folders, my sounds are broken down even further into subsections (kicks, snares, hats, etc).
There is no denying that organizing your samples is a tedious process, but it is absolutely crucial to your creative flow and staying productive when you sit down and open your DAW. In fact, its importance is emphasized in Hack #3!
HACK #3: SOUND DISCOVERY
We’ve all felt the rush of inspiration that comes with a batch of new sounds, so inducing that rush is a surefire way to catapult yourself out of a creative slump. When it comes to obtaining quality sounds, you generally have two options: find them or make them. For best results, I recommend a healthy combination of both, so I have lumped the two into a category called sound discovery. Sound discovery is a mixture of sound design and sample discovery, both of which contribute to building a library full of quality sounds guaranteed to crack through any type of creative barrier you may be facing.
Sample Discovery
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably had more samples on your computer than you’ve known what to do with at one point or another. This adds to the clutter discussed in Hack #2, but also presents a great opportunity to find amazing samples that are right under your schnoz. By taking the time to scroll through samples that are on your computer or online, you can cherry-pick the ones you like best and add them to your own personal ‘cookbook’. Many of my favorite samples are ones that were hiding on my hard drive all along!
Sound Design
Dedicating time to learning sound design is its own separate beast, but you don’t need to be an expert to create, tweak, or find presets you like and bounce them to audio. By doing this you’re effectively doing the same thing as finding samples, but instead you’re making the samples yourself. This opens up an entire new realm of possibility in regards to having a library of sounds that are personalized to your unique style. Who wants a library full of sounds everyone else has, anyway?
HACK #4: PLUG IT IN
Your sounds and samples are the basic tools you need to make music, but equally important are the tools you use to warp, mangle, and process those elements. Every DAW comes stock with its own array of plugins that will have unique effects on the audio you’re working with, but exponentially more abundant are the third-party plugins that can provide a whole new world of wild and wonderful results.
For example, most are familiar with Serum, but how often have you played with Serum FX to get some crazy new character out of a boring sound? You may be familiar with Ableton’s stock Overdrive, but have you ever tried any of the presets on Camel Audio’s CamelCrusher to add a different type of top-end grit to your basses? Have you ever visited maxforlive.com and explored the endless amounts of user-generated plugins that can do all manner of absurd and unthinkable things to your sounds?
Oftentimes, our creativity can be held up simply because certain elements don’t sound cool or attractive enough to be worth our time. This ends up discouraging us from continuing our work on our track, and can result in the abandonment of our track as a whole. I strongly advise anyone who feels stuck to explore the world of third-party plugins that is at your fingertips, and breathe new life into what you’re working on!
HACK #5: GO CLIMB A TREE. LITERALLY.
Sometimes overcoming a mental block can be as simple as taking a break. Chasing creativity often merely pushes it further away, so it’s wise to give your mind some time to quiet down and some space for your ideas to manifest all by themselves. In fact, particularly mundane chores can be one of the best cues for creativity because the mind becomes bored and seeks to entertain itself. This is why activities like grocery shopping or cleaning the apartment are unexpectedly perfect environments for inspiration to strike. The general rule of thumb is that the more mindless the task the better, as it is mindless scenarios that are the breeding ground for original ideation.
IN CONCLUSION
I hope these hacks serve as a potent laxative for the creatively constipated, and come in handy next time you find yourself in an artistic funk. Just remember – it will only last as long as you let it!
