Most musicians have been there... that frustrating moment when you just cant seem to get past a certain point, where you feel everything you create is rubbish, where you cant find that missing peice, that melodic resolve, that final hook, or perfect lyric.
Keeping the creative juices flowing is just as much a disipline as the learning an instrument, a disipline that can easily get forgotten as the pressure of a deadline approaches. Recently i have discovered that two musician friends of mine have been shedding light on this subject, giving some very cool tips on how to deal with those dry moments of 'writers block'.
Steve Hillier ( music producer and tutor, and the man behind Dubstar ) has written this excellent article on the Point Blank Music School blog given you '10 Ways To Overcome Writers Block'.
My favourite tip from Steve is...
Make connections between ideas and styles that don’t currently exist. You could argue that’s all creativity is, finding new ways of combining ideas and concepts and discovering new developments. So do it, and don’t forget the Vulcan philosophy of ‘Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations’. It proved useful in many tricky situations on the Starship Enterprise, it might help you too.
You can check out his other tips in the full article here.
Hit making house music producer Mike Monday, currently now living down under in Australia, says this about how he realised he could tackle the problem of no inspiration.
When I wrote and played music my “inspiration” was sporadic and I thought it came along randomly.
But when it did, WOW! The music just flowed through me. It didn’t seem like work, it was almost completely effortless.
So as time went on I got increasingly obsessed with what made the difference between “inspired Mike” and “stuck Mike”. How could the same person who’d knocked out a tune so easily one day be procrastinating, fearful and dithering the next?
Same guy - totally different results. And I started noticing certain patterns and strategies in my thought, words and actions that seemed to make a difference. But I still couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Then, about a year ago I discovered a methodology that fitted and expanded upon what I had noticed in myself. There were certain things that I was doing when inspired, loving it and hyper-productive, and not doing when bored, struggling and stuck. I tried these techniques on myself and it worked like a dream. I then started trying it on others and it did the same.
He has a website now on the subject helping musicians to deal with those uninspired moments here.
Links
http://www.pointblankonline.net/blog/10-ways-to-overcome-writers-block/
http://www.mikemonday.com/
