5 Minute Flash – Igniting That Creative Bolt

Learning how to ignite that creative bolt is incredibly important when working in a professional music environment. Sometimes creative energy keeps coming in like out of a garden-hose, sometimes you have to drag it by the ears to get a glimpse of imagination out of a tune.

To help you gain control over how you generate your output, we’ve collected some pointers that can get you going FAST.

Obviously, a great way to stay creative is working on your craft – fluidity of thought can be – to an extent – conditioned. So let’s start off with some structural ideas to help you regain some creative momentum:

Reframing the problem

Reframing the problem means mixing up the way you think about the material at hand.

If a verse is starting to nag at your flow, or a hook just can’t push the track up to the heights it should reach – try turning the whole thing upside down.

Go quiet on the loud parts, go loud where you would usually go quiet.

Within creativity, there is always the element of unpredictability.

Suprise yourself and – most importantly – the song by reframing the way you handle a problem.

Minimizing the noise

You know what a clean desk does? It lets you handle the immanent.

De-cluttering the space you work in can be a fundamental strategy of regaining creative control. Many producers and songwriters tend to boost the mix up with loads of fragmented elements and ideas. By doing so, they tend to lose track of the vital heartbeats of a song, limiting the potential of the whole production.

So – try minimizing the noise, and you’ll hear the next steps before your brain can even conceptualize them.

Reinforcing positivity

There’s a huge difference between these two mindsets: 1) Gotta get the track done so it doesn’t suck 2) Gotta get the track done to increase it’s awesomeness

Even if a song still has some miles to go, even if deadlines are immanent and pretty tough – try to keep up an underlying positivity towards the creative process.

Create to reach a new level, try not to think about maintaining the present one.

De-mystifying the process

Approaches to how creative magic happens vary like shells on the beach. Some people build whole philosophies around the mindset and flow that has to be present to create special output.

Yes, this might be the case for certain individuals – but many musicians also mystify their own craft and knowledge to and extent that harms the original process. Which is to make a song. That’s it.

If you get hung up on one piece of music – believe in your skill and you will produce something of equal and probably even greater value.