Defining Your Creative Cornerstones

Finding and defining your strengths can be a tricky endeavor: the more you draw from a variety of different influences and strengths, the harder the process of narrowing down your creative cornerstones can be.

Nevertheless, digging down to find the true essence of where your heading at, creatively, is an essential part of your artistic journey.

This article deals with these questions: Where are your strengths? Which key assets should you play out? What are the elements to focus on when building a solid, musical brand?

Let’s start with some aesthetic pointers:

Redefining the “I” in composition

No matter what your back-catalog sounds like, if you have one at all: It’s always the right time to redefine the “I” in your composition – meaning where you leave your mark, your signature.

Sometimes this means re-evaluating what you’re trying to chase down, musically. Maybe even taking a step back and stripping everything down, to the bare minimum.

Uncovering the most unique, personal aspects of a production should be a vital part of your agenda. Even if it means disposing of your darlings – sometimes things that produce a fast flash are actually distractions, cluttering a sound and diverting from what really matters.

Find the strongest part of YOU in the production, and enhance that.

Evaluating the tools at hand

Have you been beating at a mountain with the same tools for a while now? Well, try evaluating if the things you are using, be it analog or software equipment, are really cutting it.

If not – change something. And that doesn’t mean you have to invest a fortune to enhance your creative experience.

Check out the incredible plugin-work at UAD, or jump to Splice in order to sharpen and professionalize the sound you are aiming to produce.

Analyzing your platform status

Analyzing your platform behavior, meaning self-reflective work on your treatment of and activity across various platforms, can be an incredibly important step in defining creative cornerstones.
You can use the ForTunes app to identify your most active platforms, and even see which
playlists tend to feature your music. This can have a huge influence on the way you prepare and plan further releases, maybe even the way you work compositionally.

Also, find out how fans engage with your music, in terms of user-generated uploads on YouTube, or the distribution of favorites and plays.

Getting feedback from the right individuals

Easier said than done – getting feedback from individuals that are tightly connected to your process.

How early do you introduce someone from digital distribution to the process of song- or release selection? Hopefully soon, because they are the people that will eventually pitch your music to streaming platforms and channels.

It’s great, getting the final “go” from some best bro that you shoot hoops with on the weekend. Or play sega, or whatever. It’s important to get feedback from someone who actually has to sell your music. Because they are the ones setting up the arguments, doing the footwork in the meetings, pitches and so on.

Setting up pragmatic goals

Set up goals that can be reached within the realm of your prospective workflow.

Rushing an album concept, just because you know that you should fit everything into “fall distribution plan A”, will most likely yield unsatisfying results.

Developing pragmatic game-plans will slowly yet continuously lead to the fulfillment of grand visions. Just as Rome needed quite a few days to be built.