Creativity Ingredients

My ways of working in both art and music shift quite considerably. Sometimes I work in an intuitive way, where I'll just experiment with sounds or I'll start with a phrase or title and find sounds and rhythms that the words suggest, derived from my running list of titles and lyric ideas.

One of the benefits of knowing how to write music notation is that you can easily capture ideas, (typically 1-8 bars) which I put in my diary, which I go back and cultivate (just as I'm now doing with these video riffs). This cultivation of collected ideas is a different way of working, so I'm not at the keyboard waiting for a magical moment. Synth atmospheres can be added later.

It's interesting that after I've tracked up a piece that has lots of guitar and bass tracks it's a process of winnowing them down and finding a new piece within it. I'll group all the atmosphere tracks together and solo them and then play additional tracks against it. Usually I'll get an ambient piece out of it. It puts you in a different thinking mode. It's a really interesting process where you use the residue of what's there. It's like taking an existing painting and then slathering some other stuff on it, waiting for it to dry and then start to scrape stuff off, then use that as the background. It becomes a completely new piece, part destruction and part creation. Perhaps in the future I'll stop writing songs and start doing things that are more textural, but they're happening at the same time.

So there are a lot of things you can do after something is created. It's like making food in bulk which you can put it in the refrigerator and then the next day you can make something with it. It becomes an ingredient. Music and creativity create ingredients for creativity.

2/26/2022