Mastodawn

If you have an ability to make music (or at least have at times made something resembling what could be considered 'music') - and are not literally currently prevented from doing so by life stuff / illness / looking after someone who's ill etc. - can I recommend you just do it? Inspiration can be overemphasised and romanticised - but sometimes the most inspired material didn't "feel" very inspired in the moment. Much can come of sessions that felt dutiful, even mechanical; the inspired feeling can even be noise - lovely when there, but not always signaling anything long-term.

Either way, you'll have made something new that didn't exist before, rather than not have. Which is pretty amazing, when you think about it.

(d) / glitched 2d ago

@Cognessence Hell yeah! Genuine Inspiration is great, but the doing of the thing actually fosters inspiration more than anything else, at least for me.

Habit is essential. Even when I'm spent or not feeling like I'm being original, just playing around is fun and can (but not always) lead to real creative progress.

Robert Logan 2d ago

@d01 That's a good point! Inspiration isn't linear. And it does seem as if sometimes inspiration is less a prerequisite than a byproduct. The act itself can generate the conditions for it, rather than the other way around.

But even when it doesn’t, something has still been explored - some territory mapped out, however small - which surely accumulates over time in a way that waiting never does.

I also like what you said about habit; habit as a kind of infrastructure that inspiration gets to travel on. As you said, it's also good to not always take instruction from that feeling of being spent, or not feeling original - or any self-critical voices arising mid-process. I’ve rarely seen them contain much real insight into what’s actually being made!

One way I found around that (still have plenty of other issues lol - but less so this one) was a kind of deliberate suspension of judgement - or the thought that "music is always happening; sometimes I get to be part of it." It helps to actually believe in letting sounds be sounds; there is this great sonic flux, and we get to draw from and contribute to it in some way, whether that be along more traditional, conventionally musical lines or the furthest opposites from that. Either way, something is added back into the stream, which seems inherently interesting in itself!

ghostmeet 2d ago

@Cognessence @d01 💯

(d) / glitched 2d ago

@Cognessence Well-said. Sounds like we're on the same wavelength. 👍

David McMullin 2d ago

@d01 @Cognessence
Right—for me, inspiration isn’t something that happens first on its own so I can start. It develops after I’ve been working for a while and things start to come together.

Just begin. Don’t wait for inspiration; inspiration is waiting for you.

Guy Birkin 2d ago

@Cognessence Jim O'Rourke and David Grubbs concur

Robert Logan 2d ago

@GuyBirkin Ah, thank you for sharing. It was lovely to read this concurrence. :)

joão ms 2d ago

@GuyBirkin @Cognessence i remember manual art classes in elementary school, when we felt lazy and didn't want to work, the excuse was always 'i don't feel inspired' 😂

Robert Logan 2d ago

@noxin @GuyBirkin 😄

draftPunk 2d ago

@Cognessence either way, i'll have made something somwhat new that existed before. heard it at a mall 30 years ago, heard a child humming something in the bus, rebuilt one of my favourite tracks from years ago.
but: fun first, realising to have reinvented the wheel later. :)

Maes_Matt 2d ago

@Cognessence Take this wonderful humans advice! This post made me dust off the Monomachine and I'm now being pelted with alien sounds that I have no clue how they were created but will spend hours trying to glue them down!

Robert Logan 2d ago

@Maes_Matt This is the best news! ❤️ 👽

Daniel Johnson 2d ago

@Cognessence To (extremely loosely) paraphrase Thomas Edison: if you aren’t putting in the perspiration, you are unlikely to experience inspiration.

Robert Logan 2d ago

@ossobuffo Yes! 🙏 And I suspect the "perspiration" often is the inspiration - just unrecognised in the moment. :)

@Cognessence one of the biggest aids I've had in recent times is my DAW just loads with a single track labelled 'start something'. No pressure on having an idea or anything, just get some noises happening and not spend to much time on it, so I have quite a few basic ideas that I cycle around, eventually one will just happen and I finish it. Its been really helpful and encouraged me to do stuff even when I'm really wacked and not feeling at all inspired.

The downside, I only realised today that nearly every track I've done since is at 120bpm, even if they're stylistically different.

Robert Logan 1d ago

@inpc that’s a great idea! And I like the injunction you name the projects. 😁 I have also found what ended up the longest-lasting favourites began as part of a series where many ideas were put down in a semi-forced way.

But yeah, what you said is one reason why I guess we need some conscious intention in there! :D The specifics you mentioned is particularly funny, because one thing I had to do too is remember the last bpm and time signature of whatever I’d done the previous day, and try to at least switch it up each time…just as an initial decision to provoke some changes in direction. Either way though, whether there’s a whole set of 120bpm sketches or more variety, a host of raw materials is a wonderful result. 🙏

botvolution 2d ago

@Cognessence
I do it nearly daily. I'm not a musician. I only know a quaver as a potato-based snack. I rarely record anything. Extremely rarely share it.
Increasingly notice it all sounds like stuff I listened to when i was in my teens.

Robert Logan 1d ago

@botvolution That inclination towards teenage tastes is interesting, isn’t it? I have also actually found that to be the case.

@Cognessence this is so good. I find it easy to get lost in the why, entrenched in the Capitalist world of productivity and marketization. Just to create is to be human.

Robert Logan 1d ago

@Torithom Yes! “Just to create is to be human” is beautifully put. And what you said is part of what makes a certain capitalist framing insidious: it doesn’t just commodify the output - but the current cyber iteration colonises the entire impulse itself, so that even the desire to create can end up pre-audited, with the question “but what is it *for?*”