The whiteboard in your studio

I have no digital camera right now so you can't see my scrawl, but these are the following things I have written on my whiteboard next to my sequencers.

ROBOT - what would a robot write? I have been writing a lot of capital-T Techno recently and I try to view what I write in the style as if I built a gaggle of intelligent robots that were writing my music for me.

REVERSE - simple idea, reverse a line and include it in the mix (love ableton workflow for that idea)

THE SAME NOTE AGAIN - if I can't think of what the next note interval should be, I hit the same note again, great results with this one

GET WEIRD - self explanatory, when I am at a loss I try and make the weirdest damn thing imaginable then change the tune to fit what I churned out... even if I don't include the weird line in the mix, the mix gets better with the influence

SPACE/SILENCE - no sound is just as important/jarring as any sound, build a groove with the silence not the sound hits

SOLACE IN REPETITION - don't be afraid of a familiar theme in a track, dancers dig repetition, especially a return to repetition...

THIS IS A LAB - experiment... view yourself as a mad scientist building a weapon in secret

BE PATIENT - you are talented, this is what you love to do, it will come

ABANDON COMFORT - only work on what you are bad at, you are not improving if you are in your comfort zone, leave it

SHARP AND FLAT THE EDGES - if I need to modulate the key I will sharp and flat the edges of the key signature for a starting point on where to begin with the idea, Beethoven did this a lot in his piano works (I have a drawing of the circle of fifths next to this note)

Hmm, I don't have anything with that level of clarity. All I have is loads of scraps of paper on my desk with loads of notes on them looking like that squarepusher t-shirt from a while back. Here's a small portion of the desk:

(figure 12b - cubus at work)

  On 8/5/2009 at 11:42 PM, mcbpete said:

Hmm, I don't have anything with that level of clarity. All I have is loads of scraps of paper on my desk with loads of notes on them looking like that squarepusher t-shirt from a while back. Here's a small portion of the desk:

 

(figure 12b - cubus at work)

yeah, my notes are a bit like that. i have a little pin-up board with scraps of paper containing sketched drum patterns pinned to it - i always come up with drum patterns at work and scrawl them quickly onto a scrap of paper.

Brian Eno's cards for oblique strategies are really interesting and idea provoking, from the ones I've seen. Check em out:

http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/

If I have no inspiration but for some reason feel the need to make music anyways, I usually just follow a forumla that I know works. Make a bass patch that I have made a thousand times before, cut up a break I have used a thousand times before, etc, write a song, I'm very good at writing cheesy shit if I have to. Then, when I am really inspired I will go back to the song rework it into something good. I usually have about 5 or 6 songs that are in my work cycle that I switch between, listen to, and think about how I want it to progress. I will do this sometimes for an hour or so but not actually change anything, then sleep on it, and then come back the next day refreshed and with plenty of motivation to make changes.

i just have a little notebook i carry around, really useful, not only for music ideas

can someone possibly link me to the studio pics thread? i swear i saw one here a while back, but i searched (the search function really sucks) and went back 10 pages of threads and couldn't find it.

I just have a ton of stickies on my computer's dashboard with various things written on them. Some poems, some music ideas, some reminding me to send out cd's.

I've got notebooks and notebooks of my ideas stacked on a shelf, though they're not all musical. I bet if I went back and looked at them I would have a shitload of great concepts, but I never do since I'm always working on six different tracks at time (which is more of a weakness than anything).

A lot of my inspiration when I'm feeling stuck usually comes from listening to an unrelated style of music and thinking about which elements I could make work with my existing stuff. Sometimes I try to mimic a song I admire exactly (phrasing, instrumentation) and almost always come out with something unique that shares these elements but is saying something different.

All this whiteboard shit sounds pretty racist to me.