I used to spend several hours after finishing work every day, playing and making music. Practicing guitar, working on songs. Over the last few months, my enthusiasm has dried up.
I might sit down to play, but I get frustrated with the tools after a short while. I often find myself trying to get different boxes to work together (OP-Z and OP-1 yesterday), and when they inevitably do something weird, I pack up and stop.
If it’s software, Ableton’s wide-open nature is too open. Drambo’s lack of multitrack recording and playback leads to paralysis.
I know this is a case of poor baby with too many toys to play with, but I have way less stuff than many folks here (I sold most of it off recently).
Any tips or tricks that you use to stay motivated? And to not get distracted by all the stuff?
Or how about covering something way out of your usual style and trying to fit it into your own? Or the opposite, remaking one of your existing tracks in the style of someone else.
Or maybe check out Disquiet’s Junto project, a different musical restriction weekly.
I suggest reading, or watching videos about “mind hacks” and productivity, etc., because at the end of the day, as you probably already know, it all comes down to how efficient you work, how you manage your time to complete tasks, how you use constraints and stick to them, and basically, how you steer your mind into becoming more productive.
Something I do often is that I try to do as much as possible with little time. It’s a mind hack, mind trick, but basically I tell myself, “I am going to work on whatever for 30 minutes and that’s it, and I better get a lot done in that little amount of time.” That constraint allows me to really focus in achieve something, anything.
If you are not professional producer, it’s just the time to do something else. Sometime you get bored of an activity, try to do something else like sport, video games, writing, etc… You will come back to music later when you really feel you want to play with your gears. Or not, and nothing bad about not making music.
I sold a lot of boxes to fund a modular case. New territory, new approaches, lots of stuff to experiment with. Really inspiring and makes me focus more on sounds, less on genres/tracks which felt especially draining to me.
Before that, I was in a bit of the same boat as you.
I’ve considered that. Usually I naturally move between different fields. If I’m not making music, I’m doing a photo project, etc. But this time I’m burned out on all of them, and just listening to (and buying too many) records.
Perhaps a song-a-day kind of thing, coming up with something, no matter how bad, every day for a week.
take one box. take it away from the desk. don´t use the desk for the next time. use your favorite toy on the couch. And here it comes. don´t just use it on the couch. make yourself a nice icetee to standby. dimm the light, or change the color of light (ultra important)
Do you have a nice, focused Ableton Live template? You can use a template to limit that wide-open nature. I use one to limit myself on the creative side, and then once I’ve created a loop, track or performance, I can then remove those limitations in the polishing, mixing and mastering stage to shape the music how I want.
For example - I have an eight-track Ableton Template setup. Left four tracks (rhythm/bass) are mapped to my Syntakt via Overbridge. Right four tracks (melodic) are mapped to four copies of Arturia’s Analog Labs V. I like Analog Labs V because it is tweakable presets only, so this again limits the “wide open” nature. This setup is easily controlled with fun controllers like Push2 (there are lots of others of course).
Since I have that template as default, I know what is going to happen when I start a project, so it is unlikely something weird will happen to ruin the flow.
Hope you find something in this thread to inspire you!
boxes are not to be blamed in lack of inspiration.
yes, boxes can trigger one’s nucleus accumbens to start another dopamine production cycle.
but if it does not start anymore, the real problem is something else, not tools.
what I found recently very useful to get connected and productive in Live is creating a template with limited pre defined tracks, all midi routed to 2-3 buses with some master effects and simple master chain.
I removed every favorite category except for one, iterated all effects and vsts and chose only 3 synth, some creative effects like phaser, chorus etc, two delays, two reverbs and necessary utilities like eq, compressor, utility and limiter and put them in a single favs list.
I use the Core Library drums to fast forward the selection process and just use bus effects on them.
I have another template for my synths and I can just drag the channels from another template and have them play along when I want.
limiting my options, but not too much, made me love ableton more and I create more like this.
using pre made drum racks really making thing faster.
TBH and it’s very special me … I could not work with the OP-stuff, because for me it’s to abstract, I need more buttons, knobs and pads to feel inspired.
What about a looper and a mic. Simple - but a couple of creative options.
I don’t know how much gear you own, but my receipe for not getting overwhelmed by to many options is to pick one piece I like much, and try to figure out, what inspiraton I might get.
The other day I picked a SP-404 and a very simple synth, messing around for some time, forgetting time at all, and at the end I had a nice idea, even with a performance/jamming section, which might it make to a real track later
I have a few Ableton templates, but they don’t help. Instead of playing until something grabs me enough to develop it into a song, I get disillusioned pretty quickly.
I think it might have more to do with my expectations that every session should result in something usable. I never really had that mindset when it was just me, a guitar, and a looper.
And thanks for all this great help, folks! This is why I love this forum.
I have found I need a step sequencer, and the OP-1 definitely doesn’t have that. Or not easy and deep enough anyway.
But I have gone down the route of buying new gear to get out of a rut before. The only time it worked was the Digitakt (which I sold like a dummy, in my big sell-off last year).
Then get one. We are lucky, because in the recent years hardware sequencers pop out of the void time by time. And good ones
Depends on what you want, straight patterns (Roland TR/TB), Elektron-patterns (very versatile), clip-based patterns (Roland MC-707). Maybe you should get a Digitakt again?
I don’t think I agree with you on that one. I did get bored with my routines and always being stuck with an Elektron sequencer. Trying completely different gear/workflow definitely gave a big boost to my creativity and inspiration.
And also important: don’t push yourself to create anything. Just make sounds without any obligations attached (really helped me)
I spent all of last year in a similar place to the OP.
My “solution” was to spend the year buying and selling gear in search of inspiration. I’ve now landed on a setup that feels inspiring, but I can’t say that all the buying and selling had anything to with it. Chances are if I’d just put my gear away for a year then got it back out when I felt the inspiration return I’d have the same result.
Point is, sometimes we feel inspired, sometimes we don’t. I reckon the reasons for this are entirely internal and not often consciously controllable. At some point the inspiration will come back, but I’m not sure that there’s much more you can do than wait for it.
