As soon as inspiration hits, you want to make sure the idea doesn’t evaporate into thin air. I have talked about working on your skills routinely which will lead to periods of inspiration and productiveness. Everything feels like its effortless.
Make no mistakes, this is the direct result of all the hard work and sharpening your skills. Showing up regularly and putting in the time. As with anything you will get better with practice.
A lot of ideas get left behind. You simply don’t have time finalizing all these great ideas. It therefore makes sense making notes and sketches of all these ideas in a way they form the future working stock. For all the days things don’t flow effortlessly.
There are a lot of ways of locking in ideas for future use. You can write them down, record them on your phone, sketch the essence. The most important thing is that you can remember the initial idea and work on it later on.
I have had a lot of failures in getting a structure set up for getting ideas down for future reference. I settled for pen & paper, advantages over digital forms are the physical actions and ingraining it in the brain.
But when reading it weeks or months later a lot of the time I could not make out what I originally set out to do. Not a big problem as it always has a starting point in it somewhere. But it kind of took away the enthusiasm.
So I opted for a format, a standardized way of writing ideas down and making sure I knew what I had set out to do. I start with giving the idea a title. Then I write down the concept, and the technical side of things. Which tools to use and how to use them. Then I set the length , speed and other characteristics of the song. Last but not least I draw the song in a time line fashion, breaks drops and other things.
In that way I have way more detail and I can work on the idea while writing it down. I can then do preparations and recording later on with more focus.
It has greatly helped my creative proces, as with anything, this way of doing things suits my personality and workflow. It’s just to give you an idea what might work. It took a while for me to get there, bit experimentation will get you there and is half the fun.
