Overcoming Creative Challenges (and Other Productive Tasks)
With no live events for close to a year now, the pandemic gave artists an overwhelming amount of time to spend creating. But having more time to work on new music can also be a burden to artists, putting increased pressure to be productive and taking advantage of the free time. Even still, artists should always feel capable and mindful of their work they dedicate to their craft, and there are plenty of rewarding tasks and goals artists can manage that give them space from their music while still working towards music-related goals. Below are some of the ways I break through motivational challenges and other tasks you can do to remain productive even if the creative juices aren’t flowing!
Accountability Groups: asking for help from friends, partners, or groups to keep you on-task with your personal goals is a great way to motivate yourself to reach them. Further, surrounding yourself within artist facebook groups and communities give you additional benefits like access to remix competitions, monthly challenges, and feedback circles that can expand your artist network and frame your brand within a group that better understands the creative challenges you might face. Accountability isn’t meant to be negative or punishment-driven - the goal of an accountability partner is to constructively grow, and have a safe and honest outlet to discuss any shortcomings and to readjust expectations when necessary. There is always an ebb and flow to productivity, so choose your partner wisely and set rules and standards before beginning to make the partnership positive and empowering.
Project Tracking: recording and tracking your progress on important songs and projects can give you a more holistic view of your work. Tracking projects you are working on and what stage the song is in (ideation, arrangement, mixing, mastering stages) can help you push through to the next stage and get you closer to completion. Further, listing your projects might show you that you have too many or too few works in progress! It can also help to organize your projects by BPM, key, genre, or style/vibe to give you additional feedback on style consistency and style awareness across projects.
Education: Any artist at any stage should always be learning. Watching tutorials, reading industry news, listening to music podcasts, or joining Discord servers (like ours!). can spark creativity and give you additional knowledge and tools to tackle creative problems. Knowledge is power! Many artists (including myself) lean into our strengths while we produce and try to avoid or subvert our weaknesses. An example of this is relying on using midi packs - these can be great for sparking creativity and learning more chord types and progressions, but relying on pre-made chords subvert the skill itself - learning music theory, piano playing/programming, and arrangement.
Other Music Production Tasks: If you can’t break through writer's block, there are plenty of other tasks that can be incredibly productive and beneficial to future sessions. Organizing project files, samples, and presets is a great way to refresh your library into new views and give you a different way to look at your library. Sample digging and patch creation are my go-to’s for still feeling productive while not working specifically on a song or project. Other examples include:
Refreshing your default DAW project file
Creating and saving effect, drum, or instrument racks
Bouncing and re-sampling stems from past projects
Music Discovery: If you’re reading this you are most definitely listening to music constantly. But dedicating time to a focused session for music discovery outside of your normal listening habits can be extremely productive. Digging through playlists or song/artist radios similar to your genre or style can help you discover new styles or sounds that you might not have thought of incorporating in your music. Further, music discovery is beneficial to finding reference tracks - tracks that most closely match your songs that you can use as a reference when mixing or mastering. This is a common technique in music production as it gives you a baseline and professional comparison to your song. Dedicated listening also gives you time to discover songs for live sets, learn more about the industry through artist bios or social pages (a very important aspect for artists to know in their specific lane), and even inspire you through viewing artwork and branding techniques other professionals use.
While you can’t always be fully inspired to finish tracks, there are plenty of tasks to work on that are necessary and productive. The goal of this list truly is to keep music at the forefront even when creativity isn’t hitting, instead of resorting to more detrimental distractions that are easy to fall into. While it is obviously ok to take necessary breaks outside of music, hopefully this list can inspire you to take on one of these tasks rather than rewatching Avatar the Last Airbender on Netflix (seriously, if you don’t memorize the episodes are you even a producer?)