Okay, imagine this. You’re sitting in front of your computer and you’ve got your DAW open. Somebody just said to you “Write me some music. I don’t care what it is, how long it is, what instruments you use, how fast or slow it is” and on and on and on. In other words, they’ve just given you free reign to do whatever the heck you want.
What do you do?
A lot of people just sit in front of their computer starting at their DAW screen and go “Duh!”
Truth is, sometimes when we have free reign to do anything we want, we’re actually making things more difficult for ourselves because we have no restrictions.
Why are restrictions important? Why are they the one thing that actually makes the job easier and not harder?
Because restrictions make us focus and focus is the key here.
Just the other day, I had completed most of my new daily schedule and was up to the part of my day where I had to write a song for this site. Now that’s a pretty broad task. Write a song for this site.
If you take a look at the list of genres that I cover at wagsrfm.com you’ll see that there are quite a few of them from rock to pop to classical to orchestral to dance and electronic to even ethnic music. So what do you think it was like for me when I sat in front of my DAW trying to think of what track to create for my site the other day?
Exactly! It was as if somebody had just said to me you can have your pick of any high priced model in the industry to go out with for a night. Go ahead, choose one!
Not so easy is it? No restrictions make for one heck of a time trying to pick somebody.
But what if they said any “blonde” model?
Okay, now we’re narrowing it down some. We can eliminate all the brunettes, redheads and gals with purple hair.
What if they further narrowed it down by saying “Only girls between the ages of 22 and 24 and between 5’11” and 6 feet tall?”
Now we’re getting somewhere.
And we can keep piling on restrictions until eventually we get to the point where we’re left with only a few choices.
One of the worst things anybody can say to me is “Do whatever you want.” Really? Do you hate me that much? Can you at least give me SOME idea of what you’d like?
Imagine you’re trying to decide on a Christmas gift for your wife or husband and you’re trying to maybe get some hints as to what to get and the only thing you manage to get out of them is “Oh honey, I don’t need anything as long as I have you.”
Downright infuriating, that’s what it is.
That’s what it’s like when you’re trying to make music and you have free reign to do whatever the heck you want.
So then what DO you do when you’re actually confronted with that sort of situation where you really CAN do whatever you want and there is nobody around to give you any restrictions?
Well, the answer is quite simple really.
You give YOURSELF the restrictions.
Now I know, this sometimes goes against the grain but it’s really your best friend.
But how? How do you go about giving yourself restrictions?
Well, there are lots of ways. I’ll share a few that work for me. You’re going to have to find your own way to battle through the “OMG I don’t freaking know what to do” phase.
One of my favorite things to do is use my little random generator. Now, I don’t actually have a random generator program built specifically for writing music. I’m not even sure if one exists. What I use is Microsoft Excel and it works great. There is a command that you can put into a cell that looks like this.
=INT(RAND()*5)+1
Let me briefly explain the formula. The INT stands for integer. So that’s what we’re creating. RAND is the random function itself. The () is what you put right after each function in Excel. The *5 means we multiply the random seed that we generated by 5 and then the +1 means we add 1 to it. Why do we add 1? Because we want a number that is at least 1. Since RAND can generate something like 0.1874 and multiplying that by 5 would give us something less than 1, by adding 1 and converting it to an integer (whole number without any decimals) we get at least 1 and no higher than 5.
Now, the next step is to create a table that corresponds to each number that we could get.
So let’s say I had 5 different musical genres that I wrote for.
Pop
Rock
Classical
Orchestral
Electronic
If I generated a 3, I would work on a classical piece because it was the third one in the list. If you had 6 genres you wrote for, you would change the formula to this:
=INT(RAND()*6)+1
And so on. This way, you can tailor your formula for as many options as you had to choose from.
Sometimes I can’t even choose which VST to use for a song. Know what I do? You got it. I have a list of every VST I own that makes music. Okay, I do have to update it with my newest purchases, but it’s pretty up to date, Some of the formulas are pretty up there in numbers.
This will work for anything. It takes all the decisions out of your hands.
Another thing you can do to restrict your musical selection is turn on the radio and say to yourself that the first song you hear is going to be the style of music you’re going to write today. That will really narrow things down.
Of, if you live with somebody, write down all your choices on a piece of paper. Number them from 1 to whatever. Then ask the person you live with to pick a number from 1 to whatever. Whatever number they choose, that’s what you do.
Don’t get angry with them if they pick a number you don’t like.
When confronted with the choice of many choices, and you have no real restrictions, make them yourself. These are just a few of the ways you can do that.
I’m sure you can think of others.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim