How do you come up with your track ideas in the first place?

Hi All,



I have been making music for a number of years now and since having 2 children, I only get the opportunity to get the headphones on for a couple of evenings a week (if I’m lucky). As this time is so precious to me I often feel pressured into churning out something decent within a few hours, and I’m often left feeling disappointed.



I seem to have hit a brick wall as far as coming up with neat or creative ideas to develop into my tracks and I was wondering how you guys come up with that initial idea?



Is it purely through jamming around with various synths and fx until you hear something interesting or do you have an idea of stuff to try before hand? If the latter, where does that idea come from?



It would be good to hear your thoughts on this.



Cheers.


i have a million little voices inside my head humming different ideas. Then I elaborate off the initial idea.:smiley:

I;m in a similar situation Eric. Family, commitments - no time to just fk off like I’d love to anymore. I hear ya!

I usually get ideas from thinking about working out problems. I always have the same 2 ideas in my head whenever I sit down… which is to make a driving rhythm, with some kind of dischordant sound over the top.

Its cool to grab something & throw your favourite plug in chain on top & extract a WTF sound…

Then its just a case of refining the techniques to make it all sound better… and hope to fk that it sounds as good with the headphones off! LOL

You can always try to get the ideas during the day and remember or write them down.



I often have little time as well, but when listening to the radio in my car or while listening to some music during my work, I often get ideas.



These ideas are put into Ableton as soon as I got some spare time. Got lots of stuff that’s in start up fase, but when I do have some time I go through some of those projects and the one that inspires me most get some of that valuable spare time :wink:



Besides that, it might help you to have save some templates to start off right away with the settings, vst’s, etc you usually start off with. That’ll give you some extra minutes :slight_smile:



You just got to face it, that making electronic music like the big shots out there takes lots of time. We don’t have that time…


Interesting - for my own tracks I never have an idea when i start - i just muck about and something will click eventually



For remixes it is entirely different - I listen to the original once and and maybe note down something i would do and go from there

I’m with Slender on this.



Mostly I know what type of sound I want but not what it’s going to sound like :wink:



Inspiration comes from my head, other tracks, sounds in other tracks, rhythms in other tracks, samples from a sample pack, loads of different places. It’s very rare though that I’ll know exactly what I want to do. It’s very common also to start a track one way and have it ending up sounding completely different when it’s done.



What I do tend to do though is make sure I listen to one genre, and usually artists whose sounds are close to what I want, pretty much exclusively for a few days before I make the track. That way I feel certain elements of what make that genre THAT genre have kind of sunk into my consciousness.