How many times did you open up your empty arranging window in your DAW with an intention to write a hit song and found just zero ideas in your mind, and asked yourself what to do with that? Well, looks like no Muse knocking at your door, right?
Remember, finding yourself stuck with no creative idea is a common thing for creative people, I call it “creative block”, everybody knows it. But the more you try to deliberately, by force push through this creative block the less you like the results – every piece of melody, every beat or lyric you make sounds generic at best.
I’ve come to a conclusion that one of the reasons why creative blocks happen is because we’re too obsessed with the intention to write a hit; we put ourselves under the unreasonable pressure of creating only an extraordinary hit. If you experience this situation now – my congratulations, your perfectionism stifled your creative flow!
Here are the two practical steps to follow in order to get rid of creativity block:
1.The first step to remedy this issue is to acknowledge that you are in the creative block because of your perfectionism.
2. Second step is just giving yourself permission to create the worst piece of music ever. Let the bad, mediocre, mundane, “too much on the nose” songs flow out of you like a mudflow after a hurricane. Let it all out of your system. This approach will help to ease up the stress your subconsciousness is experiencing every time you begin to write music.
IMPORTANT: never delete these “masterpieces” from your files. Eventually, you will be surprised to see that among these “bad songs” there are actually real gems.