Inspiration may seem capricious, but just like a wild animal, if you leave out some treats, inspiration will come to you. So what does inspiration like? Check out these seven essential food groups.
1. Learn to play another instrument
You don’t have to be a virtuoso — just have fun. I picked up a soprano ukulele for the heck of it and found myself writing entirely different types of songs. Keyboardists, try guitar. Guitarists, buy an inexpensive keyboard controller (Samson’s Carbon has 49 keys for under $100), fire up a virtual instrument, and you’ll find that you write very differently when playing keyboard. And everyone should learn how to play blues harmonica because it’s just so much darn fun (and portable) — check out the article “Rediscovering Blues Harmonica” on Sweetwater’s inSync blog.
2. Use the “sure cure” for creative blocks
If you agonize about having a creative block, then you won’t be creative. Switch off your brain, don’t think about being creative, and just start playing. It might take 60 seconds or 60 minutes, but eventually something will come to you — especially if you play in a key you normally never use. C#, anyone? Which brings us to the next tip…
3. Hit record as soon as you start playing
No more “the big one that got away” in 2021! If you’re not in your studio, then your smartphone can capture song ideas. Or go more upscale with a dedicated recorder like the TASCAM DR-05X, which has a USB interface so that you can transfer whatever you record to your DAW. If you’re playing in the studio — no matter how casually — and the record light isn’t on, there’s something wrong. (And you do have a cool default DAW template for songwriting you can open with one click, right?)
4. Metronomes don’t taste good to inspiration
CLICK-click-click-click-CLICK-click-click-click. Ugh. Programs such as Toontrack Superior Drummer 3, XLN Audio Addictive Drums 2, and Sonoma Wire Works DrumCore 4 include grooves so that you can put together a drum part instantly to kick-start (or snare-start, if you prefer) your inspiration. You can always change up the part later.
5. Inspiration loves song titles and story lines
Whenever I see a potential song title, it gets written in my smartphone’s notepad. Having a title and a story line starts the lyric-writing process, and then the rest falls into place easily because I…
6. Make RhymeZone.com a browser “favorite”
It not only provides rhymes, but just looking over the words will often give lyrical inspiration. Thesaurus.com is another resource. And here’s another tip: Melody lines are important, so I’ll often come up with the melody line first, sing nonsense words, and concern myself about fitting words to the melody later to avoid slowing the creative flow. This works better for me than coming up with words and trying to fit a melody to them.
7. A maintained guitar is an inspirational guitar
A guitar with action like butter is inspirational, but the time to tweak your guitar setup and wipe it down is after a session, not before. When inspiration strikes, you shouldn’t have to do anything other than pick up your guitar, tune, and play. The Dunlop System 65 is a complete guitar setup kit, including polish. Make a habit of getting your guitar tweaked up the day before, so when you pick up your axe, it feels loved and ready to play.
