Developing Your Product

Before you even BEGIN expecting to make money in music: you’ve got to have a viable product. Something that is good enough to cause at least some members of the public to willingly part with their cash!

Contrary to popular sentiment: creating highly desirable musical material is not necessarily a random act of destiny or fate.

There are certain basic rules, processes and structures which govern the development of GREAT music. They are simple enough that nearly anyone with a moderate amount of dedication can comprehend and put into practice.

There is a saying that all great artists share two things in common – sincerity and simplicity.

Ironically it’s that insidious mental urge to complicate things which results in the useless junk heaps of history. The mind will work just fine if you can understand that it is composed of specialists.

The Two Halves of the Brain

You’ve probably heard that neurologists tend to assume our brains are divided into two distinct areas. One area is set up to handle Artistic activities and the other half takes care of Analytical processing.

Brainstorming: Getting Into the Creative Flow

(How to Engage the Artistic Portion of the Brain)

Brainstorming is that portion of the creative process where ideas are supposed to flow straight from the deeper soul-self. During this part of the process – anything goes. It’s best to have some sort of digital “notepad” to record your inspirations. Possibly a mini digital pocket recorder. Or for studio-work a hand sized digital recorder which allows you to record a vocal and instrument with a push of the button. The idea here is to save your inspirations as they flow – as efficiently and unobtrusively as possible.

Inspiration is the raw building material from which great music is fashioned. It’s a wise idea to generate plenty of it from which to pull: in order to design your own original musical masterpieces.

What makes YOU go Into Creative Gear?

We are all different. Take mental note of the specific conditions that send you into that flowing CREATIVE mode. Is it when you hear certain sounds.. watch certain movies… go to church? Do certain people bring your energy to the surface? Is it when other musicians are around? Or do you need to be alone to go deep?

Learn to create those favorable conditions by choice – whenever you need to access your most powerful levels of inspiration.

The powerful loop features included in our recommended DAW programs are also a great way to get those creative juices pumping.

Producer/Editor Mode

(How to Use the Analytical Portion of your Brain)

This is a totally separate part of the creative process where inspirational components are selected and assembled into coherent musical expressions. For more on this process please see Anatomy of a Hit Song.

Creative Blockages

Creative blockages develop whenever the two stages of creative process are intermingled. For many musicians it’s much better just to hire a producer/writing partner to handle the analytical side of creating. The synergy of working together in this way has resulted in some of the top musical pieces in modern history.

(Read Creative Partnerships for smart strategies on how to build your own collaborative songwriting teams.)

Add too much analytical structuring in the mix, and you’ve got what most music lovers disdainfully call “commercial” crap. This material is noticeably lacking any type of genuine inspirational value.

However without the analytical aspect, you simply have something that doesn’t actually make sense on a neurological level to the human mind.

Humans crave structures. In music we crave circular structures. This is where we arrive at the musical concepts of theme and variation.

YOU May Be one of those Rare People who can Effectively wear all the Hats in the Creative Process!

The smart thing to do is only wear one hat at a time. Sometimes it’s better to just focus on one role per day. Just get your analytical, critical mind out of the way.. when you are brainstorming. Never take on the producer role in the same session where you are tapping into your creative soul. You can fly different combinations during the brainstorming process. But the key is not to stop or get into a mental conflict about what will work. Just get down whatever comes out and then keep coming up with ideas.

Later on, you can objectively pick out the hot stuff and structure it into finished songs. Please read Anatomy of a Hit Song to understand how this is done.