Cultivating Inspiration: Tips on how to handle boredom or a lack of inspiration
We all face periods where we lack inspiration, where new ideas just do not come to us and we almost feel lost when it comes to creativity. These moments can be especially frustrating and create a sense of stress or unease. You may even find yourself staring at an empty timeline, opening up an init preset on a few different synths, only to close the DAW and try again later, repeating this process between various distractions. This can be demotivating, to the point where you might not create anything new for months on end. While I’m a firm believer that breaks are necessary, I also believe they need to be intentional, and when they extend beyond a few weeks and into months or even years, it’s more a matter of simply not doing something rather than a “break”. As uninspiring as this article sounds so far, I want to express some ideas that may help you in these situations. These aren’t necessarily solutions to any problem, but methods of mitigating and navigating the environment of stagnation and boredom.
First of all, a lack of motivation or inspiration is perfectly ok and normal, if you think about your favorite artists, they likely only put out one solid album a year at most, and maybe you only even enjoy one or two songs off that album. You likely consume a wide variety of art and media from many creators, their collective output conditions us into expecting the same level of quality from ourselves on a daily basis, but this really isn’t possible or necessary. It’s perfectly fine to make a song that isn’t worth sharing, it’s perfectly ok to go through a few bad ideas before reaching the good ones. With this in mind you can hopefully relax and distance yourself a bit from any feelings of negative self reflection that may come from a vacuum of inspiration. On top of it not being such a big deal, there are some things we can do to take advantage of uninspired periods, actions we can take to prepare ourselves for creativity, and even some things we can do to cultivate it in the future.
Creative dry spells can be the perfect time to get some of the more tedious aspects of music creation out of the way. This can actually be very important for when we are inspired, nothing breaks the cycle of inspiration more than hitting a roadblock or moving slower than we’d like to when we do have an idea in our heads. This can be a great time to really learn our tools, there’s almost always a button or setting that we just don’t have any clue about. Usually when we are creating these things pique our curiosity, but we’re in the middle of a process. Go through one of your favorite tools and see if there’s anything it does that you have avoided simply for a lack of understanding. You might discover a setting or option that makes creating easier in the future, or that you’ve always wanted, or at the very least, you can remove that moment of distraction in the future, because you’ve learned new features you can comfortably ignore. I like to go through my daw’s list of keyboard shortcuts, and see if there’s anything I can incorporate into future sessions, even if it’s just a single command, if I can adopt it into my process, it’ll make things easier in the future.
On the note of tedium, this is a great time to explore very simple ideas, test out different timings, intervals, compositions. Think large scale and simple, take your time listening to how different notes interact, or how different patterns feel. This exploration isn’t in service of finishing anything special, it is simply to give us a roadmap of various musical contexts we can use later. This doesn’t need to be hyper focussed either, it can be a recreational period, feel free to chat with friends, watch videos, play games between moments of exploration, just be mindful that you are making some progress and actually testing things out a bit. Perhaps listening to a podcast can even be enough to actually keep you focussed, ideally we’re not trying things we already know sound good, so it might help to have something pleasant to listen to while exploring musical ideas that exist outside of your comfort zone. I also think this is a great time to develop large scale compositional practice, one of the hardest things to do with our more precious works is to cut them up and rearrange them. I think it’s worth making some boring music while you are bored, get a little practice laying out melodies and beats, get to a “song” fast, no matter how bad it is. Then you have something disposable that you can comfortably rearrange and do larger structural work with, without having to worry about ruining anything special.
If you’re really finding a sense of dread or anxiety from even these tasks, a controlled break might be in order. It’s worth being mindful of your break though, take time away from music and creation, enjoy it, but ideally you shouldn’t let it last too long. You can set a date to come back, either a week or a month, and use this time to cultivate fantasy. Play some fun video games, read a book, see some cool movies, go on a vacation, see some shows. You’ll hopefully find moments where you feel like you wish you would have made something, or want to do something similar to the creative worlds of others when you step away for a bit. On the other end of the spectrum there is what I like to call “recreational boredom”. This is where you take yourself completely away from distractions, either by going on a long walk, hike, sitting at a park, or most potently, by meditating. Meditation in this context doesn’t have to be anything spiritual, we are simply forcing ourselves to do nothing, think all you want, but simply do nothing. Set a timer, maybe 5 or 10 minutes, you’ll be surprised how many ideas start sprouting up as soon as you force yourself not to do anything. About 3 minutes in chores often sound fun to me. It will be tempting to just get up and start doing anything, but while in the ascribed period of recreational bored your main goal is to prepare for action. Plan your next task, make it something important, and prepare to head straight into that task when the timer runs out.
Most of all you just want to make sure you’re having fun with it, the idea behind the break is to build up drive and motivation. This becomes easier with time and practice, and I think the biggest item I’ve left out so far is practice. Everything becomes a lot more fun and motivating when you develop the ability to put your ideas into action. Practice helps with this a lot, to the point where even practice can become fun. Having a natural understanding of rhythm, or simply knowing which note you actually want next instead of hunting around will make these processes fun and engaging. Hopefully you don’t ever feel any lack of inspiration, hopefully you don’t need any of this advice, and hopefully the advice is useful should you need it. From my experience, there’s a certain state of mind that comes from allowing creativity to happen, it’s almost like a cat, you have to sorta pretend it’s not there for it to pay attention to you sometimes. Many of these methods have helped me in the past, and help me to this day, so perhaps they can help you too.