Production habits to boost your creativity
Cycling in loop land As it turns out, leaving your symphony unfinished can be one of the most effective of creative tactics
The problem
It’s every producer’s nightmare, but it’s an inevitable part of life. You create a loop that works, and sounds great, but then you stop there! The reason? You’ve made a short clip of music that’s so good, you can’t help but keep cycling through it, playing it back over and over again. You only get deeper into loop land as time goes by – the more you hear your perfect eight-bar loop, the more ingrained in your skull it becomes, and the harder it is to change it.
How to fix it
One solution to the ‘loop land’ problem is this: don’t get there in the first place! The problem begins the moment you close the loop – as soon as every element of your nascent track starts and ends at the same point.
Instead, work from the start with the fear of loop land in mind. You might create a bassline for eight bars, set up a drum loop for only seven and a half (setting aside half a bar for a fill later on), and get to work programming some backing chords. Make sure you run those chords past the eight-bar line before even listening back to them – stretch the progression out to bar 16, using the second half to establish a variation on the first, giving yourself somewhere to go with the other elements.
Next, you might return to the drums, crafting that fill from 7.3.1 and running it into a slight variation of the beat for the second section. Extending the bass out from bar eight, this time you have an idea of where you want it to go based on the other elements. Whatever you do, though, make sure you don’t stretch it out to exactly bar 16 to complete the loop again – either overshoot or undershoot the timing to give yourself an empty space to program into.
This ‘scaffolding’ method helps you to latch bits of your track together without giving yourself the satisfaction of having a ‘finished’ product. Use as many elements as you want in the building process, but just make sure you never ‘close the circle’. This’ll prevent that sense of completeness and keep your mind on the ball as it tries to imagine what will fill the gaps. A track should constantly move forward, after all.