| List of things I do when I get stuck:
- Piano practice
- Create some drum sounds (kicks, HHs, snares, claps)
- Create some synth sounds
- Read up on production techniques, synthesis articles, etc
- Listen to a lot of different music
- Head out to Shibuya and listen to some indie Japanese Pop groups, House clubs, etc
- Run by HMV and listen to a bunch of new CDs
- Last but not least, this may be a strange one but really helps me get some ideas in. Walking around Tokyo, there's always noise, people, and some music playing over some speaker somewhere. With all this randomness going on, I sometimes hear a couple of notes of one song, a couple of notes from another, which is nothing really memorable but really gets my imagination running. By the time I get home from the mayhem (collecting the typical 5 packs of advertisement tissues along the way), I usually have verses/choruses/bridges that I've come up with, which I then just plop into logic and come back to later on as a starting point.
-Maru |